I left home for college planning to be a Navy fighter pilot. With a restless nature and having grown up in a place with fewer people than cows, I craved excitement and adventure. And like my dad, a New York City detective, I was sure I’d never be happy working indoors, and certainly not at a desk.

Now I spend almost all my working hours at a desk. Ditto on Wall Street, where I stared at computer screens on trading floors for fifteen years, and before that pursuing a PhD in physics — a time now lodged in memory as one six-year-long stint of pulling my hair out at a desk.

I never became the swashbuckling hero that I thought my dad was and that I wanted to be. At some point along the way, I realized that the adventures that excited me most were those in the realm of ideas: navigating new mental territory, tackling tough questions and trying to solve tricky problems.

That discovery led me to graduate school to study physics, where I dreamed of solving at least one of the great problems of the time (which, by the way, more than thirty years later, are still the great problems of our time!) Needless to say, in addition to my doctoral degree, I got a big lesson in humility.

I went to Wall Street feeling like I’d failed in my grand quest but also needing to pay off my student loans. I told myself that finance could be an adventure too, even if I wasn’t so excited by the subject, largely because of how little I knew. Before I started preparing for interviews, “Wall Street” conjured just three things in my mind: stockbrokers jumping from windows in 1929, a movie with Michael Douglas and a newspaper that I’d never read.

I didn’t expect to stay long. But fifteen years later there I still was, having learned a lot along the way, including that I could get interested in and excited about practically anything, if I dug into it deeply enough.

On Wall Street, I don’t advise letting others know that you’re more motivated by learning than by money. But now that I’m writing, I can admit that learning is what it’s all about for me. I am a perpetual student who, despite all the times I’ve been humbled along the way, is still essentially on the same quest that sent me to graduate school all those years ago: to understand the world and our place in it, as best as I can.

If you are a fellow traveler, or if you are doing something – or know someone who is doing something – that you think I might want to know about and/or write about, please feel free to drop me a line.