Therefore, when I received this email from an experiences platform called SideTour (co-founded by our future partner, Vipin) offering me the opportunity to have a meal at a monastery with an ex-investment banker, I was ecstatic. I excitedly took the F train down to the monastery in the East Village of Manhattan, and it was there that I met a monk named Rasanath wearing his white robes. As I ate the delicious vegetarian food, Rasanath told me the fascinating story of his life from banker to monk. What struck me most, however, was not his story, but his ability to reconcile two worlds that I yearned so deeply to reconcile: on the one hand, the material world full of physics and math and economics that made so much sense to me; and on the other hand, the spiritual world which I had only experienced for transient moments during my life but was calling me from deep inside my heart.

I knew I wanted to buy more of whatever it was that Rasanath was selling (just kidding), and so I would go back to the monastery often to ask him all my crazy existential questions. Through these experiences, I soon met Rasanath’s monk partner-in-crime, Hari Prasada, whose insights and kindness kept me coming back for more. A few months later, I enrolled in Rasanath and Hari Prasada’s first ever “Excavating Your Ego” Enneagram workshop, and it was this workshop that fundamentally transformed how I related to myself and others. For the first time, I could see how much of my life was controlled by my Ego’s need for validation and the desire to be seen as successful by others. It was a brutal wake up call, but one that I so badly needed. 

Barely a month after the workshop, just as the insights were settling in, Goldman shipped me (very willingly) off to Hong Kong. I would spend the next three years in Hong Kong and four years in Tokyo, climbing the ranks from Analyst to Managing Director, but always keeping the teachings from that workshop with me. Hari and Rasanath eventually left monastic life to devote themselves full-time to Upbuild in 2013, and my team at Goldman invited them to teach a couple of Enneagram workshops for us in Asia. As I was attending these workshops for the second and third times, it became crystal clear that I was sitting on the wrong side of the table. My life’s calling is to be on the Upbuild side of the table paying forward the insights and inspiration that were so generously given to me. 

A selection of Michael’s articles

• Trading Derivatives and the Shame-Based Fear of Being Ordinary

• Our Unilateral Contracts

• Goldman Sachs Bonus Day and the Entitled Ego