For a long time I had a pretty simple idea of what success looked like.
Get into a great company.
Work hard.
Keep moving up.
Make more money.
Get more responsibility.
Become one of those people everyone else looks at and thinks, this guy made it.
And for me, JP Morgan was basically that.
I went through something like four months of interviews to get in while I was studying Economics at night.
When I finally got the job, I remember feeling like I had arrived at the center of the world!
We were on the 35th floor of one of the most iconic corporate buildings in Argentina.
Amazing views over the city.
Black corporate cards.
Catering.
Business class flights.
Events in nice hotels.
Everyone around me was smart, ambitious, dressed well, working on important things.
There was status everywhere.
And when you're young, status is incredibly powerful because it gives you a very easy scoreboard.
You don't have to decide what success means.
The system already decided it for you.
Get promoted.
Earn more.
Manage more people.
Work on bigger transactions.
Get closer to the people at the top.
I was good with that scoreboard for a while.
Actually I was very good with it.
I learned a huge amount there and I met some incredibly talented people.
But after maybe four years, something started bothering me.
The higher I looked inside the organization, the less sure I was that I wanted what I was looking at.
There was one person in particular who I really respected.
He had been at the company for around 20 years.
He was running a division of something like 180 people.
This was basically the future you are supposed to want when you're a young guy inside a company like JP Morgan.
He had made it.
At least according to the scoreboard.
Then we were working on a transaction of around $500 million.
There was some issue with the deal, some possibility that a mistake had been made, and one day he told me something I never forgot.
He said he couldn't sleep.
He was terrified that because of this mistake he might lose his job.
And I remember looking at him and thinking:
That is not the life I want for myself.
Not because there was anything wrong with him.
Quite the opposite.
I respected him.
That's why the realization hit me so hard.
Here was someone who had spent 20 years climbing the exact ladder I was climbing.
He had the title.
The responsibility.
The salary.
The team.
The status.
And he still didn't have the thing I suddenly realized I cared about most.
Freedom.
He was managing 180 people and a transaction worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but one bad situation could still make him lie awake at night wondering if somebody above him would take everything away.
That completely changed the way I thought about success.
Because until then, I was always looking at the next position.
I had never really looked at the life attached to that position.
And those are two very different things.
I started noticing other things after that.
The corporate theatre bothered me more.
Someone senior would fly in from the US and suddenly everyone would stop what they were doing.
Schedules changed.
Priorities changed.
People who had never spoken with this executive before would spend days preparing things because this important person was coming.
And I remember thinking… why are we doing this?
Not the work itself.
The performance around the work.
I started seeing how much of your life you slowly exchange for that ladder.
And nobody really tells you that this is the transaction.
They just show you the next promotion.
The nicer title.
The salary increase.
The better seat on the flight.
So you keep saying yes.
And then one day you can be 10 or 15 years further up a ladder without ever stopping to ask where the ladder is actually going.
During the pandemic this became even more obvious to me.
I was working remotely and there were periods where I was finishing at 3 AM almost every night.
And at some point I reached this very weird contradiction.
On paper I had the career younger me wanted.
But I wasn't enjoying my life.
The funny thing is, when I thought about the moments where I had felt most alive, they looked nothing like JP Morgan.
Years before, I had been building a trading club from a tiny office.
The office was maybe 2x2 meters 😂
Nothing impressive.
No view from the 35th floor.
No corporate card.
No status.
But I was running around creating things, talking to people, trying ideas, making mistakes, seeing immediate impact from something I had built.
I had much less.
But somehow I felt much more free.
That contrast became very difficult to ignore.
One of my colleagues at JP Morgan once described something about me better than I probably could.
He told me:
“Julian, you have something rare. If we order empanadas and I tell you one is terrible, you won't take my word for it. You'll say ‘let me try it’ and judge for yourself.”
😂
It sounds stupid but I still think about that.
Because that was probably the biggest problem I had inside the traditional career path.
I needed to try the empanada myself.
People could tell me:
This is a great career.
This is a prestigious company.
This is what success looks like.
You should be grateful.
And all of those things could be true.
But I still needed to know whether it was the life I wanted.
Eventually, around 3 AM one night, I decided I was done.
I quit.
And I moved abroad without some perfect plan for what came next.
Which in hindsight probably wasn't the safest career advice!
But I knew one thing very clearly by then.
I would rather deal with the uncertainty of building my own life than have somebody else give me a very successful life that I didn't want.
I don't tell this story because I think everyone should quit their corporate job.
Definitely not.
JP Morgan gave me an incredible education.
There are people who genuinely love that environment and are amazing inside it.
Some people want to run huge organizations.
Some people like structure.
Some people want the responsibility that comes with those jobs.
And if that life fits you, climbing that ladder can be a great decision.
The mistake is climbing it automatically.
Because prestige is a very easy thing to confuse with desire.
You see someone with a bigger title, more money, a better office and 180 people reporting into them and think:
I want what he has.
Maybe.
But look a little closer.
Do you want his calendar?
Do you want his stress?
Do you want the way he spends his Mondays?
Do you want the tradeoffs he had to make for 20 years to get there?
Do you want his life?
That is a much better question.
And I think it applies way beyond corporate careers.
Founders do this too.
We see another company raise $100M and assume bigger must be better.
We see someone with 500 employees and think we should build 500 employees.
We see the exit, the press article, the valuation.
We don't see the board meetings.
The pressure.
The dilution.
The inability to disappear for two weeks because hundreds of people depend on you.
Every version of success comes with a lifestyle attached to it.
And I think we spend way too much time choosing the success and not enough time choosing the lifestyle.
Today, building HiresLink, my definition of success is very different from the one I had when I walked into JP Morgan.
I care about building things.
I care about having impact.
I obviously care about making money.
But I also care a lot about being able to decide what I work on, who I work with, where I live and what my day actually looks like.
Freedom became part of the scoreboard.
Maybe the biggest part.
So before you spend the next ten years trying to become the person sitting three levels above you, there is a simple exercise that I wish I had done much earlier.
Don't just look at their title.
Look at their life.
And ask yourself:
Would I actually trade mine for theirs?
If the answer is no, maybe you don't need to climb faster.
Maybe you're just on the wrong ladder.
— Julian