My career on Wall Street was random.

At surf camp in Portugal.

My career on Wall Street was a bit of a random walk.

I started in investment banking because it seemed like the best place to learn about companies and finance without going to business school.

And honestly, I liked the people. They were cool nerds.

After business school, still not totally sure what I wanted to do,

I went back to banking at Goldman Sachs because it seemed like the right path.

But eventually I realized something about myself:

I didn’t want to advise on transactions and then move on to the next one.

I wanted skin in the game.

A boyfriend at the time wanted to move to the buy side, and

that introduced me to investing.

And I loved it.

On the buy side, you make a decision and you live with the result.

Your stock picks become your track record.

Good or bad, they’re yours.

No one can take that away from you.

Looking back, I think what I loved was Agency.

The Economist recently wrote about the importance of developing

an internal locus of control (Agency)

— the belief that what we do can influence what happens to us.

Research has linked that sense of agency to things like

- saving,

- self-control and

- actually taking the leap from wanting to become an entrepreneur to becoming one.

It made me wonder why agency has always mattered so much to me.

I think it started long before Wall Street.

As a kid, I had a lot of freedom — partly because my mother simply wasn’t doing many things for me.

I made my own breakfast.

I rode my bike to the grocery store with her shopping list and checkbook.

I helped pay the bills and balanced her checkbook.

At the time, these felt like tiny things.

Looking back, they taught me something enormous:

When something needed to be done, I could figure out how to do it.

Maybe my career wasn’t quite as random as I thought.

I kept moving toward work where the decisions

— and the responsibility for what happened next

— belonged to me.

(Photo at Surf camp; I could have been on the beach after surf lessons,

but instead I wanted to work ;-)

What small experiences in your childhood gave you freedom?

Tiffany Kent

Your Friendly Wealth Engagement Guide

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