Choisir sa carrière et pourquoi celle-ci en particulier (document en anglais)

Nowadays, the world of work is really exigent and asks for different qualities to achieve a task. Since I was little, I always knew what I would like to do later; even if I did not have an exact idea, I wanted a job that asked me to travel a lot, with a part of relationship and important stakes. Indeed, discovering new cultures, meeting people, dealing with pressure has always been attractive to me. My ambition is to find a job with all those criteria, but to answer these different needs we require specific virtues, qualities. I believe that all people have qualities and they vary from one to another and it’s our responsibility to make them grow in order to have a healthy life not only physically, but also as Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, a political and intellectual one . If we don’t cultivate our primordial quality, our lifestyle will be simplistic and ignorant compare to someone who look after his virtues; which is a mess. For example someone born really gifted, with clairvoyant virtues such as intelligence and does not try to make the best of it and just lets these a quality pass him by, you can call that laziness or selfishness. My thesis is that the three most important virtues required for this specific work are honesty, tolerance and rigor, I will try to explain why those virtues match with this job and give a definition of each virtue.

Choosing a carrier is a difficult process as it limited by both internal factor, my education and my skills, and external factor such as the social environment and life opportunities. I was really inspired by a friend of my parents work in the domain of finance, he actually currently own an investment company, but started at the bottom as a portfolio manager and worked hard to attain his goal. He was a mentor for me and I want to live the same kind of life that he did, indeed when I was younger I tried to find out which job was the most adapted for me. After searching around and taking account my character, I knew that business was the most adapted way to go. After some time, the branch of Finance seemed to be the most appropriate for me, I was a really good math student and a logical person which is essential for Finance.

I believe that to success in a job you need specific virtues that concord with it. In my case for a job in finance, I think that the three virtues required are honesty rigor and self-confidence. First of all, honesty is one of the major key to be a portfolio manager, indeed the main point of this job consist of managing other people money everyday by investing at he right time in the stock market, so the customer have to trust you to let you manage his money safely. If you are not honest, nobody will entrust you his money. Secondly, rigor is also a major virtue in this job, portfolio manager is a work that asks to be really rigorous, when you have big amount of money in your hands the error is forbidden. You have to be exact every time and obey to really specific mathematical rules, if you to perform in this domain. Finally the idea of self-confidence is also crucial for this job, with the pressure you have to carry one it s obvious that if you are not ensure, it s impossible to do the right investment at the right time.

Those virtues are of course important as we have seen, and are often chosen by people who seek to do business in order to perform well at interviews. But I believe that they are truly the roots of a successful carrier if understood correctly.

When speaking of honesty, very often we consider it from the moralist point of view that one must always be honest, that is never lie, always tell the true etc. However, always telling the true is not being honest, it is being fairly stupid when doing business. For example in the case of a portfolio manager you are not going to explain your investment plan to your opponent just because you are being honest. Nonetheless trust is the basis for business, and people like Madoff did not do good business by lying to his customer. I have through my life being force by my parent to be honest (not lying, not cheating…), but now that I understand what honesty is in essence, I can truly cultivate the virtue by myself by trying to find a middle in this virtue. At first cheating

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