Story of the day by legendary investor Jim Rogers
June 29, 2013 Leave a comment
As I said, on Wall Street, I worked all the time. I loved it that much. One Independence Day weekend – it was July the third, around seven o’clock – I received a phone call from a friend, Burton MacLean, who had been one of my classmates at Yale. Mackie worked at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co, the oldest private bank in the United States. We were the best of friends, but we had followed different paths in life. Having settled down to raise a family, he and his wife, Charlotte, had four children – unlike me, Mackie had priorities other than work.
“Why don’t you come to the beach with us for the long weekend?” he said.
I said, “Oh, no, I’m working, I have some things to do.”
He said, “Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July, what are you talking about?”
I said, “Well, there are things to do, and they have to be done so we don’t lose money.”
I know he felt bad for me.
I remember, when I left Quantum, one of the first calls was from Mackie.
He said, “I heard that you retired or got fired or something.”
“I retired,” I said. “I don’t ever have to work again for as long as I live, unless I do something wrong.”
Time has a way of outrunning even the closest of friendships – all of a sudden ten years have gone by, then three times ten years – and Mackie and I have lost touch. But I still remember that call. In my mind’s eye, I could see him, looking out the window of his home, at his four children and his car, all of which he was still paying for, and wondering where, and at what cost, he could possibly have found the time to out in the hours that would have enabled him to retire at the age of 37. And I realized that how lucky I was to have found something about which I was so passionate that I was able to pursue it to the exclusion of everything else.
– Jim Rogers in “Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets”
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