A great thing about catching up with friends is that you get to tell stories. Stories of how you’ve been and then you hear stories of how they’ve been. If you catch up with a number of friends all on a monthly cycle… you end up retelling the same story over and over again.

It’s kind of like a job interview. You know when you come out of a job interview and on the walk home you think “Oh shit I should’ve said X instead of Y”? I have that even when I catch up with friends. Despite all the journaling I do, telling a story is always different.

Actually speaking does something. I don’t know what but it gets you into a loop. Naturally, many of my friends did not know I joined a startup and quit within a month. But retelling the story enough time led to thinking about an alternative that had been in my mind.

While I was at the startup, I was just extremely miserable. I recently was making a list of things that made me miserable (it was part of the exercise in the 80/20 principle book) and I wrote down my time at the startup. Really not trying to be dramatic but it was the first thought.

I thought it was rather surprising because I’d been an auditor before. If you’ve ever had friends in the Big 4 audit group you might no longer hang out with them because all we do is bitch about how shitty our lives are. Seriously, I stopped going to company socials after realizing we would force down more shots to “get back at the firm” with insane bills….idiotic I know. My idiocy was sky high then.

But I stopped and thought if audit was truly a miserable experience. I think it was because I quit a couple of months after punching a hole in the wall. It was a really stressful time. I think this story is somewhere in my essay archives.

The funny thing is, when I was in my startup job….I really asked myself numerous times if this was better than audit. Frankly, the work was marginally better. I wasn’t working 140 hours a week. Yet I had hyper anxiety.

This made me think about what I had in audit that I didn’t have in the startup. Hope.

Audit friends go a long way. They’re like war buddies in the trenches. Ironically, my closest friends from my management consulting days are the ones on my worst project. Everyone knows it sucks. We all know it and don’t deny it. But we push on with the hope of greener pastures.

In audit, my friends and I kept on going because of the belief that getting a designation (the CPA now) will solve everything. It’s kind of like a religion. You believe in it strong enough and you think it’s real. Within a year of leaving the Big 4 world, I learned no one gave two shits about my designation. Some may disagree but….<pausing myself from being unnecessarily mean>.

Plainly speaking, I had hope in audit. I didn’t in the startup. I think because I concluded the business had a failing strategy and a founder I could not see leading it to success….there was no hope. This is probably why having a founder you can believe in…..the god to the religion of the startup….is important. I no longer believed in this god and my equity was worthless.

This is actually a wonderful thing.

I think this makes it a strong reason why people should work for startups. Why? Because there is 0 prestige involved. It’s not like you’re quitting some monopolistic institution. It’s a company that is supposed to fail 9 times out of 10. The only thing you can cling onto is hope for a brighter future and if you don’t see it….then you can cut it short.

Prestige is the tricky thing that makes something seeemmm shiny. That’s the case for those in the Big 4 after getting their designation. I say this because a large chunk of my friends go through this. They had hope…. then they got the designation.

You hope it would be this "heavens opening" situation. Instead….you feel shortchanged. At least I did. It’s kind of a “Is that it? When is Santa or a bucket of cash over the rainbow coming out?” feeling.

So after this hope is identified to be false (this is for the majority but I’ve also met plenty who made the right decisions and are doing something they love so don’t want to take that away..purely my experience and 90% of my friends) no one leaves like they would with a startup. No, you just double down on the thing you no longer have hope for. Maybe it’s so traumatic that they can’t recover? Or maybe it’s because the prestige of being in that environment is too strong.

Now you might say “What they aren’t Google….” but let me tell you when you are in that world….especially during my days when working at Facebook was nothing to be celebrated and your friends would say “What? You’re going to help people friend each other?”….the bubble of corporate prestige was quite overwhelming. I’m sure the bubble is still going strong. Actually, the bubble might exist in the big tech companies too from what some of my engineering friends tell me.

It’s such an important thing. Hope. This is what kept people alive in all the concentration camps that Viktor Frankl survived through. It’s not the grittiest, strongest, or smartest. But those that don’t lose hope.

Luckily for us, if we lose hope in an organization or a career path, switching is always an option. Ideally, you are in a place without prestige so it doesn’t get shrouded in illusions.