[johnnyBuz]

What do you ESTP's think about your job/career? Do you see it as a means of making money? Do you enjoy it? What would you rather be doing?

I just graduated college with a degree in Finance. So I'm most likely gonna end up with a finance/trading job making good money but most likely bored with the work I'm doing.



I got a degree in Finance cuz I'm good at it and I know it would open up a wide and profitable career but the problem is ... I feel like I have too much personality/energy to be rotting away in a cubicle for the next 40 years!

My ultimate goal is to own my own business of some kind, maybe a club or something, but I'm really wrestling with this 'next stage of life' thing.

I had two full-time internships but I kind of enjoyed them because I was making a ton of money (for me, at the time) and i knew it was only temporary (for the summer).

But the thought of a never-ending job like I'm about to have is kind of freaking me out.

Ideally I would like to be some Adventure Adrenaline Junkie tour guide or something but I also want to make a lot of money and be able to do the things I wanna do (which I need $$$$ for). I guess we ESTPs are greedy bastards.

Anyway, what about youz?

[njchick]

Congrats on your degree! That's awesome. Well, the rest of you are much younger than I.
I wish I knew I was an ESTP when I young, it certainly helps to start off recognizing what is going to fit as far as career, etc. I would have loved to understand back then why I thought like most guys, why I wasn't like most girls.
Here's what I found for myself.
I am extremely motivated by money, especially task oriented pay such as commission, investments, profit,real estate flipping, etc. I have never worked a salary job. I like getting paid for"the job" as opposed to the hours (does this make sense?).
For some reason there is a sense of accomplishment with this sort of payout. I was a professional singer, do some shows=get a check for it. Now I am a real estate broker, market and sell=check shows up. Somehow a job where I punch in and out, have to be there when the boss says so, would kill me. I like going to appointments and meetings with people I interact with, different from going to a day to day job on hours (repeating the same thing). I worked for another agency first, obviously, before I was my own broker. I was with 2 companies that I hated, found one with an ESTP broker ( didn't know it at the time, hind sight) and flourished. He was so good for me, he spoke my language. Till this day we are good friends.
So anyhow, I actually enjoy it. I own my own real estate company so I don't mind going. My office is a casual, fun atmosphere and it's been a great success. I am horrible with process so I have my assistants take care of it.
Finance seems like a great career for an ESTP. I said it before in another thread. We are natural entrpreneurs. I always knew this, even before I knew I was ESTP.
You do have too much energy to rot away in a cubicle. My suggestions is find a company who lets you use your talents, your creativity and people skills with pleny of freedom.

[dagnytaggart]

blech...I hear you about the rotting in a cubicle for 40 years.

But I hastily decided to double-major in Accounting & Econ, so I basically built my own cage. LOL very smart of me.

Doesn't mean I need to use it though. I'm already working a full-time job, so I plan to finish school (I'm a senior in uni). Then, I'll get a higher-paying job once I have my degree, work like a dog, live like a miser until I get substantial savings. Then, I'll get a CELTA certification so I can teach abroad.

I'll teach anywhere I want, like Vietnam, Guatemala, Mali, etc. Then I during my off-hours, I'll hone a certain skill of mine that's fun (surfing, skydiving, kayaking, etc) and see about teaching it for a living. For the usual outrageous rate. Meaning, less hours worked, and the hours worked will be fun.

And at that point, the Accounting/Economics will merely be a dusty back-up I hopefully will never need to use.

Maybe you could try that.

[RobinsonCrusoe]

So my younger sister is an ESTP and has been telling us all her life that she will become a famous movie/tv show/model star although she's done nothing to get there. to all of our surprise, she skipped almost a week of school in her freshman year of college to go to a talent audition where they were looking for models and actors/actresses!

she, uh, didn't make it. standing in at a terrifyingly dizzy height of 5'4, the agents told her no-go. her response when she came home? "i'm 1000X prettier than all the girls there anyway!"

so now she's actually studying to become a doctor! i read over the estp profile...and can't say if medical careers and ESTPs go well together...

[elvis2010]

Robinson, your sister has feeler written all over here. We ESTPs are far too grounded to expect anything out of the lark you sister went on. We might do it for fun and adventure but there is no way we would expect anything. ESTPs are more into money, and ESFPs are more into fame, and your sister, based on your very brief description, is a screaming ESFP.

NJChick, I am 45 so does that make you feel better? You are still young in my eyes. Still, I am not too old to learn, and I have already learned a lot about myself from you and the others here. In my civilian life, I do not come across ESTPs too often.

Johnny, God do you remind me of myself. When I was 21 in 1986, I looked hard at all the professions, and people I respected told me to look at money before choosing a career. Everybody who ignored the financial aspect of their career regretted dong so. The three top paying professions at the time were business, law, and medicine. The mistake I made at the time was not realizing that things were going to change.

Bill Gross, the PIMCO bond king, wrote that "I remember as a child my parents telling me, perhaps resentfully, that only a doctor, airline pilot, or a car dealer could afford to join a country club. My how things have changed. Now, as I write this overlooking the 16th hole on the Vintage Club near Palm Springs, the only golfers who shank seven irons into the lake are real estate developers, investment bankers, or heads of investment management companies."

"Granted, we had Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and other true capitalistic dynamos who benefitted society immeasurably. But growing percentages of fortunes were being made by those who could borrow or aggregate other people’s money. Because our economy was still in a relatively early stage of leveraging, those who borrowed money and used it to invest in higher-risk yet higher-return financial or real assets didn’t require a lot of skill, they just needed to be able to convince a bank or an insurance company to lend them some money. After that, the secular wave of leverage would be enough to multiply their meager equity many times over and carry them to a beach where a fortune awaited them much like a pirate’s buried treasure."

So the reason I am showing you this is that I want you not to make the same mistake that I did. Finance has been a great job for the last twenty years and will probably be one for the next few here as well, but after that... Given life's cyclical nature, the skilled professions (doctor, airline pilot, car salesman) are probably going to return to the country club and those whose life was based on leverage will be out of luck again. So I would advise younger people today to forgo the financial fields and look to the skilled ones.

On top of that, the U.S. is getting old, and that means the market is not going to have the huge runs it did based on growth we saw from 1983 to 2000. The biggest part of the U.S. population are the baby boomers, aged 47 to 64, and they have always driven the economy. Growth is going to be slowed as they are going to stop spending on most items save for health care, and health care is where I would advise young people to look for employment today.

The only long term indicators I have found to be worth a damn are based on demographics, and the best author has been Harry Dent. You may want to see what he is writing about the future.

I'd also read the first three books of Robert Kiyosaki in the Rich Dad Poor Dad series. It turned out that the works were mostly fiction, but the second book in particular turned out to be very instructive.

The truth is that when you have a job the goal of any employer is to pay you as little as possible to get you to do the work required. It is extremely rare for the non entrepreneur to break through and become wealthy before age 40 but even the entrepreneur is not the ultimate goal in achieving wealth. That is the realm of the investor. Ultimately, wealth is going to be determined by the return on your investment much more so than income. Go to fidelity.com and play around with the retirement calculators and see what I mean.

But given the market is going to move down to sideways for years, it is going to be a zero sum game, and that means the financial fields are going to be decimated. My father, a surgeon, told me that there was no way what he was doing back in 1986 was worth the $2000 an hour he was being paid. The same is true of what the finance guys are making today. They are way overpaid, and their wages are going to be cut and hard. A surgeon today makes half of what my dad did back in 1986.

Does that mean that a life in finance is dead everywhere? Not at all. From 2004 to 2007, I was sure that South America was the place to invest in the world, and it was. Their populations are much younger than ours, and the growth that comes with leverage is still going to be able to be obtained there. Finance is still in its infancy there, and they are desperate for people with your skills.

And the ESTPs entrepreneurial skills are badly needed there too. I talked to a guy, who was probably in his late 20s, responsible for bringing the acai fruit to the U.S., and his company now has sales of $30 million. He fell in love with this fruit and wanted to bring it here.

In my case, I toured Paraguay and saw my favorite fruit, the Atauflao mango (AKA champagne mango) by the thousands wasting on the ground. These fruits sell for a buck apiece in U.S. grocery stores, and I couldn't believe so much fruit/money was just sitting there on the ground. It drove me nuts.

The bottom line is that you are not going to be sitting in a cubicle doing finance for 40 years. You wouldn't be allowed to even if you wanted to. My guess is that you will be given the chance to jump into an area that you had never dreamed of.

But keep South America in mind. It is ESTP paradise. The food is fresh, cheap, and great. The clubs don't get going until midnight, and the women look great and move like you have never seen before. Most Americans think South America is like Mexico, but the truth is Buenos Aires is more white than Des Moines.

A friend of mine told me if you want a woman in Argentina, you buy her dinner. In Paraguay, you buy her lunch. Whom you marry may even be more important than the career you choose. If you are looking for adventure, you will find it in South America in spades.

[johnnyBuz]

Elvis I will comment on your post more in depth later but I just wanted to quickly comment on the South American angle you mentioned.

One of my good friends from college moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina and is working for a boutique finance company. She also said I would have no trouble finding a job there (although I don't speak Spanish ... yet).

She loves BA says it's got all the qualities of Europe for a fraction of the cost. I may have to rethink the expat route.

[Zinette]

I was always wondering what the other Doers are doing :)

I started my first business when I was... eight :D When I was on the summer brake I went to my Grandparents. They live by the forrest near the border (lower silesian wilderness) and I figured out that I can make some nice money by picking up berries and selling them to the tourists. This was a brilliant idea, because during those four days I've earned enough to buy myself a genuine Barbie dollhouse! The fifth day my Grandma cought me red-handed and she forbade me to sell berries because the police could arrest her for the child abuse ;)

So I waited till I was 15 and because I am 6 feet tall, skinny and blonde I decided to try if I could make it as a model. I went to the casting for a soap commertial but it turned out that they were looking for shorter girls with bigger breasts but ask me to come back some other day because I walk well and I would make a good runaway. So I started my career as a model but I found soon that although I can make nice money this way I lack something the other (uglier :D) girls have. I was not an exhibitionist.
It may sound strange, but this is how I see it. It's not that I had problems with walking around half naked in front of the public, noooo... The other thing. I always felt weird during the castings - the other girls were like almost throwing themselfs at the casting people whlile I was nothing but the usual me. I didn't care that much to lick somebody's buttocks just to get some stupid job while the others were doing everything to be picked. So I didn't make a good runaway afterall, but I made a great make-up model. Turned out that I just have "the face" for it :) I quit when I got married (22) - since I've started a family and I was still at the university I had no time for modeling.

When deciding on what I am going to study I was kinda split in three :) My first choice was the art school, second medicine and the third was human sciences.

From the early childhood I wanted to be an artist - I mean I just love to draw, to paint and to sculpture. I make jewelery and I sew or knit my own clothing. I love to make pretty things with my hands. So I went first to the art high school and then to the art college. But I didn't make it to the academy. I had chosen to study industrial design, but I scored low on physics so I was not admitted.

My second option was medicine - but I didn't want to be a doctor, I wanted to be a surgeon. I may sound weird but I kinda know that my patients would not like me if I would be their doctor, not because I lack compassion in general - I lack it when it comes to strangers and I suck in expressing it (althought I feel it) to my own friends. So I figured out that surgery would be a good option, I could use my excellend eye-hand coordination fixing people and make good money out of it. I may sound unhuman but for me human body is just a piece of matter, nothing holy or special. The job is not to heal people and make them feel better but to make a mechanism work either by taking off the part of it or by connecting broken parts. I may sound weird, but this is the way I see things. But again... my nemesis, physics. I scored 100 % on biology and chemistry but failed on physics.

The third was human sciences. My first choice was philosophy but I also considered psychology - I am good at reading people and I would make an excellent psychoanalyst (personal attachment to the clients is not required and even unwanted). But ... surprise surprise! I failed physics, lol :D

So I studied philosophy. Funny thing, because this is where I "got typed" as a ESTP for the first time, to the surprise of the lady who was doing the test. At the first year we had "general psychology" course. Once the we finished the class earlier so our professor ask us if we would like to take a test. So we did. Turned out that most of the students in my class were architects (I remember because of laugter - philosophy has little to do with the architecture but when the proffesor read the the description of the type people started to nod), there was one healer (laugher again), some scientists (one was my buddy, sitting next to me so I remember) few were I don't remember what (it was almost ten years ago ;)) and there comes I. The lady asked if somebody got ESTP so I rose my hand and she was like - "Ohh, and what are you doing here?" I was like one big question mark - she read the description and concluded it with "Ernest Heminguay was of this type" - I asked "But he killed himself, right?" - she noded but she told me - "oh, don't worry, you know how to take care of yourself" and she ask if there was an ESTJ among us (there was one ;)). I don't know why, but I was left with an impression that I was ... kinda marked or doomed :D

Studying philosophy doesn't give you a "proffesion" - if you finish veterinary you are veterinarian. If you finish dentistry you are a dentist. But if you finish philosophy? Pffff :D I don't regret studying philosophy, but so far I don't do money being just a philosopher, although during my studies I was paid nice money for having excellent grades.

Now I make stained glass and I love my job, although I am thinking about outsourcing the production and to concentrate on designing rather than manufacturing. I feel kinda bound to the place where my workshop is and it started to annoy me recently. I am 29 but still to young to settle down.
[My crappy intuition is screaming now that I should study physics]

[RobinsonCrusoe]

Robinson, your sister has feeler written all over here. We ESTPs are far too grounded to expect anything out of the lark you sister went on. We might do it for fun and adventure but there is no way we would expect anything. ESTPs are more into money, and ESFPs are more into fame, and your sister, based on your very brief description, is a screaming ESFP.

wow. you seem very sure of yourself.

too bad you're wrong. she's a T.

[Adrenaline]

I just graduated high school. I'm joining the Marine Band and majoring as an EMT.

[Adrenaline]

I just graduated high school. I'm joining the Marine Band and majoring as an EMT. I won't be bored and I'm not very concerned about the pay since I know I'll be alright. I could better answer your questions after I become an EMT but I know my future career will be very action-oriented and adventurous and I hope to see it as something I enjoy doing rather than just a means of making money.