In this video, the presenter critiques popular career advice given by prominent finance and business leaders—Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett, David Solomon, Christine Lagarde, Will Smith, Nick Baker, and Will DeLucy—by comparing their high‑level recommendations to the practical realities faced by finance students and early‑career hires. He explains Dalio’s idea‑meritocracy and notes cultural mismatches between US‑style radical truth‑telling and more hierarchical European firms. He questions Buffett’s suggestion to work for someone you admire, highlighting limited access and the grind of long hours. Solomon’s "marathon, not a sprint" mantra is praised but contextualized within rigid recruitment pipelines that pressure young talent. Lagarde’s emphasis on failure, resilience, and teamwork is examined against the backdrop of elite recruitment that often shields candidates from real setbacks. Smith’s advice to be liked, first to respond, and curious is framed as essential in sales‑driven roles like prime brokerage. Baker’s call for authenticity is linked to the importance of genuine interpersonal skills over stereotypical finance personas. Finally, DeLucy’s reminder not to be your own worst enemy stresses mental health, perspective, and self‑compassion. Throughout, the presenter offers a reality‑check, urging students to weigh these philosophies against their own contexts, choose environments that foster learning, and adopt adaptable, self‑aware mindsets.
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K, welcome back to the channel. Hope you're doing well and wanted to do a slightly different video specifically about career advice for students from leaders in industry, but giving you the real truth. And this came about because I was putting together a blog, um, a lot of questions from students I get about what would be the best advice that you would give to your young self So I collated a whole bunch from people you'll recognize— Christine Lagarde, as you can see, Ray Dalio, the head of Goldman Sachs, other investment banks, as well as those people that we know in industry from, from Amplify. And I thought, that blog's all well and good, but how realistic is it? Then they say these quite grand statements that they can be applied into your decision-making as a young person to make the best decision on your career, whether it's for a spring week, an internship, a graduate placement, whatever it might be. So what I wanted to do is run through some of these and kind of give you a bit of a sanity check of really what's this like in reality? Because I think honestly, not many people really tell you the truth. And I want to kind of dispel a couple of kind of misconceptions, I guess, about certain things. So I'm going to start off with someone who I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with. He's an infamous hedge fund manager, biggest in the world. Incredibly successful guy, Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates. And he has this philosophy, if you've read the book Principles, about radical truths. And he talks about this idea when it comes to advice for young people, which is work in an idea meritocracy. And this is based around where you can ask the questions that need to be asked, challenge the ideas that need to be held. So you don't need to be held as a lackey to a boss, but instead a partner, so you can learn and grow and have your your say. Now, as much as I get the benefit of what this approach does entail, I do think that in practice, from what I've seen, there is a bit of a cultural difference behind how a lot of US-based organizations operate compared to those in, say, mainland Europe. To say, for example, probably the opposite cultural terms of this would be, say, a French organization as a classic example. Now, Now, the idea being here is that having radical truths is great in a sense of you eliminate uncertainties, you pick holes in each other's arguments, makes it more robust and hopefully a better outcome in the end. But in reality, the practice, of course, is very challenging. There's a lot of confrontations, uh, and a lot— not a lot of people, I would imagine, would feel particularly comfortable in those types of environments. So yeah, as much as, uh, Ray Dalio is obviously an incredible individual, with incredible success. The idea meritocracy, I think in reality is not something that probably that you'll receive early on. It's going to be manager by manager specific. There's obviously different types of managerial styles. And I think as a graduate, picking what type of team you want to be in is super important. As much as you kind of emphasize the role and as well the organization in terms of the prestige and so forth, who you're going to learn from is ultimately key and the value you're going to get out of that. And so, yeah, the idea of a meritocracy, perhaps slightly wishful thinking, but certainly does come as you become more senior, is more likely the reality. So moving on, because there's a couple to go through. The next off is the legendary investor Warren Buffett, obviously a real legend in the, in the community. And he said, go to work from whoever you admire the most. Now, definitely I get that. The reality, I'd say, it's people don't have that option, right? I wanted to be a basketball player. I'd love to play for the Chicago Bulls and be alongside Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan. It ain't going to happen. So the idea is going to work from whoever you admire the most is— I kind of get it. If that's a very senior person in an organization, you would hope that culturally that spills down from top down. and then that breeds the type of environment that you want to be in. I think that's the more practical way of taking this type of advice. But the idea that, you know, you can't get a bad result, you'll jump out of bed in the morning, you'll be having fun. How much fun is it working 100-hour weeks in an IBD division? Probably not a great deal of fun. So yeah, there, there's a two-edged, double-edged sword to this, of course. Um, for me personally, I'd say I found the first year or two of my career incredibly challenging because I came from it from really a non-econ background. So I had to learn everything from scratch. Academia wasn't really my thing because I was very focused on sports as a young individual. And so I really found that hard. And so actually, I'd say traits like perseverance, consistency, these sorts of things, tenacity, really speak a lot in those terms. Having fun, I'd say it was probably of a second order. I get the sentiment here. I think in reality it's probably not that, that adaptable, and not at least until it becomes more flexible as you get more senior and you start to have a little bit more control about what your day looks like. The other thing then is David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs. He said, don't be in a hurry. It's a journey. Ultimately, you've got to find something you are passionate and interested in, but you don't have to find that on day one. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Now, yeah, I absolutely believe in this. I think that's incredibly true. However, I think it's not this comment that's at fault. I think it's the system that's at fault because we get put into a lot of pressure given how rigid typical recruitment processes are, particularly in large financial institutions where you have to go through this channel of being an 18-year-old doing a spring week. Leads to summer internship, leads to return offer to graduate, and so forth. Now, what we're trying to do at Amplify, and I think the way the industry is going, is trying to disrupt that somewhat to be more flexible, to have greater pool of opportunity to secure talent. And yeah, definitely I think, you know, being passionate, being interested in what you're in will speak volumes in the end. And that's super important because if you are going to work long hours, really commit yourself to work, the more that you have those innate core values in what you're doing, the more you're going to have longevity and progress and develop yourself going forward. So yeah, I like that one from Solomon. The other one's then Christine Lagarde. Um, this is kind of not just finance, but across the board, I guess. Failure is okay. Um, this is not necessarily accepted in all societies or all civilizations, but success does not come easily. It should not be taken for granted. It's very much about hard work, resilience, determination. And it's also about teamwork, helping others, being helped, operating with others on your team is critically important. So some really good elements there from, from Lagarde for one, and certainly being a woman in the financial industry and to go on to have achieved the things that she does, I think is incredible. She gets an awful lot of kind of negative comments for from certainly the proprietary trading community. But I think she's— she does an awesome job. I think she is a very effective communicator. It's just that a lot of people have preconceptions given her background and so forth. But back to the point of what she's saying is working hard, resilience, determination, and teamwork, and having the nature of being comfortable to be able to fail. Now, what we do know is that given how the traditional recruitment path looks like for large financial institutions is you go through this process and you're selecting pretty similar candidates, really similar types of backgrounds, types of schooling that they've had. So therefore the type of environment or socioeconomic situation. And what that leads to then is that there hasn't been too much failure, whether excelling in academia, in sport, in life in general given the, um, cushion, if you like, of opportunity. Now that's not that individual's fault, that's just the way it is. The idea then here is that to learn how to fail, I think you've got to fail. And the more that that happens, I think the more then you gain confidence that that's actually an opportunity to learn, to adapt, and be better the next time. So yeah, spot on Christine, uh, that's definitely a good one. Some other ones here just to wrap up. This is Will Smith, who's the co-head of EU Prime Brokerage at Morgan Stanley. You know, really happy to say he spends a lot of time with our community personally, and which I appreciate. But I spoke to him about this, and he said, very simple: be liked, be first to respond, and be curious. Now, I like the idea of first to respond. I mean, certainly he, he works in prime brokerage, and so definitely being first to respond is integral because after enough time, he said, then people don't look for anyone else, they come straight to you. So being first tactically in a, in a kind of sales-driven environment is obviously going to be very beneficial for you. The other thing I really like here is being liked. I think people sometimes lose, particularly at a student entry level when you're going into finance, you think you need to have this preconceived way to behave in order to be successful. Ultimately, if you can get on with other people, you will make headway pretty quickly. Then the other thing is being curious, you know, proactively asking questions, reviewing, understanding what went well and why, and what failed, how can we address it, what can we do better next time? That type of mentality is a lifelong learning exercise, not just one that you do as a student coming out of school, going into the workplace. So Yeah, absolutely spot on. This one I really thought was good, and this was from our chairman and founder of Alpha FMC, which is the world's biggest financial market consultancy, Nick Baker. And he said quite simply, it's one thing, is be authentic. Kind of goes to what I was saying a minute ago. His view was that don't behave in business like you wouldn't behave in normal life. You know, treat people with respect and be personable, and that will go a long way. And I can absolutely testify to that. You know, you kind of have these ideas of probably driven out of a lot of the mainstream media and movies and things like that that you see of what finance might be perceived to be like as characters. But ultimately, those who are the most successful that I have met at a very senior level in industry have always been very personable people. And it's because then they get that buy-in and they're able to really drive direction of the teams in which they manage. And then the last one is from our founder, Will DeLucy, uh, of Amplify, and he said, don't be your worst enemy. Um, obviously we work with a lot of students, and thankfully I get a lot of exposure to people from lots of different backgrounds. And yeah, coming out of a pandemic, it's obviously been incredibly challenging, both mentally as well as physically. And there's many, many worries, concerns, anxieties about your performance, your decisions you need to make about your career, whether where your future is heading, all these different things. And it can be quite easy to fall into a trap of looking over your shoulder, looking what other people are doing, thinking very short-termist, analyzing every small thing. And a tip he kind of gave was don't be your worst enemy. Step back, review, bird's eye view. What's going on? How am I progressing? Look at where I've come to, where I've got to, and where I want to be. Um, and then having perspective is the main takeaway point there. So yeah, couple of, couple of things there. Um, I hope that was interesting. I just thought it would be good to kind of give some rationale and a reality check to how implementable some of these, these career advice tips are in reality. I'm gonna share the blog in the link of this video, so feel free to check it out and feel free to leave a comment. Um, and don't forget to like and subscribe to the video. Super appreciate it. And I'll see you for the next one. Take care.
