Wiconomics

How many career advises you have received so far in your life? And when was the last time when your uncle bragged about his success and told you to do X or you will end up with a miserable life. We keep receiving such advises from all tom, dick and harry’s of the world. So, how about receiving an advise from a comic writer?

Couple of months back I was browsing through internet and came across this post from Scott Adam’s (creator of Dilbert Comics) Blog. Believe me, this is one the best career advise I have ever received. Here is a snippet:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The second part i.e. “become very good at two or more things” caught my attention and I started thinking about what multiple skills I have and can I create something out of it.

I already have a career in Finance and I believe I am reasonably good at it. Apart from it, I am reasonably good with Technology, particularly web / internet technology. I have designed dynamic websites in the past, all by myself. I have also helped in redesigning my Business School’s website . I don’t know any programming language as such, but I have a decent decent functional understanding of key web technologies. Generally speaking, I understand following elements:

• Wiki
• ASP
• PHP
• SQL
• Ajax
• XML
• Perl
• Phyton
• HTML / CSS
• SEO
• pings
• RSS/syndication
• SSL
• Regex

Initially I thought, what’s so big deal if I understand above. There would be thousands, if not millions, of people out there, who not only understand all of above, but are far better than me. But thats were Scott Adam’s advise came in. How many of those millions also understand followings:

• Spin Off
• LBOs
• Risk Arbitrage
• Reverse Merger
• Clean Price / Dirty Price
• Yield Pick-up
• ABS/MBS/PTC
• Sub Prime
• Carry Trade

and so on.

Simply put, how many people can analyze Risk Arbitrage opportunity in stock market and at the same time hack a PHP code.

I surely wont be the only one, but I guess there would not be too many. So I started thinking about how can I put both of these (and possibly more) skills to use. And thats where an idea was born, which led me to create Wiconomics.