Aye aye. Doubtless you were thinking that after last week’s absence, you’d be getting Mark again. Nope, this week you’re getting yet another stooge, fresh off the seemingly inexhaustible carousel of Mark’s vassals, AKA the lang cats. I’m just a year in, though, so a mere adolescent in cat terms.

However, I spent the greater part of my adult human life [REDACTED], so I’m also relatively new to financial services. I’d never even worked in an office before the day (at 45) I started as an equity analyst, so joining this world felt somewhat jarring. As some of you will know, investment floors are insular places where it feels like one day there’ll be A Sign, at which point the walls of the office will fall away to reveal that you’re actually inside a giant mothership. It’ll then blast off and carry the sainted investors off to a place of superb isolation, one infinitely more worthy of their singular clairvoyance.

And as I say, I’m even newer to financial services PR (can you tell?). Nevertheless, I’ve learned a couple of things this past year. They might be obliquely related to the above observation, alongside the fact that I haven’t been inside the financial services tent for thirty years – who knows? But they’re definitely pertinent to the fact that I’m the traumatised dad of a teenager.

Yes folks, that’s the analogy I’ll be torturing for you today. Disappointed? Well hard lines. Life isn’t fair. And don’t roll your eyes at me – you treat the Top Class Wednesday Update like a bloody hotel, anyway.

Anyhoo, to mark the week that my hostile, entitled offspring finally got herself a job out there in the world, I present for your review my “PR Guide for Teenagers in 5 Easy Steps”:

• Most folk don’t care what you think yet, about your dearly-held-but-parochial ideas about Life. Who the hell are you? You haven’t earned anything. Your credit rating is zero.
• Relatedly, you lack a crucial perspective: (mostly) everyone else only wants to hear about you inasmuch as you relate to them. You are but an extra in the movie of their lives.
• Again relatedly, you’re also trapped in your own bubble – in truth, most of what seems vastly, galactically important to you is all but irrelevant to the world at large.

However, lest I appear too frothingly irascible, there’s also some good news to sweeten the pill a bit:

• If you surround yourself and listen to smart folk who – critically – have a sincere interest in your success (oh, I dunno, LIKE YOUR DAD), they can help you calibrate your relationship to the world in such a way that you might gradually start to win friends and influence people.
• Do that, and you’ll soon learn this wonderful fact: if you spend less time obsessing over what *you* think is terribly significant (example: no, the way I hold my fork is not rude), and instead spend more time talking to *other* folk about what they like and find important, well, then you might also find that those other folk will start soliciting your opinion on things entirely of their own volition. And then, my treasured progeny, doors will really start to open.

And don’t get me wrong, my dearest child, my heart – I know that you care deeply about all the little things, all your details, and that’s a good thing. And because I’m on your side, so do I. And I’m certainly humble enough to know that you know yourself much better than I do. I’m just trying to help you present your best self to the world here.

So yeah, allegedly this is also somehow related to financial services and PR, and more tactless and inelegant types might be tempted to crudely spell it out for you. However, this professional sugar-coater learned long ago that discretion is the better part of valour. Plus, you’re not children anymore, you can do your own math.

And finally, for pity’s sake, *it’s an analogy* – don’t go off in the huff, slamming doors and throwing your toys out of the pram. Plus, I have links to write. God knows if I waited for you to do them, I’d be here till Christmas. (Love you, though.)

Your musical choice, fully in keeping with today’s theme – off the album “Sounds for the Young” – and today’s audience of financial bods, here’s Kevin Shoemaker’s “Capital”; the kind of thing I’m really too middle-aged and mean-spirited to like, but frequently harrumph along to anyway.