During college, I gradually began to realize that I would be on my own financially very soon. Perhaps it was when I wanted to continue on my college’s equestrian team and my parents refused. Or maybe it was when I wanted to take a year off. That was a “no” too. I remember my father saying, “Every year you wait, college will cost more.” Rather than pursue law school, my original goal, I went to work and took the job that paid the most money: corporate finance and specifically mergers and acquisitions. At the time, working on those deals was intense but fun. I flew to Europe for meetings, ate in very fancy restaurants, and met board members and senior management from a number of large, publicly traded companies. In order to make the numbers “work” on these deals, I would have to merge various departments at both companies and eliminate the duplication by cutting jobs. When the deals were large, I didn’t know the human beings who lost their jobs as a result of the merger. But when the deals got smaller, I knew the people who were losing their jobs. We worked together. They had families and mortgages. We both knew that they would be losing their job. It was at this point that I didn’t feel right about what I was doing.