Why do so many people become accountants?

Risk is the price you pay for a shot at greatness

I recently raised money from friends and family for the venture I'm working on. It got me thinking about my appetite for risk.

I grew up in a middle-class home. While we never went without anything, we never found ourselves with excess money. Our friends and family were the same. The people I grew up around were cautious by nature. Risk was seen as something to be avoided. For some reason - which I'm yet to figure out - I have a larger appetite for risk than they do.

It's not that I seek or crave risk, but rather that I've come to believe that without risk there is no opportunity. Risk is the price you pay for a shot at greatness.

Moving outside of my immediate circles, I remain an outlier. My generation is terrified of risk. Everybody wants to become a consultant or an accountant - two of the most risk-averse career paths out there.

People pursue these careers, but almost none of them enjoy what they do. They’re open about their dislike for their career and admit that they would rather be doing anything else. So why on earth do people keep pursuing careers like this? Why do they remain on a path they don’t want to be on?

Careers like consulting and accountancy come with the promise of optionality. The promise that the path you’re on leads to choice, and freedom, and your pick of jobs just a little further along the way. It’s a promise that has taken hold of my generation. We've become obsessed with accruing optionality.

Mihir Desai is a professor at both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, putting him in contact with more high-achieving young folks than pretty much anyone. Five years ago, Dr Desai wrote about The Trouble with Optionality in The Crimson. He says:

This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.

The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!

This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions.

I'm not saying that options are bad. Having choices is a good thing. There’s value in trying different paths, learning about yourself, and creating optionality before going all-in. I’m saying that our inability to commit is bad. Our tendency to acquire safety net upon safety net without ever taking a leap is bad.

Optionality is only as valuable as the things that it allows you to commit to, and if you never commit to something, that optionality dies with you, worthless, unable to be redeemed.

One of the reasons people look at artists with a sense of longing is because they know what they want to do. They want to make art. They want to make music. They want to create. The path is challenging but artists pursue it anyway. And the reason they do is that they know that nothing is more important than making art. Artists aren't accruing optionality.

Your life has an expiration date. You can spend 40 years of your career constantly chasing “the next step,” just to look back and realise you never pursued a single job that you actually liked. I’m not saying that you should fire from the hip and hope that everything works out, but the idea that every period of our lives should be some stepping stone for an ever-present “next stage” is a recipe for disaster.

In fact, the longer you wait in your life to take risks, the more difficult it is. The more you have to lose, the more unrealistic the rewards have to be to get you into the game of risk. Your risk appetite decreases with age, meaning you need to take big risks early.

If you’re young, this is your window. This is your time to take risks. That window will close as you hit your thirties and forties because your decisions will no longer be entirely your own. There will be people that depend on you. You’ll have accumulated wealth and status and standing that you don’t want to risk. But early in your career - early in your life - the worst that can happen if you take big risks is that you move back in with your parents. And that’s not shameful if you’ve thrown yourself out there and committed to going for greatness.

Look around you. How many people have been building optionality, creating a platform and safety net to take a big leap? Ambitious people compete insanely hard to accumulate options for the future, instead of figuring out what they really want to do and doing it. It’s like spending your whole life filling up the gas tank without ever driving.

The truth is, it takes time to build anything significant. It takes years to build a company from scratch, raise a loving family, or master a difficult skill. Sooner or later you have to call your shot and dive in. Sooner is almost always better.