Is Day Trading a Good Parnossa for Post-Kollel?
A few days ago I got an email asking if day trading is a good opportunity to go into for those looking to leave kollel. Obviously, the draw towards day trading is that the barrier to entry is low – anyone with a few bucks and a computer can get in. Stories abound about those who have made fortunes from trading, so it seems like an interesting path to pursue.
I am no career expert, but I have seen many businesses and business people try their hands at various different ventures, so I will take the liberty of expressing my opinion. Day trading, as far as I can tell, is a form of legalized gambling. There is a very big difference between investing in the stock market for long term returns, and doing ultra-short term trading, which is highly risky. Investors have a time frame of 5, 10, 20 years or more, for which the historical evidence of positive returns prove that the rewards far outweigh the risk. However, when it comes to day trading there is no historical data. Day traders have to open and close positions in a matter of minutes, often using borrowed money at a ratio of 3:1. In the span of a few minutes, tens of thousands of dollars can be gained or lost. (A couple of years back, a former day trader told me how while he is trading he doesn’t get up from his seat even to go to the bathroom!) It is not for the faint of heart, and contrary to what many believe, there are no “secrets” on how to beat the system.
[Try to find someone who has been successfully day trading for 10 years or longer. You won't be able to find any because they don't exist.]
But there is a deeper issue regarding day trading that should turn any respectable frum yid away from getting involved in it.
Chazal give us a list of those who are passul l’eidus, and in the list are dice players, a.k.a. gamblers. The reason why is because they are not involved in a beneficial work for settling the earth, i.e. their occupation does not immediately provide a benefit to the world.
This tells us something about going to work. When one takes upon the responsibility of earning a living, it should not be done just for the sake of making money – even if the goal is to support one’s family with that money. If that was the case, there would be nothing unacceptable about gambling (as long as you can handle the risk). But working is not just about yourself, it is so that you benefit others with your work by creating products or services that help settle the world. Groceries, insurance, building contractors, tax preparers, attorneys, and even stock brokers are all about helping others – if that wasn’t their primary goal they would not have a business. But a day trader is all about himself. No one benefits from his occupation, and so he is missing out the vital aspect of doing good onto others that is present with every other occupation. So much so, that Chazal felt that such a person cannot be trusted to testify honestly.
If you did spend years learning in kollel, does it make any sense to transition into an occupation that Chazal did not approve of? From the thousands of opportunities that are out there, please realize not all that glitters is gold. What seems easy to get into will cause you lots of heartache, and is not something that makes you a good person in the process. Choose an occupation that helps others. There really isn’t any other choice.
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Path to the Exit – Part 5
Once one has decided on a career path, how do you go about finding an actual opportunity?
Believe it or not, this is actually the easy part. The difficult part is figuring out what to do, the easy part is finding where to do it.
Opportunities exist everywhere in the frum market, you just need to know where to look. Its not as easy as opening a Yated and looking through the help wanted ads, those jobs are not the ones we are talking about. But once you begin to network, you will find plenty of leads – provided that you have already firmly decided on a career path.
Keep the following in mind when looking for a position:
- The first position will not be your dream job – its just a place to get started. It doesn’t need to be perfect, or even pay too much. It just needs to be a start.
- You must bring something to the table when offering your services. If you just show up looking for any job out there, don’t expect to be respected. But if you come with some sort of skill that you “specialize” in, that will give you credibility and get you noticed.
- Friends and family are a good place to get referrals from, but not to work for. They can be of great help in talking to other people they know to help you find something. But don’t try the easy way out of getting a job with them. Even if you do bring valuable skills to their business, they will always consider your job as a chessed on their part, and will not value your work accordingly. It’s better to sweat it out in the beginning by finding a job where you “earn” your way in the door, rather than being “given” a job as a favor that will always be remembered as such.
Our community is very well networked with one another. We have each other looking out for us and providing us with opportunities that are so hard to come by through ordinary means. It really doesn’t take much more than “putting yourself out” by informing friends, family, fellow shul mispalilem, and askanim that you are looking for a job. You may be surprised, but it is amazing how the community looks out to help each other, especially with regards to parnossa. But you have to put yourself out there in order to find something. Don’t expect opportunity to come knocking by itself.
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So Many Candidates but No One to Choose
I just heard about a well established yeshiva looking for a high school rebbe. The current rebbe is set to leave next year after many years of teaching, and there is a lot of pressure to find a suitable replacement in time to calm the parents and the talmidim who are choosing mesivtas for the coming year. You can imagine that with 6,000 yungerleit in Lakewood looking for shtelers, this would be the opportunity of the century, and the yeshiva would have a long line of suitable candidates to choose from.
But sadly, that is not the case. The yeshiva has already been struggling for over a month with no obvious choice in sight. Even though there are thousands of people who want the position, the yeshiva doesn’t want them. The opposite is true as well. There are qualified candidates whom the yeshiva wants for them to take the job, but they don’t want the yeshiva. This leads to the obvious question – with so many talmidei chachamim waiting for positions, why is it so difficult to find someone? Surely from the thousands of kollel yungerleit it should be no big deal to come up with the right person?
The answer is that the person being sought needs to have qualifications that none of those vying for the job actually have. If all the yeshiva needed was someone capable of saying a high school level shiur, that would be no big deal to find. But the yeshiva is looking for something else – a successful rebbe. They are looking for someoen to fill in the void left by the previous rebbe who was considered a success. To find a maggid shiur, that is easy. To find a successful maggid shiur, that is impossible. So impossible, that the yeshiva would be willing to pay an outrageous salary to the “right” person. (And this is while others are willing to work for free just to get a shteler.)
Keep this in mind when looking for a shteler. Even the few positions a year that do open up, are not looking for someone who knows how to say a shiur. Those people are in great supply. The challenge is to become someone who will be a “guaranteed” success. That is a much more difficult accomplishment to achieve. And it is those people who are getting wooed with all the good offers that are out there.
TweetLife Lessons from Chanuka
A lesson we can all take away from the story of Chanuka: How a few Macabbim were able to rout the entire Greek army was certainly a miracle. But hidden beneath all the glory is a troubling mystery – What were they thinking? How could Mattisyahu and his sons even imagine they would possibly succeed? If they would’ve been crushed, which is what should have happened, everyone would have described their deaths not as martyrs but rather as suicidal.
I heard the answer to this from Rav Mattisyahu Salomon. He said that Jews are not bound by typical odds. Sheer numbers are not the deciding factor when it comes to an outcome involving yidden. Our fate is handled with special hashgacha from Above, where odds and favorites don’t have the same power they do for the rest of the world. The knowledge that they were fighting for the preservation of Torah and the kedusha of Am Yisroel gave them the courage to attack the Greeks even against the overwhelming odds, because odds aren’t a factor in battles such as these.
When considering the odds of succeeding in establishing a source of parnossah for your family, you may be tempted to say the odds are stacked against you. Thoughts of, “How can I, an illeterate uneducated yeshiva guy, possibly have success in business when so many others that are “better” than me have failed?” But when odds don’t play a role, these thoughts become a non-issue. The “fight” is for a noble cause, so chances and odds of success are not what determines the outcome. But your only chance of succeeding is if you try. Mattisyahu and his sons would not have been successful had they not started fighting. And once they did, they were successful beyond their wildest imagination.
That can happen with you too – if you are willing to give it a chance. Not if you sit back and do nothing.
TweetPath to the Exit – Part 4
Once you have established what professions you will not be entering, its time to start investigating what kinds of opportunities are available to you as a kollel graduate. I know there will be many readers who think the situation is helpless, and they have already spoken out in the comments, but the truth is very different from the bleak picture they like to paint.
The truth is there is lots of opportunity for a yeshiva/kollel graduate in the marketplace, just the choices don’t seem obvious at first.
There are three primary kinds of jobs that are very suited for someone coming out of kollel, all of which have income potential to adequately support a frum family on:
- Managerial: Operating a business, or even just a subsection of one, requires lots of skills, most of which are not acquired through any college degree or course. It requires trust, leadership, shrewdness, decision making, and determination. Yeshiva guys are just as qualified, or even more qualified for this kind of job than anyone else out there. Especially if the business is frum owned.
- Sales: Often an overlooked area of opportunity, sales offers the chance for an unlimited earning potential. Sales positions exist if every kind of market, from the hi-tech corportation to the tiny yeshiva looking for donations.Yeshiva guys can make great salesmen. (By the Lakewood dinner in Brooklyn last night, I was approached by Binyomin Spear who works for BMG, who I don’t even know. He recognized me in the dark, came over to me and greeted me by my first name with a very warm shalom aleichem. How could I not give a good donation after such a warm reception? Those kinds of skills make a great salesman for any kind of product or service.)
- Creative: If you can come up with a chiddush in learning, why can’t you use those same skills to create a new product or service for the marketplace? I personally know a few yeshiva guys who went out to create their own software products and have built thriving businesses from what they have developed. I agree not everyone has the ability to create software programs, but applying a chiddush to the marketplace can on take many forms. It can be a new method of writing software, a creative way to market something, or an insightful way to qualify for government research grants. I know of a fellow who came up with a new approach to streamline the process of importing goods from overseas that saves manufacturers millions of dollars a year.
Before deciding which type of career you should pursue, first determine what is the best fit for your personality. Are you someone who likes to take risks, or are you more cautious? Do you prefer to take charge, or would you rather be an obedient follower? Are you a friendly & sociable kind of person, or are you more quiet and reserved? These self-assessments make it easier to figure out which career path to follow.
After you figure out what kind of career you will fit into, you need to get started with actually finding an opportunity. That comes next in part 5.
TweetIn the New Economy, A Ben Torah has Better Training
For years we have been led to believe that those who push through the difficult courses in college are the ones to “make it big”. But in the new economy things are very different. Doctors face huge uncertainty with all that is going on with healthcare, and lawyers are finding it very difficult to get good jobs.
Today, the opportunity lies in those who can offer something new. Anything that is different, creative, thought-provoking, or engaging, is an area of big growth.
The big companies of yesterday are no longer where the action is. Coca Cola, Exxon, Microsoft, Verizon, Honeywell – you won’t find anyone talking about them. Instead, everyone’s attention is being captivated by exciting companies such as Google, Amazon, Groupon, Facebook, and just in case you thought everything exciting had to do with the internet – Starbucks.
Google doesn’t sell any products at all. Starbucks sells coffee, which has been around for centuries. Amazon sells just about everything, but so does Wal-Mart. So what is it about these companies that makes them so successful today? It is the chiddush that they each bring to their market. Not the actual goods themselves, because the goods are freely available elsewhere. No, it is the creativity and engaging way in which they present their offerings which makes them so valuable.
The big difference between the way subjects are studied in college and how Torah is learned in Yeshiva is that a yeshiva learning encourages critical thinking. You aren’t taught to accept things as they are, instead you question and provoke, and don’t accept the status quo. When all other solutions fail, you need to say a chiddush to resolve everything. This is creativity at its highest form.
Don’t accept the status quo for anything in life. Take your skills of saying chiddushim and find a creative way to apply it in the marketplace. There are so many areas of opportunity that lie in waiting, which you are singularly qualified to uncover.
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Path to the Exit – Part 3
What to do when you will leave kollel? Discover what you will do by eliminating what you will not be doing.
This question needs to be answered, of course. It sounds like a weighty problem, but it can be made easier by process of elimination. First exclude categories of career paths that you will not be embarking on – which will help focus on the areas that hold promise.
- Chinuch – Face it, you will not be getting the ‘sheteleh’ of your dreams. Not you, and not any of your friends. (Unless you are the son/son-in-law of the rosh yeshiva.) So that leaves you settling for a “teaching job” that you don’t really want just to be able to say you are in chinuch. Do you really want to live your life this way?
- Doctor – This needs 7-9 years of medical school + residency and costs anywhere between $150,00-200,000 to accomplish, besides living expenses during this time period. If your family wants to foot the bill and you think you have the brainpower, go for it. Otherwise, its a pipe dream. (And please don’t take out that much in student loans!)
- Lawyer – Maybe not 7-9 years, but definitely a long haul. Plus, there are lots of experienced lawyers that are out of a job who will gladly advise you against the law profession as a career path in 2011.
- Low paying careers – Notice, I didn’t say low paying jobs, but low paying careers. Examples of these are (but not limited to) – clerical jobs, city or other low-level government jobs, manual/physical labor, or any career where there is lots of competition and no clear path of advancement opportunity.
Choosing a career path to follow is a tough decision. By breaking it down into manageable pieces, you can make it easier and more likely to actually decide on something.
Next, we’ll start exploring possible career paths for a kollel graduate.
TweetEscaping the Harsh Realities of the Shidduch Crisis
The shidduch crisis and the kollel crisis share many things in common. The shidduch crisis is clearly a result of a numbers problem – the age gap between the boys and girls creates a situation where there are a surplus of girls and a shortage of boys. (This video explains it well.) The kollel crisis is a motivational problem – too many unmotivated people not being responsible for themeselves and their families.
How can a girl who is facing the harsh reality of the numbers make herself sought after by the boys? The only way she can is by being remarkable. A girl can be remarkable in many different ways. She can be remarkably smart, remarkably pretty, remarkably talented, remarkably capable, remarkable wealthy, or even remarkably trendy. But what if a girl doesn’t have any of these remarkable traits? If she isn’t exceptionally smart, pretty, talented, capable, wealthy, or trendy – how does she rise above the crowd?
A girl can become sought after by having a passion. If there is something she cares about so deeply that it defines who she is, that makes her stand out from the other girls out there. For example, a girl who is so into kiruv that she is always talking about it or doing something related to it, will come to be known as the “kiruv girl”. While every other girl is being described as “a very nice girl, frum and ehrlich”, she will be described as “the kiruv girl”. Believe it or not, that will get some boys’ attention. Being passionate about something specific makes you stand out from the crowd and give you a mission that defines your very essence.
Those in kollel who are unsure what to do with their life need to find a calling. Yes, it may be true that an entry level job coming out of kollel pays very little. However, with a clearly defined passion you will almost certainly succeed and go places. Entry level jobs and their miserable salaries are for the “crowd”. But you can do better. Figure out what your calling is, and rise above the crowd.
You don’t need to solve the entire shidduch crisis to get married. You don’t need to solve the entire kollel crisis to become successful. All that needs to be done is to solve the crisis as it relates to you. And that is clearly within your ability to do by defining your passion and making it your very essence.
The books that you need to read to help define the mission are Purple Cow
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Path to the Exit – Part 2
After you’ve really decided that it’s time to leave, now comes the hard part. Telling other people, and asking for their help.
Breaking the news to others seems very hard to do. There is a false feeling of failure when you tell them you are leaving kollel. Really though, the challenge is not over, it is taking a new form.
Here’s how you go about with the announcement. The first person you speak to about your decision is your wife. Get her feedback , hear her out, and geniunely validate her concerns. She may be worried about parnossa, about what her friends and family will think, and about all the hashkafa she heard about kollel during her years in high school and seminary. Listen to her well, and be wise. If you force your decision upon her suddenly you will lose a valuable ally and support system during this transition process. Here is your chance to strengthen your marriage as well as making sure you have a strong partner as you prepare to go on the tough road ahead.
After you have your wife on board, its time to do get da’as torah. As mentioned earlier, most if not all Roshei Yeshiva are very supportive of kollel yungeleit going to work. They know most people cannot spend their life exclusively in the beis medrash, so they will be very encouraging of your decision.
(However, they will not decide this for you – if you are still unsure they will leave you hanging and you will be disappointed. It has to be your decision. If in doubt, go back to step 1.)
After speaking it over with your da’as torah, you will be able to inform friends and family. Their reaction will probably be more positive than you think, since most likely they were worried about you.
Now that you have “come out” with your decision, its not likely you will turn back. Now it’s time to get working on what you are going to do after you leave.
TweetPath to the Exit – Part 1
Transitioning out of kollel into the world can be a very difficult and challenging time for everyone. What is the best way to do so, limiting the pain and anguish that is often felt during this period?
Having done this before and seeing many others through the process, here are the steps to follow that will make it easier:
The first step involves just yourself.
Decide – once and for all – that you are leaving.
Really think hard and long if this is the decision you want to make. Very often, people push off making hard decisions just because they are hard, and they continue to suffer longer because of that. Don’t let that happen to you. Instead, think about the reasons why you want to leave kollel. Is it because your family needs you to earn more money? Does your wife need you to take over the burden of parnossa? Are you parents or in-laws ending their kollel support? Maybe you just are starting to feel unmotivated to continue learning all day and feel that your life will be better elsewhere.
All these are good reasons for you to decide that the time has come. But a decision must be made. And that decision has to be yours alone, without anyone else helping you.
Just to clarify – you don’t need to decide to actually leave at this point, only to decide that you want to leave. The actual decision will come later, and with other people’s input. But you do first need to decide where YOU want to lead your life. And that has to come from you alone.
No one else can tell you what you think. Only you can do that.
After you have decided that you want to leave kollel, then its time to move onto step 2 where we actually begin the process of transitioning out of kollel into whatever it is that you will do with your life.
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