You Have to Give the Miracle Somewhere to Land

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” — Epictetus, Discourses, 3.23

In 2000, after nearly nine years working internationally—first in Paris for Société Générale, then in Tokyo for Société Générale, Bear Stearns, and UBS—I found myself unemployed, the sole provider for my wife and two children, and forced to decide where we should build the next chapter of our lives.

I did not want to move to New York. After years in Paris and Tokyo, I was tired of big-city life and did not see New York as the place to raise my children.

After speaking with my wife, I narrowed the choice to San Francisco and Boston.

San Francisco fit my background in finance, derivatives, technology, programming, and sales, especially at the height of the Internet boom. But it was riskier because it probably required a new career in venture capital or technology.

So I investigated it carefully.

I cold-called firms in San Francisco, including Sequoia and Benchmark, explained my background, and asked whether they would meet with me. Then I flew to California to explore the opportunity for myself.

The people I met understood how my skills might fit the emerging Internet economy and encouraged me to come.

Boston seemed safer: a strong financial community, a more traditional environment, and what appeared to be a better place to raise a family. I assumed I could continue the career I had already established.

Ironically, I investigated San Francisco far more carefully. I was so confident I would find work in Boston that I arranged no professional meetings there in advance.

That confidence was a serious mistake.

San Francisco aligned more naturally with my abilities and the direction of the world. Boston seemed better aligned with the life we wanted for our children.

We chose Boston.

I believed I could succeed in either place. But I understood the irony only later.

I avoided San Francisco partly because it required a new career. Yet Boston made my conventional career unavailable and forced me to reinvent myself anyway.

Sometimes alignment does not disappear because we refuse it. Sometimes life circles back and demands the same transformation through a harder route.

I had savings, but no income. The clock had started. I had about a year to find another job or reinvent my life.

When the Visible Path Ends

Once I arrived in Boston, I began looking for work.

My career had been international and largely on the sell side. Boston was primarily a buy-side city. I had spent much of my career selling and structuring complex financial products, not managing portfolios in the conventional way Boston firms expected.

The experience that had made me valuable elsewhere did not fit Boston’s boxes.

I looked for work.

Nothing happened.

My savings began to disappear.

There is a particular fear in having succeeded before but finding that your success no longer seems transferable. You know what you can do, but the people in front of you do not know what to do with you.

With a wife and two children depending on me, I was forced to look beyond the conventional path.

Around that time, I discovered that a man I had heard about during my years in Paris was now living in Boston. He had built a successful business raising money for hedge funds. Although we had lived in Paris at the same time, we had never met.

I reached out to him.

He agreed to meet, explained how the business worked, and gave me a list of 25 potential investors I could contact.

That was useful, but it was not yet a business.

I had investors to call, but no investment manager to represent.

Then my cousin told me that the instructor in his CFA program was starting a hedge fund.

He offered to introduce us.

The Next Spoke

The fund had only about $5 million under management, but it had an excellent track record and wanted help raising capital.

Before going back to the manager, I decided to understand the fundraising business properly.

I contacted several established hedge-fund fundraisers in New York. I told them I was researching the business and considering entering it, and I asked whether they would meet with me.

I wanted to know how they found investors, approached institutions, and structured their compensation.

They were remarkably open.

Looking back, I think ego played a role. Successful people often assume that what they do cannot be copied, or that the person asking questions could never execute as well as they can. They underestimate others because they overestimate themselves.

The fundraisers explained more than they probably realized. I listened carefully and concluded that the business was not mysterious.

It was institutional sales.

The product was different, but the underlying process was familiar.

I returned to Boston and went back to the hedge-fund manager my cousin had introduced me to—the instructor from his CFA course.

I sold him on my background.

I had spent years selling sophisticated financial products internationally. I understood institutional buyers, complex products, credibility, and the path from an initial conversation to a commitment.

My argument was simple:

A hedge fund was another financial product. I already knew how to sell financial products to institutions.

He believed me.

He also did not want to pay the customary fundraising fee of around 20 percent of the fees generated. Giving me a chance could save him a great deal of money.

He offered me a choice.

I could receive $10,000 a month for six months, perhaps with a bonus if I performed well.

Or I could receive 10 percent of the fees earned on the capital I raised.

Under different circumstances, I would have taken the percentage. Had I done so, I would have made more than $1 million.

But I was running on fumes. I was supporting a wife and two children, and I could not responsibly gamble the household’s survival on a future payout, however attractive it appeared.

So I took the salary.

That was the cost of being responsible.

Faith Does Not Remove the Bills

It is easy to romanticize risk after it succeeds.

Stories about entrepreneurs betting everything on themselves often omit the mortgage, the food, the fear, and the people depending on them.

Faith does not require pretending that practical constraints do not exist. Sometimes the brave decision is simply to survive long enough to create the next opportunity.

I took the $10,000 a month because I needed it.

Then I went to work.

I contacted investors, explained the fund, built relationships, and followed up. I made calls that led nowhere and calls that led to meetings.

Through a combination of luck, hard work, and extraordinary timing, I raised approximately $200 million for the fund in just six months—the exact period they had given me.

A fund that had started with roughly $5 million under management had been transformed.

Yet they did not want to hire me or build a permanent fundraising operation.

They saw themselves as investors, not marketers. They believed performance should speak for itself and treated the $200 million almost as though it had arrived naturally.

Their ego made them underestimate my role. People often resist acknowledging a contribution that challenges the story they tell themselves about why they succeeded. Admitting that a fundraiser had transformed their business did not fit their identity.

So despite my success, they did not offer me a permanent position.

In retrospect, that rejection became another spoke.

Had they hired me, I might have remained an employee. Because they would not, I was forced to create something of my own.

Building Castor Pollux Securities

When the fundraising succeeded, I expected the managers to recognize what I had accomplished financially.

They did not.

They were reluctant even to pay a meaningful bonus. It was insulting, but it taught me something important: never assume that another person will value your contribution merely because its value appears obvious.

After considerable negotiation, I persuaded them to provide $100,000 for me to start my own business.

I used that money to create Castor Pollux Securities LLC, an NASD-registered securities firm.

That changed everything.

I now had a regulated securities company through which I could represent investment managers, build institutional relationships, and participate directly in the value I created.

The managers also made an important introduction.

Over the next several years, through Castor Pollux Securities, I would raise approximately $2 billion and earn more than $10 million.

My cousin’s introduction had led not merely to a temporary assignment, but to an entirely new company and career.

Yet no one person gave me the business.

The fundraiser I had heard about in Paris gave me investor names.

My cousin gave me an introduction.

The New York fundraisers gave me knowledge.

The small fund gave me a product to represent.

The first success gave me credibility.

The managers eventually gave me startup capital and another connection.

Then I had to build the company, win the mandates, develop the relationships, and raise the money.

Each spoke led to the next spoke.

The path existed, but no one person could show me all of it.

The Miracle Is the Chain

Some people would call this networking.

They would not be wrong.

Others would call it luck.

They would not be entirely wrong either.

But neither word fully captures what I experienced.

The individual events were ordinary: a man I had heard about in Paris was living in Boston; my cousin was studying for the CFA; his instructor was starting a hedge fund; successful fundraisers explained their business to me; and a small fund needed precisely my combination of investment knowledge and sales ability.

Together, those events created a result none of us could have planned.

This is how miracles have often appeared in my life—not as supernatural interruptions, but as improbable sequences of ordinary human connection.

The miracle is not always the introduction.

The miracle is the chain.

That pattern repeated later in a way that became even harder for me to dismiss.

My mother knew almost nothing about what I did for a living. She could not have explained hedge-fund strategies or institutional fundraising.

But one day, she met a man at Starbucks who told her he was starting a hedge fund.

She said, in effect, “You should meet my son.”

She introduced us.

I eventually raised approximately $200 million for his fund as well.

My mother became a spoke through which an opportunity reached me. She did not need to understand the path. She only needed to make the introduction.

Faith Requires Works

The Bible says that faith without works is dead.

I would put it this way:

Faith requires works.

I believed I would find a path. But belief alone did not create Castor Pollux Securities.

I had to research where to move, cold-call firms, travel, investigate the business, recognize that my skills were transferable, sell the manager on that idea, accept an imperfect deal, make the calls, negotiate for the $100,000, create the company, and build it.

Faith did not substitute for the work.

Faith made the work possible when I had no guarantee that it would succeed.

Passive manifestation says that you can visualize an outcome and wait for the universe to deliver it.

Pure materialism says that everything can be explained by personal labor, probability, and ability.

I believe both are incomplete.

The universe may contain the person, idea, capital, client, or opportunity you need. But unless you reach outward, there may be no path through which it can reach you.

The email creates a point of contact.

The meeting creates a point of contact.

The conversation creates a point of contact.

The introduction creates a point of contact.

Your work does not command the miracle.

It gives the miracle somewhere to land.

The Road Did Not Look Miraculous

While I was living through it, none of this felt spiritual.

It felt like running out of money, being forced to reinvent myself, accepting a compensation arrangement I did not want because my family needed income, and constructing a business from pieces that did not yet fit together.

Only in retrospect did the pattern become visible.

Losing my job pushed me out of a career path I understood.

Boston’s rejection forced me to search for an unconventional opportunity.

That opportunity required a fundraiser I had only heard about, a cousin, an instructor, strangers in New York, a small hedge fund, $100,000 in startup capital, a securities company, and eventually my mother speaking to someone in a coffee shop.

At the time, I could see only the immediate problem.

Later, I could see the shape of the wheel.

You Do Not Need the Entire Map

The next opportunity rarely looks large enough to become the future you are trying to create.

Twenty-five investor names were not a business.

A $5 million hedge fund was not an empire.

A six-month arrangement was not a career.

A meeting in New York was not a guarantee.

A $100,000 investment was not yet a securities company.

An NASD registration was not yet $2 billion in capital raised.

A conversation in Starbucks was not a fundraising mandate.

Each was only the next spoke.

People often reject small openings because they do not resemble the final result. They want certainty before taking the next step.

But life rarely reveals the whole road.

It gives us the next point of contact.

Our responsibility is to recognize it and act.

I cannot prove that the universe arranged every event in this story. Someone else may reasonably interpret the sequence as probability combined with persistence.

But I know what it taught me.

Faith changes how we move through uncertainty.

Work creates connections.

Connections create possibilities.

Possibilities provide the raw material from which we build.

No one handed me Castor Pollux Securities as a finished company. No one handed me $2 billion in mandates.

The spokes brought the pieces.

I still had to assemble them.

We cannot force the wheel to turn according to our schedule.

But we can place ourselves in motion.

We can act with faith.

We can reach outward.

We can remain attentive to the people who appear.

And we can give the miracle somewhere to land.