Purpose · proposed 1 month ago
What’s the main purpose of being a finance person.
People who stay fulfilled in finance long-term don’t stop caring about returns. They stop needing returns to answer questions returns were never built to answer. Teaching, building, and mentoring have a different reward structure — they compound narratively, not just numerically. A student you trained two years ago who’s now trading competently is tangible evidence. A system you built is still running. A firm you’re constructing gets more solid over time, independent of any single month’s swings. These give you a second scoreboard — one immune to drawdowns. There’s an identity angle too. If your self-worth is “I am someone whose value is this month’s return,” every red month is a threat to who you are. If your identity is “I am someone building an institute, training people, compounding a body of knowledge,” a red month is just a data point — not a verdict.
Proposed by Akshat Jain
Surfaced by AYVA's assistant
Considerations to engage — not conclusions.
The assistant reads every idea through the nine-question Challenge Protocol and offers openings for debate. It never decides — each point is yours to answer, extend, or reject below.
has this existed before
Ancient guild and apprenticeship models separated craft mastery from immediate output, suggesting this 'second scoreboard' idea recurs across professions, not unique to finance.
where could it fail
Narrative compounding can mask real skill decline; a mentor's poor judgment or system's hidden risk may only surface after major losses, undetected by teaching-based metrics.
who could exploit it
Underperforming fund managers could use 'teaching and building' narrative to deflect accountability for poor returns, using mentorship optics as cover for weak performance.
unintended consequences
Overemphasis on legacy-building might reduce risk-taking needed for genuine alpha, or create hierarchies where mentoring becomes status theater rather than substance.
works across cultures
Individualist finance cultures may resist framing worth around institution-building, while collectivist or relationship-based markets might already implicitly value this framing.
survives generations
If the 'system' or trained students become obsolete due to market or technological shifts, the compounding narrative asset could depreciate just like the numeric one it replaces.
works when machines do most productive labour
If AI executes most trading and analysis, human 'teaching' and 'building institutions' may shift meaning entirely — mentoring machines, not people, raising identity redefinition questions.
Openings you might build on
Identity diversification across multiple 'scoreboards' is a recognized psychological buffer against burnout, similar to portfolio diversification reducing single-point-of-failure risk in careers.
Redefining self-worth around teaching/building could rationalize mediocrity, letting practitioners avoid honest reckoning with declining returns by hiding behind narrative productivity.
Academic tenure systems similarly reward long-term knowledge-building over short-term output, yet critics note this can entrench unaccountable, complacent performance over decades.
If widely adopted, finance culture might shift incentive structures toward mentorship metrics, altering hiring, promotion, and firm evaluation criteria beyond pure return-based benchmarks.
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