There was a point in my life, as a successful young banker, where I was offered two jobs as a bank president. I was also offered a prestigious and important ladder of success job at a major national financial consulting company. I turned them all down to be at the center of the hippie cyclone.
But why?
Both my parents were hard core Lefties. My mother’s brother, Fred, was a Marxist who kept the National Guardian newspaper alive with his own money for 20 years.
My mother knew wealthy people in New York, parents of her friends. She took me and my brothers to the The Plaza for lunch, once, in our jeans and said ‘don’t worry, the staff assumes we are rich if we dress this way.’
My father was friends with many rich business people but considered them de classe.
The attitude of both my parents must have rubbed off on me. I concluded, from a young age, that I could do anything I wanted, money was irrelevant. I never saw any barriers and I never encountered any (except being a Jew kept me out of some snotty private clubs).
In retrospect, that is probably why job offers on the ladder to financial success never had great appeal to me.