So Long Jones

It is difficult to consider the ramifications of spending the last year and a half of your life trying to help people achieve their goals only to realize that they would have been better off having never met you. But, to some degree, that is what I did. I worked hard as a financial advisor building a new business in a rural community and I had some significant success at it...even despite the downward turning market. I was getting good clients who trusted what I told them. I was actually surprised that a simple (yet brutally difficult and oftentimes impossible) strategy actually could reap rewards...even in a bad economy. You see, simply put, I knocked on people's doors and asked them to invest their money with me. Usually such a strategy was reserved for Jehovah's Witnesses and guys selling meat out of a mobile freezer or, occasionally, a local politician with a lot of motivation, no money, and two good feet. As I think back on it I knocked on many doors over the past two years--too many to count--and I met a lot of very nice people. A few of them gave me money, some even gave me all of it. Then the bad market tanked. Companies my company always called "safe," and, "could never hurt anyone," were either on the ropes (and still are) or gone completely. I spent three weeks in a faraway city, calling all those people I doorknocked on a number from out of town, trying to sell them Lehman Brothers bonds or Citigroup stock. Why? Because they were safe. Thankfully, I never sold anything on those intense trips because deep down I knew that calling people and trying to sell something I knew nothing about was not a good way to build a successful small town business. Today, Lehman Brothers bonds are gone and Citigroup stock is down 98%. Two months ago, when I was fired for failing to perform to the standards of the company by a person I've never met, I really thought that I had failed. But now, as I think about it, I succeeded because I didn't do what they told me to do. I didn't sell any of their "safe" investments and, because of that, my clients--the people who trusted me to tell them the right thing to do--are better off.