Why You Can’t Quit Something You Hate Even When You Know You Should

My first job out of college was for a slimy financial company.

Not the “Occupy Wall Street” kind of financial company you might assume when prefaced with the word slimy, but a true “Wolf of Wall Street” operation.

Except our office was on the second floor of a nondescript building in Bethesda, MD.

We bought lottery annuities.

By the pep talks we got you’d think we were curing cancer.

We were ruining lives.

That’s an overly harsh assessment. We tiptoed the line between possibly helpful and most likely destructive.

I was a Finder.

My job was to find lottery winners. We used large online public data warehouses to track down their contact information (and the information of everyone we could directly connect them with).

There is no data privacy. There hasn’t been for years.

Then our sales team would hunt these people down using every high-pressure sales tactic imaginable.