What Do American Bankers, German Psychologists, and Soviet Geologists Have In Common?
The Influence of Status
April 7th, 2023 — Greetings from Hamburg, Germany 🇩🇪
I met up with some Money Twitter friends last weekend.
It was fantastic to be around people on a shared mission. Excited to share with you some reflections from our mastermind in a future newsletter.
The Influence of Status
Today I’m going to share with you why I think status games harm our career paths and how I learned to make choices for myself.
Hamburg, Germany, March 2023
Last weekend, I went to the Fulbright Alumni ball with Jeanne:
As we were walking to the U-Bahn at 1:30 AM, we bumped into a stranger from the ball. The stranger started asking us some questions to get to know us. When she found out that Jeanne was studying psychology, something funny happened…
Her eyes lit up, “OH, wow.” 👀
The Level of Respect Surprised Me
Look, nothing against psych majors, but where I’m from in the US, psych is often seen as an easy major.
In fact, my parents dissuaded my little sister from studying it because they feared it was beneath her intelligence level.
But in Germany, it’s the exact opposite.
You need straight A’s to get into a psych program. Just to be accepted is an accomplishment.
How could this happen?
Are Germans and Americans just different?
It all started to make sense once I remembered the Soviet Geologists…
How This Relates to Soviet Geologists
While reflecting on this interaction, I remembered a story my Belarusian host mother told me…
One day I asked her,
When you were a kid in the Soviet Union, what was the most desirable job for an ambitious little commarad?
Her answer shocked me:
“A Geologist”
WTF…?
Yuliya, my host mom, even showed me a song about the “brave geologists” that Soviet schoolchildren used to sing:
Why Did Soviet Kids Want to Become Geologists?
In the end, it came back to status.
Before Gorbachev, geology was well-funded. And to become one was competitive.
But as the Soviet Union collapsed, geologists lost their funding and their status.
And now, according to Yuliya, modern Russian children want to become real estate agents, bankers, and other high-status jobs in a capitalist society.
I get it. The example of the Soviet Geologist might seem laughable if you live in a Western country today. But what might our great-grandchildren think about early 21st-century bankers hunched over their laptops crunching numbers into Excel?
Culture Determines Status
If we’re being honest, most people desire some level of status. It feels good and opens up opportunities for networking, dating, and making money.
But the problem starts when we blindly chase status and forget that status is not absolute. It’s culture-dependent.
What we view as high status in one time or place may be laughed at in another country or era, as the Soviet Geologist perfectly points out.
And when we chase status without self-awareness, it can cause us to act against our self-interest.
We might ignore our unique strengths in favor of something high status like I did when I tried to become a New York investment banker.
Ironically, by dropping out of the status game, to play my own game, I achieved much more status. After I chose to lean into my curiosity for Germany and the German language, I won a Fulbright scholarship, one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world to live and work in Germany funded by the US State Department.
Funny how that works.
How I Escaped the Blind Status Game
There is an Epictetus quote that I love:
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
When you check out the status game, some people might laugh at you short term, but maybe it’s the price you have to pay to stand on your own two feet.
Later in the passage, Epictetus suggests that if you want to improve, it’s easier to get started abroad than at home. Because at home, the resistance from people and ideas around you is stronger.
And from my own experience, spending much of the last four years abroad has made it much easier to think for myself.
Because when I left home and met people from other cultures, I discovered what I viewed as desirable and high status was mostly a result of where I grew up and the people around me.
Not from my independent thinking.
But What If You Can’t Travel Abroad?
I recognize not everyone is a 19-year-old boy with the capacity to leave their home.
But we all can tune out the noise around us and look inward. And after all, travel is no magic pill, as Seneca discovered 2000 years ago:
"How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away." You have to lay aside the load on your spirit. Until you do that, nowhere will satisfy you
“A change of character, not a change of air, is what you need.”
The Answer is Self Awareness
When I graduated college, I was confused about what path to take.
Nearly three years later, I’ve created an income and network from writing online and feel optimistic about the future. But I never could have taken these steps without getting real about what I really wanted.
If you’re unhappy with your current path, I’ve found it helpful to look inward. And the most useful tools I’ve found for that are:
Meditation
Journaling with pen and paper
Reducing my noise-to-signal ratio (less scrolling, more books)
If you rely on other people to tell you the best option for you, it’s unlikely you’ll find it.
The answers are already within.
Thanks for reading.
Great piece!
I agree with John N. I love reading your thoughts on life. Keep thinking and learning.
Love,
Gram