Embracing Chaos and Challenges in Treasury with Wade Olsen Part 1

One of the key things I always talk to people about when they ask me when they're coming out of school or they're getting ready to start their treasury career, or any finance career or any career for that matter. Find a way to identify a good mentor and always find a good mentor that has your interests at heart, that understands your family interests, your career interests and your other passionate things that I'm passionate about activities. I love to be outdoors in the backcountry and doing stuff in the backcountry. When you have a mentor that understands those things about you, they can really do a lot to guide you. There's been multiple times in my career where you're faced with something that's completely unexpected. Like for example, when you're running risk management in the insurance part of treasury and you get called up from your head of security at the company that runs the security of the physical security and some of the other security and they start telling you about an employee that's a potential problem and it's such a problem that's a potential liability for the company. We need to inform our insurance providers about it. Those are the kind of things that as a finance person it's got more HR related issues with it. But now here you are thrown into that mix because you're managing the policy for your insurance. But it's just one kind of strange little example that if you don't embrace that chaos or the strange stuff that happens, or even the non strange, but it's going to happen anyway. Items that are just kind of random, if you can't embrace that, it's very hard to move forward in your career. Very hard to move forward. Find a way to embrace that, find a way to solve it, get the solutions right. You know, there's no, like Thomas Sowell always says, there's only trade offs, there's no solutions, there's just trade offs. And so you got to find that right and appropriate trade off. One of my things, I always like to say to people, if you really work hard and you put your head down and you learn things and you do things that are difficult and you embrace those difficulties in a way that others can't and you provide those solutions and alternatives that others don't or they actually even ignore the idea because it's so difficult. If you have the ability to take that difficult concept, create an alternative or a solution to make it work, you get recognized, you become a trusted advisor. And that trusted advisor is kind of a nice status because then people know you're going to be relied upon. When you have a difficult thing in front of you, then opportunity finds you. You don't have to go find opportunity. A lot of.