Chapter 10: Imposter, Explorer, Analyst
Unexploded ordnance, bioluminescence, CEO in an elevator, off-the-grid BBQ, dormant ski lifts, Colombian wedding speech, Saquon, Chick-fil-A, Hamilton 5th row, and 92 notes to the ether
It's Saturday night. Highly unlikely anyone will read this, and that's OK. Like I've said many times, I have to write these and get them out. Trying to move faster to get to present day. I'm relearning a lot about myself writing these and recommend everyone do something similar.
Finding Your Footing as the World Gets a Lot Bigger
In Chapter 9, I wrote about Ireland and the return to reality. The Lavin family homestead in Castlerea, Newgrange, the Penn State game at Croke Park, and then coming home to a Monday morning ferry ride into the city with everything exactly where I left it. From there the chapter moved fast through the rest of 2014 and into my wedding, the honeymoon, leaving Nielsen, a brief stop at a boutique analyst shop, and then the leap to Wall Street. And then the fall. The darkest professional stretch of my life. Dropping from 195 to under 170 pounds. Googling how to read financial statements in real time. My wife breaking down one night seeing me completely hollowed out. Standing in the shower one morning, exhausted, when something finally flipped.
I ended Chapter 9 with the line: “2016 was a completely different story.”
This chapter is that story.
The Notes Were Already Running
Before I get into what happened next, it’s worth pausing on something. Throughout this living “anti-course” memoir I’ve been weaving in fragments from my self-addressed email archive. Notes I’d fire off to myself from my phone, sometimes mid-thought, sometimes late at night, sometimes between meetings. They were never meant for anyone else. Just a running log of whatever my brain was processing at the time. I wrote a standalone dedicated piece about it this past week called 1,647 Notes to Myself.
What’s interesting to look back on is how many of them predate Wall Street entirely. In the months before I started at RBC in mid-August 2015, while I was still at the boutique analyst shop and figuring out my next move, the notes were already running on a track that had nothing to do with the career I was about to enter.
May 4, 2015 — “As civilization becomes more advanced, the more people rely on other people and companies to live and work... when you start to become reliant on technology that you know nothing about in terms of how it works, you’ve entered dangerous territory.”
June 6, 2015 — “Is the Conservation of Angular Momentum responsible for millions of drivers NOT shooting off the highway every day?”
June 6, 2015 — “Is the IMAX 3D experience the 2015 version of 1915’s nickelodeons?”
June 6, 2015 — “We need reminders.. whenever you feel sad or pessimist, you just need a trigger to get you back to positive — could be a song that brings you back to an awesome memory.”
June 6, 2015 — “New technologies could start to get rolled over before they even hit their peak, or worse even hit the market.”
June 6, 2015 — “I wish Netflix would buy HBO from TimeWarner.”
June 6, 2015 — “The whole idea behind cable subscription bundles.. that the revenue from popular channels like ESPN and AMC pays for the awful channels that nobody watches? If a channel can’t pay for itself, it shouldn’t exist.”
June 6, 2015 — “Most everything approaches commoditization, cheapness, and near perfect quality, no?”
June 6, 2015 — “What’s with every WSJ or BusinessWeek article citing someone ‘not authorized to speak on the matter because of national security concerns’?”
June 6, 2015 — “Self driving cars vs wfh.”
June 7, 2015 — “We need reminders.. music.”
Eleven notes from a single stretch. Just short notes on systems thinking, the invisible architecture of modern life, and random business musings. Observations about language, power, commoditization, and the fragility of technological assumptions. All of it running before Wall Street even started. In one sense, I was primed for the intellectual explosion that Wall Street would spark… in another, my mind was highly unlikely to be corralled into a specific outcome or type of deliverable for any meaningful length of time.
This is who showed up at 200 Vesey in August 2015.
The Paradox
I wrote in Chapter 9 about how the most stressed I have ever been in my life was not in an ambulance. It was sitting at a desk, updating a model within thirty minutes of an earnings release, drafting a note, and publishing it so my boss could go on CNBC. I spent nearly a decade in emergency medicine treating real life-and-death situations. Running calls in the middle of the night. Managing trauma scenes. Making decisions in seconds that determined whether someone lived or suffered. And none of that ever broke me the way those first months on Wall Street did.
That paradox haunted me. How could someone who thrived in chaos, who ran toward emergencies, who led crews into the worst moments of strangers’ lives… how could that same person be falling apart over spreadsheets?
As I wrote about in Chapter 3, a month before I started at RBC, I had taken a Predictive Index assessment voluntarily on a mentor’s recommendation. The results painted a pretty clear picture. High dominance. Low formality. Risk-taking. Future-focused. Unimpressed with tradition. Restless under routine. Strategy over tactics. Aggressive when challenged. The key line from the report: “More concerned with where he’s going than either how he’ll get there, or where he’s been.” Some good and bad that follows that.
Because look at what I had walked into. Equity research at a major Wall Street bank is one of the most hierarchical, deferential, and process-heavy environments in corporate America. I was the junior person. You do not lead. You support. You update models you didn’t build. You draft notes that go out under someone else’s name. You sit in a chair and wait for instructions. Every output is reviewed, edited, compliance-checked, and published on a schedule you don’t control, often responding to events that are entirely unpredictable… like M&A announcements, pre-announced earnings, global macro surprises that move the price of some commodity, a new tax law that upends all your adjusted EPS forecasts. There is a chain of command and you are at the bottom of it... a chain of events you can’t possibly foresee arriving at often the most inopportune time that certainly don’t care about your personal life.
That is the exact opposite of my Predictive Index profile. Every single trait it identified as core to who I am was being suppressed, inverted, or punished by the environment. High dominance meets mandatory deference. Low formality meets rigid compliance. Risk-taking meets “check with me before you send anything.” Strategy over tactics meets “just update the model.”
And that’s why the EMS comparison isn’t actually a paradox at all. In emergency medicine, I was autonomous. I was the crew chief. I made the decisions. The stress was acute and physical and real, but it was mine. I owned it. On Wall Street, the stress was chronic, invisible, and layered with ego and self-doubt. And worst of all, it wasn’t mine. I was bending myself into a shape that my own personality was rejecting at every level. The PI assessment had told me this would happen. I just didn’t listen. Even my prior corporate roles were more similar to driving an ambulance than this new experience.. manning the phones booking trades on my own with little to no direction or direct in-the-moment supervision… and being in sales or customer service… almost all self-directed or self-paced.
The day after that assessment, I had emailed myself four words.
July 16, 2015 — “Sailboat cruise serve drinks.”
Tangible work. Physical work. Service. Freedom. Everything the PI said I was, compressed into a dream I didn’t even know I was filing away. And everything the job I was about to take was not.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Down Bad
One of the other reasons I was spiraling, which I didn’t mention in the prior chapter because frankly I forgot, was the question of whether I needed to take the Series 7 and 63 exams. They are required in the job after a certain period of onboarding, and especially so if you wanted your name to appear legally on the bank’s published research. The issue was that I had both from my first job back in 2013 on the trading desk in NJ, but they expired with my time outside the industry. What we did was apply for an exemption to reinstate them, but the answer took forever to arrive, and then the answer was no. So I had to cram on top of everything else in the job itself for four FINRA series exams and get them all done ASAP… Series 7, Series 63, Series 86, and Series 87. It was brutal, distracting, and added another layer of oppressive stress on top of everything else.
All-in, I was down bad. And a lot of people knew it.
Family, friends, former colleagues, anyone who would listen. I was reaching out to everyone for advice on how to get through this new professional slog. I didn’t even know what I wanted to hear. I just wanted people to listen. Looking back it seems almost silly, given how things eventually played out. But this was the deepest depth I can ever remember. I was 27 years old. I’d turn 28 that October.
December 15, 2015 — “BBC article: ‘Why self-sabotage could be ruining your career.’ Sent from iPhone.”
That’s the kind of thing I was reading on a random Tuesday. Searching for explanations. Wondering if the problem was the job or if the problem was me.
The most powerful voice through all of it was my wife. She was the rock. There every single day, carrying the weight of it alongside me. She made me know that it would all be fine no matter what, whether she fully believed that herself or not. But she said it and she meant it and she showed up like it was true. She definitely carried a burden during this stretch, and she used it to lift me.
One day my dad simply listened to my concerns and perspective. He let me talk. Then he said, “Son, you’ve got the world by the balls.” That was it. Just a mirror held up by a man who built things with his hands and didn’t overthink it. You’re 27. You’re on Wall Street. You’re married. You’re healthy. Stop spiraling.
A couple weeks later, I was talking to my mother over the phone about the stress. She said whatever I do, I have to do it “on my own terms.” She wasn’t telling me to stay or leave. She was telling me that the decision itself mattered less than whether it was mine versus me making a rash decision solely because of pain or stress. Just push through it. Remember who you are.
One of the people I called during this stretch was a close friend from college who had served as an officer on a nuclear submarine in the US Navy. I think even just having the conversation out loud with him set me somewhat straight, less because of what he actually said and more because of the comparison it forced. Here I was, panicking about Excel models and earnings deadlines, talking to a guy who had spent months sealed inside a metal tube underwater running nuclear propulsion systems with no sunlight and no exit for months at a time. He didn’t say anything about “perspective” because he didn’t need to. It was obvious.
What he did say was simple and I’ve never forgotten it. “You can do anything for 18 months.” Encouraging me to stick it out, not make any moves under duress. It was generous because he wasn’t belittling what I was going through. He was just calmly telling me I’d survive it, because he’d survived worse. And the act of saying it all out loud to someone like that seemed to have recalibrated something internally.
Sink or Swim
I remember my first real situation of any responsibility. Only about a month on the job, we were given the opportunity to host a meeting with the head of IR and the CFO of Hain Celestial in New York. My boss couldn’t make it. Maybe he was testing me, throwing me into the fire. Maybe things just came up. Either way, I had to host it as lead.
I distinctly remember my boss emailing the company to introduce me, telling the executive team that “Kevin is 30 years old.” I was barely 28. A fair round-up for credibility, I suppose. One of the equity salespeople came along with me and was clearly sizing me up. I remember it like it was yesterday. One of those burned memories. She had no idea about my background, but maybe something in my demeanor or tone signaled anxiety or uncertainty.
“You’ve done this before, right?”
The rest I barely even remember. Investors asking questions. I chimed in with something. I don’t remember what. It must have gone alright.
Because about a month later, on November 5, 2015, for the Hain Celestial fiscal Q1 2016 earnings call, I needed to sub in for my boss again. He couldn’t make the call. That’s not unusual in equity research. But I’d never done this before, and I barely knew how to do the job yet.
Let me explain what this means. Every quarter, a public company releases its earnings results. The executives present the results along with color commentary about the quarter and upcoming guidance. Then comes the analyst Q&A, when covering analysts have the opportunity to ask the CEO, CFO, and other executives questions directly. Live. With anyone in the world listening. Investors, journalists, employees of the company, industry folks. And of course it’s recorded for all time as part of the securities industry record.
I had never spoken on an earnings call before, obviously. And I had never actually met any of the Hain executives in person yet. I still barely knew how to read a financial statement. But what I did know was the consumer industry and how to read retail sales data feeds, which the bank licensed, thanks to my time at Nielsen. Indeed, that’s exactly why I was recruited to the job in the first place. So when I needed to pull off an intelligent question that could add value to the call, that’s what I went for.
Here is my section of the transcript from that earnings call:
