In this blog post, we’ll cover how to avoid common clichés in investment banking cover letters and how to effectively showcase your unique selling points.
Growing up
Opportunity always comes to those who are prepared. It’s something my father always emphasized. Luck may be a matter of personal preference, but life-changing upsets don’t come to those who aren’t prepared, and we must always be prepared and ready to wait for the tide that may come at any moment. At the time, I was a clever kid who was always trying to figure out how I could avoid effort and slip through the cracks, so I found his words, which often boiled down to “that’s why you have to study hard,” very boring. I kept hearing the complaint that there was no point in accumulating hard work if you don’t know when opportunity will come your way.
At that time, I had a dream of becoming a gambler or a lottery winner, which is a bit ridiculous, but I was only interested in such fortunes. One day, my father asked me to play cards with him. If I could beat him even once, he’d buy me the gaming machine I’d always wanted. We played nearly a dozen times, but I never won. When I protested that he might be cheating, he quietly said, “I’ve memorized all the cards and calculated the probability of their appearance, excluding the cards that have already been dealt and redeemed.” He made it sound easy, but I was stunned to think of the effort that went into such a strategy. He told me that there are many times in the world when luck favors those who are more prepared than those who are lucky. He also explained how the luck I was proud of, when combined with hard work, can create a tremendous synergy. I was deeply impressed, and I was able to abandon the laziness that I had been relying on luck and become a person who can prepare for the future like my father.
Academic life
With my father’s teaching, I was able to change from a lazy child who believed in his innate intelligence and luck to a hardworking child who knows how to improve himself. My father’s words resonated with me because he said that the luck I thought I was born with, when combined with the skills I had prepared in advance, would make for a smooth sailing, like a sturdy ship with a gentle breeze. So I became a person who knew how to make my ship stronger, to wait for that gentle breeze that would blow someday, and I tried to find a career path that would prepare me for the future early on. It was also during this time that I gained knowledge about stocks and stock trading.
Instead of gambling, where luck plays a much larger role than hard work in building myself, I sought the right soil for hard work and luck to come together, and I was convinced that stock trading was a perfect match for my personality. Ever since I made the decision to launch my boat into the choppy waters of the stock market, I’ve been on a straight path to where I am today.
About Me
I’m the type of person who always strives to be prepared and to be well prepared. Even if I never have to use those efforts, I believe that it will be a practice that will make me grow, and I feel like a hunter setting up a trap to catch my prey, as I imagine the possibilities in my head and weigh my efforts accordingly, feeling proud that I’m perfectly prepared for any eventuality. It’s like a hunter setting a trap to catch his prey, because it allows me to indirectly experience the excitement of catching my prey after considering various criteria such as the position and angle of the hill, the size of the forest, and the current weather.
Whether it’s cause and effect or luck, the bigger the prey, the more traces it leaves behind, and when I carefully consider those traces and set the right traps and devices for the right situation, I feel the same excitement of capturing fate. It’s an excitement you don’t get in a typical office job, and it’s something that has kept me enamored with the world of securities investing since childhood.
Life Creed
You must be able to enjoy the wait. Even with the best traps laid out, if the hunter waiting for his prey is impatient or doesn’t get the timing right, all his work will be in vain. In other words, don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by thinking you’ve got everything in place, but rather have the patience to stay on your toes and keep your finger on the pulse of the situation until the very end. So, in order to see a job through to the end, you need to not only be able to handle the wait, but also have the personality to “enjoy” it.
You need to be able to enjoy the tension of being in that silent moment when everything is about to explode at once – the hard work you’ve put in, the luck you’ve had, the foreshadowing you’ve had – and if you don’t learn how to relax yourself, you’ll find that despite all your hard work, you’ll end up screwing up at the end. You also need to have enough mind control to not let yourself get stuck at the last minute.
Career Highlights
Since I started working as an intern at an investment firm, I spared no effort to master the basics of the business and its applications in an apprenticeship role. My efforts were positively evaluated and I was converted to a full-time employee, and since then, I have gradually expanded into areas such as funds and investment work, and have been able to fully mature my work skills and experience over the years.
Motivation for applying and post-employment aspirations
Waiting and the precise timing that comes with it are virtues that I have pursued not only in investing and betting, but also in various forms of life. I have been privileged to have had many great opportunities in my life, not just because I wanted a part-time job, or a career, or to learn a certain field, but because I hunted for them, waiting with bated breath for a better opportunity to arrive. With the instinct that hunters recognize like hunters, I smelled a skilled hunter in your company’s many accomplishments and history, and I was eager to learn from them.
When a person has been in a particular job for a long time, it’s easy to treat their work with a relaxed attitude because they’ve already developed an immunity to it. However, I believe that my job is like a cold that attacks the body in different virus forms and patterns over and over again, so I have unconditional faith in my past experience and I think it’s a field where I shouldn’t be relaxed. Therefore, I always try to be sensitive and prepared, never lose my initial enthusiasm when I first stepped into the world of securities investment, and always be willing to absorb experience and learn from it.
