Find Your Passion

It all started with the gift of a stamp collection from my Uncle Horatio when I was eleven.

Brookline, Massachusetts, where I grew up, was a respectable middle class Boston suburb. Boys like me were groomed from an early age for safe, respectable careers in law, medicine, or business by parents who, having survived the Great Depression, craved nothing more than social and economic stability.

I nearly went down that route, following my father, at his insistence, into his small law practice where he spent his days collecting small debts from minor deadbeats. Indeed, I did practice law with him for a short time but I felt like Willy Loman in Death of Salesman; the life was being slowly drained from me.

But always my mind went back to that stamp collection. As a boy I would look at the images on stamps from exotic places all over the world and imagine myself a world traveler living a life rich with adventure. I could think of nothing more exciting or romantic than collecting my steamer trunk, covered with tags of all the places I’d been, at some smoky railway station in Bucharest or Baghdad or Bangkok.

I first tasted life overseas as an exchange student after graduating from high school, living in France for three months. After college I worked for a short while in Belgium and Turkey as a bank intern. In the mid-1960s, looking for more adventure, I went to Vietnam as a young officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development. These experiences made the tedium that much greater when I found myself, in the mid-1970s, working in my father’s law firm.

General George Patton once said that luck is when opportunity and preparation meet. It was an assignment to collect a debt owed to an American company by a Turkish importer that got me out of my Beacon Street office and on a plane for Istanbul. How that trip launched a thirty-year career trading the sovereign debts of the world’s riskiest countries (financially risky and often physically risky, too), is the story I tell in my book Riches Among the Ruins: Adventures in the Dark Corners of the Global Economy. Suffice it to say here that from something I hated – being a collections lawyer – I found something I loved, traveling the world and making a very good living doing it.

“Find your passion.” It’s advice given so often it becomes trite, but it remains sound. However, it can be easier said than done. It gets harder as we get older and our obligations pile up. Taking the risks needed to find your passion gets harder when there are kids to educate and a mortgage to pay.

It takes a real genius to make a fortune doing something he hates. But even an under-achiever like me (I graduated last in my high school class) can make a fortune doing something he loves. At the end of the day, it’s not how much money you made that counts, but how you made your money. And thanks to my Uncle Horatio, I made mine following the dreams of foreign travel inspired by the stamp collection he gave me when I was just a young boy.

Robert P. Smith is the founder and managing director of the Boston-based Turan Corporation, which specializes in trading emerging market sovereign debt and evaluating creditor claims against foreign governments. Smith is the author of Riches Among the Ruins: Adventures in the Dark Corners of the Global Economy.