Personal Qualities

I rarely make political or personal posts on this blog; it’s mostly a scratchpad for what I’m doing at work. Occasionally I run across an article I can’t resist commenting on — like this one linked from Get Rich Slowly, called The End of Wall Street’s Boom. In it, the author interviews Steve Eisman, who ‘called’ the end of the boom and also had the stones to bet on it.

The way that Mr. Eisman is described strikes a chord with me.

The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility was Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy. “I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit,” Eisman says. “I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put a sell rating on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could pick the one you thought you should.” He was pressured generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn’t Steve Eisman’s style. Upbeat and Eisman didn’t occupy the same planet. A hedge fund manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund manager started to laugh. “He’s sort of a prick in a way, but he’s smart and honest and fearless.”

Smart and Honest and Fearless. Those are qualities I admire in a partner and coworker and strive to achieve myself. Don’t let the lure of money or success or any amount of peer pressure and name calling deter you if you too would someday like to be called “smart and honest and fearless” in a national publication.

If someone merely called me “kind of a prick” after I stopped them from doing something disruptive or destructive in my workplace, I’d take it as a compliment.

The above linked article is well worth reading if you have any interest in the economy or investment markets.