Game, set, match

One of my concerns about the career I've chosen is that it will turn me into a boring person. Even worse, that it might turn me into a boring, wealthy person. It doesn't have to be the case because I know a lot of well-grounded, cool people who work in the industry. Incidentally, most of them are traders.

It starts out with being at work all the time (full disclosure: I'm actually headed there in about an hour). I don't want work to define my life with work because 1) I'm not really a fan of people who do this and 2) if anything's been learned over the past month it's to not put all of your eggs in one basket unless you're going on a picnic. Vague enough yet? It's fun to make jokes about the (insert asset type here) market with co-workers, and it's fun to hear people talk about girls in terms of Sharpe Ratios (a friend has a theory that 6s and 7s aren't worth pursuing because "you have to work just as hard to get them as the 8s or 9s and so you might as well go for the bigger payoff"). But overall I don't think it's too dramatic to say that in certain situations your work can transform you into a one-sided, one-track person , and that's usually bad unless you're in the heat of battle or wild sex. In addition to the cool people, I know plenty of people who are completely uninteresting and unfun to hang out with because they're stuck in the mud. Actually, hanging out with them, you start to wonder if you're becoming like that, whether it's true or not.

So, in an effort to keep the creative juices flowing, I've started a game that I play pretty much every day now. In the morning, I come up with one (usually offbeat, very specific) word or phrase that I'm going to work into a normal conversation at some point in the day. The rules of the game are: you have to use the word in a sentence that makes sense in the context of an already established conversation about some other subject, the other person has to nod and accept it and not call you out on it or seem confused or break up the flow of the conversation to try and figure out what you meant, and you have to keep a straight face and not laugh while saying it (usually the hardest part). The best is when you don't see anyone till like 7 PM and then youre trying to figure out how to slide "hieroglyphics", "sucker punch", or "donkey kong's bananas" into a dialogue. Classic.