What it’s like to miss out on all the promotions, titles and opportunities from pivoting through accounting, consulting, investing to building my platform… all in the name of leading an interesting life. 

By my calculations, if I stayed as an auditor in the Big 4, I should be a senior manager now. This would be on-track with my plan of making partner in seven years out of university. 

Looking Around. 

When I look at my peers who started in similar situations as me, a few are senior managers and many are managers in accounting. I am not. As a matter of fact, I’ve long since left that field and am on my fourth pivot. 

I have no ’title’ that easily puts me in some corporate structure. Just a self-appointed title I’d given myself as “creator” because it fits the technical definition of creating something that didn’t exist before every week. Like this essay and the various conversation I have.

When I look at my colleagues who stayed in consulting, many are senior consultants, a few are managers after ‘exiting’ to do similar work at some organization. A number are trying to get their MBA. 

When I look at my colleagues who stayed in the institutional investing world, a few are partners and portfolio managers of the fund. Most are research analysts given this world only has two titles (i.e. portfolio manager or analyst). One could say organizations with fewer titles put greater weight to them than those with 8 levels of VPs.

Once again, I have no such title. If I were to apply for a job, I can only imagine a recruiter scratching their head as to how I don’t fit in their easy ‘plug and play’ parameters. The same applies to strangers who always ask “What do you do?” Many implicitly desiring simple 10-second answers to slot me somewhere in their mind’s reference to pass on their judgment of what kind of person I must be. 

Sometimes I do wonder where in the hierarchy I would get slotted in. Some may say at the bottom, some may say at the top and some may say in the middle. 

Fear Of Missing Out in Work.

FOMO is real. It’s one of the reasons why I quit social media a few years back. 

Although FOMO is commonly referenced to luxurious travel, meeting famous people, fancy offices, nice restaurants, extravagant parties and all kinds of experiences in that genre, I think its subtly existent in our careers as well. 

I think it's so subtle that you won’t even realize it’s FOMO. Just some sort of anxiety that gnaws at you. But they are the thoughts that come out in forms like:

• "I have to make more than I am now for my next move"

• "If I leave now I'll fall behind in the promotion scale”

All the envy you feel for someone doing work in “greener pastures”, the jealousy of someone’s promotion or compensation, the anger to your superiors for not being recognized for how wonderful you are. It’s such relativity at work that creates the FOMO. 

It’s such relativity that keeps one from taking the path they are truly curious about. It’s such FOMO that keeps people on the same treadmill. It’s such FOMO that keeps people narrowly focused on the short-term and think life revolves around the annual raise or bi-annual promotion scale. It’s such FOMO that makes one make up titles like Growth Lead when they are the only person in the team. 

This FOMO makes all these factors like promotions, compensations, and the likes feel so real and important... when in fact, they are just facades and illusions. 

How It Felt. 

In hindsight, I could say that it wasn’t a big deal. But I’d be lying if I said it never bothered me. 

How could it not?

I’d love to tell my friends I had absolute certainty I was right and that I was able to stay hyper-rational and see through the social construct of meaningless titles. The flawed human I am, I could not. 

When I left audit and started from the bottom in consulting, of course, I lamented the fact that my peers had various senior titles when I was starting as an analyst. Even a $10K difference in salary just felt so big back then. Even if after-tax if would only about to about $6K, that objectivity wasn’t there. Even though I knew these were all my decisions and I knew in the long-run it wouldn’t matter, the momentary feelings of “this sucks” come. 

When I left consulting after my promotion to start in investing as an analyst and saw my peers joining tech firms as managers in strategy, of course, I wondered “what could’ve been”. Even if I knew I had succeeded in achieving a dream job, there would be moments of wonderment in the back of my mind. 

I’d love to say things got easier with each time I made a pivot but I think the bigger the pivot the bigger the feelings of FOMO. 

When I decided to build OMD Ventures I had no title and no company brand. Even walking through the financial district without wearing a suit gave me angst. I experienced FOMO every time I worked out of a coffee shop in the financial district. There were undoubtedly days where I’d feel awesome about being the one guy in a v-neck t-shirt surrounded by everyone in suits talking bout some EBITDA or some ROI. But just as frequent was the FOMO of not being on that side of the conversation. 

I’d be lying if I didn’t dream about the ease of getting easy paycheques for just walking into an office and slapping together some excel sheet. That’s at least how I felt about what I did for the majority of my career. By the time I left consulting I was able to run a true four-hour-work-week at times. 

But I think the greatest FOMO was felt in just feeling like an outsider in the realms of society. The fact that I didn’t fit inside anywhere and how much harder it seemed to ever get back into the social game. 

It’s on the cusp of such angst and anger at myself for being so irrational to feel that FOMO that I took ever so greater time to examine why I was feeling this. What this meant. Whether this feeling would ever go away or if I needed to shift my mind in some way to come to peace with it. 

The Rational Outlook on Myself.

The fact remains that if I stayed on due to FOMO on my senior manager title in accounting, I would never know the world of management consulting. I would never have made the relationships I made there. I would never have learned what it’s like to build an insurance company from scratch… never have learned to value renewable energy plants… never learned how a bank makes a new credit card… and all the fascinating things I learned about various companies.

I would also never have learned about how different the world of consulting and accounting is. Even if a software engineer might consider it the same.. to me they were so different. 

Again, if I was afraid of losing out on titles and the wide exit opportunities that consulting offers, then I would not have gone to experience what’s like to realize a dream. 

Very few people have a ‘dream job’. I think even fewer people ever get to try working in the ‘dream job’ and even fewer get to go through the journey of telling themselves that they were wrong. 

If I had succumbed to FOMO in all the exit opportunities one gets from a career in consulting and feared the jump to a role that is considered to be highly specialized… I would never have gotten the chance to see how the world of money managing works. I would never have gotten to interview dozens of CEOs around the world. I would never have had a glimpse of how money is invested, what factors move the stock market, how institutional money managers think and all the fascinating things behind that world. 

If I had not gotten to work in my dream job, I would’ve not known why people who had all the money to retire chose not to. I would not have been able to work with people who pulled all-nighters all for the love of the work. I would not have had the push to explore the world. The push to use the investor’s mentality of identifying my ‘edge’ in life. 

Short-Term Beliefs. 

When I started my career, a 6-figure salary seemed like a big deal. As if your life would be complete with it. Being made ‘partner’ seemed like everything without even understanding the concept of having “equity” in a business. 

But slowly, after speaking to enough people who had lived longer and read more about the lives of other people I realized that no one will care if you made $70,000 a year or $100,000 a year at 27. It won’t matter when you are 55. 

The anger of not getting a faster promotion, not having your life figured out by 30… all that’s a rush that will prove meaningless and foolish in the long term. At least, this seems to be the case when I examine the lives of individuals who’ve managed to live an interesting one. Interesting being completely arbitrary to me of course. 

I think FOMO turns a blind eye to the long term and tunnel visions one to the short term. Where one chooses to shroud oneself in the veil of glamour. Tying oneself to “vanity metrics" like pay, title, brand. All noise without substance. 

I’ve come to believe that FOMO in the short term will cost you dearly in the long term. For the inaction of not taking that leap will stay in your head as the regret of your life when you die. Of course, the caveat here is you don’t need this money to survive. But as always, I write from the privileged position of those in similar positions in mindset. 

Living With Decisions. 

As I mentioned earlier in the essay, I know the rationality of the decisions I’ve made but FOMO creeps in. It won’t go away. At least, not unless you isolate yourself from people entirely. That means no connection to media, the world etc…. 

But I do believe that you can minimize it by selecting the right people to surround yourself with, or you can limit social media and many other methods to construct a system that works for you. 

I also think I’ll continue to feel it until I get to the point of being happy with myself and what I do. Not to get touchy-feely but I truly do believe that the process of loving oneself is a difficult one that takes a lot of work. I am nowhere close to confidently saying I have achieved anything like it. 

However, I do think the decisions I’ve been making are becoming more and more grounded in my intrinsic scorecard. It isn’t always like that. I don’t even know if 20% of it is grounded in my intrinsic scorecard, but it’s the act of striving for it right? As long as I believe they are then what does it matter what others think. Most who doubt it are just miserable fools who won’t matter to you anyway. 

A Final Thought.

I’m not advocating for any kind of career jump in people. Rather, what I’m advocating for is for people to think about what they are doing. Actually asking yourself “Why you are doing all this”, "Why does a promotion matter for you"? Asking why over and over and over until you feel like you understand the foundational reason. 

Utilizing a bottom-up process of examining the foundational reasons to then consider all the options that are actually available. I think this is required to fight the FOMO but also to be able to independently think about what it is you actually want.

Maybe the promotion makes sense. Which means you’ll probably be gunning for it harder.. or rather… the promotions won’t matter so you won’t be someone gaming for titles but rather allowing it to be the result of the work you do. 

Only you’ll know, right? I’m still learning more about myself and learning how I want to operate in this ever-changing world. I’m just trying to let myself happen to the world rather than the other way.