🤠's Dua Sen :Don't Work Hard, Work Smart (updated)
KSK Land’s Thought Leadership series had a recent feature on Bjorn Li, CEO of MindFi, talking about his “Work Life Balance” as a successful Millennial. How to juggle work with personal leisure time seems to be a perennial talking point amongst young professionals as they sip their RM15 lattes with their pals. So let me give you, dear reader, my Dua Sen worth of insights into the working life of young finance professionals in Red Dot Island and Hong Kong 40 years ago.
I worked very long hours in my 20s to 30s, ie 8am to 7pm. Including Saturday and Sunday mornings if required. My better half , an academic who is now a VIP - a Very Important Professor-at her Uni, worked even longer hours at her lab bench. But I didn’t think we were “Workaholics”- long hours were just how you showed your bosses and peers that you had the “Right Stuff” to be in Investment Research, Investment Banking or STEM Research.
The financial rewards of working long hours in stockbroking and investment banking were big. It wasn’t unusual for still wet-behind-the-ears 28 year olds in stockbroking sales teams or corporate finance departments in Red Dot Island and Hong Kong to get RM0.5 million as basic salary (plus 12-18 months pay in bonuses if their firms had a banner year). Plus we got to use exciting State of The Art IT stuff at work. Wowza! Like the new IBM PC that came with a blazingly fast Intel i386 processor, a 10M hard disk (Yes I mean 10M not 10G) and a 10” B&W monitor screen (Windows OS, graphical interfaces & Excel spreadsheets didn't exist when I started work as a rookie investment analyst in the 1980s- they weren’t invented !).
The two ex journalists founders of C*** -the Hong Kong based stockbroker I joined as a rookie in Red Dot Island more than 35 years ago -were the most successful financial entrepreneurs I have met, GC and JW, started a business from ground zero and made tens of millions for themselves. But GC and JW both died young, at 52 and 55. And TC who was the young Singaporean MBA (with a first rate MBA from a top Australian business school AGSM) who joined ahead of me (with a 2nd rate MBA from the School of Management, University of Bradford, UK) died aged 60, three years ago.
🤠's Dua Sen: Only the Fates know how much time you have left. Don't work hard. Work smart.
Post Script & Notes
Malaysian mortality tables from insurance companies show the median life expectancy for males born in the late 1950s is about 78. See line chart below.
But 23% are dead before they even reach 65. If you ponder the latter statistic, you might want to think twice how you spend your time now
My 2nd rate MBA (Top Quartile) was a one year Full Time course at Bradford Business School, rated Best Business School 2021 by the Specialist UK publication, The Times Higher Education.
If you are interested in a Get Rich Quick book I did a review of the Millionaire mindset by one of my MBA lecturers in Finance, who made a cool ÂŁ10m in academic publishing.
Interview with Bjorn Li of MindFi
