There Has Never Been a Better Time to Start a Career

How careers actually begin

In the spring of 1974 I was nineteen and I had eleven dollars. I walked into a bar two blocks off Wall Street, the kind of establishment your generation would review on your telephones instead of entering. At the bar stood two gentlemen in beautiful suits, and I will be honest with you, as I always am: they were catastrophically drunk. One of them was attempting to order from a coat rack.

I did what any serious young man would do. I bought them a round with nine of my eleven dollars, listened to the taller one explain the bond market with his eyes closed, agreed with everything, and helped him into a taxicab. Before the door shut he gripped my arm and said, 'Monday. Ask for Brandt's desk.' There was no Brandt's desk. It became Brandt's desk. Eight o'clock Monday morning I was a runner at the firm, and 43 years later I retired from that same firm having run it in all but title.

Total cost of my career: nine dollars and one evening of attentive listening.

Now. You have a Master of Science degree. You are, I am repeatedly assured, computer-savvy. You have machines in your pocket that can reach every employer on the planet without a postage stamp. And you cannot secure an unpaid internship.

I have thought about this at considerable length, on my boat, and I have concluded that there are exactly two possible explanations. Either something is deeply wrong with you, or you are lazy. I have searched honestly for a third possibility and I report to you that it does not exist.

The advantages you refuse to notice

Consider what you have been handed. The internet, where every job on earth is listed. LinkedIn, which is a Rolodex that fills itself. Email, which delivers your letter in one second at no cost. In my day, applying for a position meant walking there, and I mean physically walking, in shoes, often in weather.

And what has your generation done with these miracles? You send, I am told, six hundred applications from a couch and consider the day's work done. Six hundred! In 1974 a man sent one application, in person, with his hand extended, and it worked, because effort concentrates like capital. You have diluted yours across six hundred couches. This is arithmetic, not opinion.

People raise the matter of housing with me, usually in a tone. Yes, I bought my house in 1978 for $34,000 on a single salary while my wife raised the children. And yes, I hear that this is now considered impossible. I would simply note that I also endured 13 percent interest rates without composing a single word about it on any website, and that a $7 coffee taken twice daily comes to $14, which over a forty-year career, invested sensibly, is a summer house. I have done this exact calculation for four separate grandchildren and been thanked zero times.

What I did that you will not

I arrived ninety minutes early every working day for 43 years. Not to work, necessarily. To be seen arriving. Visibility compounds.

I never once asked for a raise. Asking is what you do at delicatessens. A serious man makes himself indispensable and then waits, sometimes for a decade, and the decade is the point. Your generation calls this being exploited. We called it Tuesday, and we owned homes.

I said yes to everything. When the chairman needed someone to drive to Connecticut at midnight to retrieve documents from a partner who had been, let us say, asked to leave, I drove to Connecticut. Was it my job? It became my job. Everything becomes your job if you let it, and then one day the whole firm is your job, and that is called a career.

A practical demonstration

Last month I sent my grandson to apply for work the correct way. He wished to work at something called a data center. I instructed him: walk in, ask for the manager, firm handshake, look the man in the eye, hand over the résumé, do not leave until you have a start date.

Security escorted him out. He telephoned me from the parking lot as though this were a defeat.

I told him what I will now tell you: in my day, being escorted out was how you got noticed. I was escorted out of Salomon Brothers twice in one week in 1976, and by Friday the man escorting me knew my name, my situation, and my willingness, and that man's brother-in-law ran a desk. You cannot be remembered by a security system, but you can absolutely be remembered by a security guard. My grandson went back the next day. He is now banned from the parking lot as well, which means, and I need you to understand this, that they are discussing him.

The field is wide open

I will close with the only career advice that has ever mattered. Get a haircut. Shine your shoes. Answer the telephone when it rings, at any hour, because opportunity calls from unknown numbers. Take any job offered, including the mailroom, especially the mailroom. Never discuss salary, it is vulgar, and the money finds serious people on its own schedule.

And stop telling me the market is broken. The market is not broken. The market is exactly as it was in 1974: it rewards the young person willing to walk into the right bar with his last eleven dollars. The difference is that in 1974, I showed up.

There has never been a better time to start a career. Nobody else in your generation is genuinely trying, so the field is wide open. If that sentence made you angry instead of ambitious, you have located the problem, and it is not the economy.