Published on: Tuesday, June 02, 2026
There is a podcast I enjoy listening to on Bloomberg Radio called Masters in Business. It is hosted by Barry Rithotz, the founder of a very successful investment management firm in the US; the author of “How Not to Invest” and a frequent commentator in the business media. He interviews prominent people in the business world – mostly from the wealth management industry.
Every interview/episode begins with him reviewing the guest’s background, highlighting where they were educated and then asking what their career aspirations were when they first entered the workforce. It sounds something like this.
“You grew up in Cincinnati. Received a bachelor’s from Ohio State in English Literature. What was the plan?”
I can’t count how many times the individual says something like “there wasn’t one” or “I didn’t have one”.
What’s more, it rarely pointed to a career in finance. And rarely is the individual’s undergraduate education in Business Administration or Economics.
Many say something like, “I wanted to write fiction,” or “I moved to New York to try to get a job at a newspaper.” Or, with even more serendipity, “I moved there to be close to my girlfriend who was going to grad school”.
I’m fascinated by how many had interests in the arts, or how many whose first job was based more on their value system than on building a career that was financially rewarding and started to move them up the ladder. And yet, these are people who now sit at the top of their profession on Wall Street, far away from where they started.
It makes me ask whether the best thing a person can do to be successful in finance is to develop their thinking in ways that have nothing to do with it.
It’s one thing to learn the mechanics of investing and wealth management. It’s very mathematical, of course. We learn accounting principles to understand the financial health of a company. We learn ratios and other metrics for determining the intrinsic value of an investment. We learn to make projections. But there are so many other non-mathematical influences that form a plan or a thesis. An analyst must be able to evaluate a company’s strategy, the dynamics of the industry, weigh the impact of regulation and public policy and even the relevance of global events.
In the part of the industry where I work – retail, personal finance – it’s even more nuanced toward life events. Whereas an equity analyst needs to make sense of the world, the wealth advisor needs to look at a client’s place in it. Clients are more affected by what happens very close to them than they are by what happens in the economy or around the globe.
The advisor who appreciates art in all its forms (music, theatre, literature, film, opera, painting and sculpture) has spent some time thinking about how we humans make our way through life. He or she is more equipped to help clients navigate life’s events, especially the challenging ones such as a forced retirement, an illness or the loss of a spouse.
They will have more insight into what truly affects their clients, what their insecurities are, how to move past them, and how to be more at peace with the way things are.
Here is what it sounds like in practice.
“I can see that you’re not comfortable with this. You feel like you have no other option, but you do. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of moving in a direction that puts you more at ease”.
“It sounds like that is very important to you. I get the sense that you’d feel better if we prioritize that over X”.
“This seems like something you just feel like you need to do. You’re having a hard time finding the words to explain why. But that doesn’t diminish how much you’d feel better if you do it. How can we make that happen?”
Experience in the industry is important. But the well-rounded advisor brings something that is powerful and at times equally important – insight into the human experience.