Stop Smiling and Nodding: You Can Speak Money

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Here's the moment I became a Rich Bitch—

I was sure I nailed it. When it came time to interview for my first-choice college, I was beyond prepared, like the star student I portrayed myself to be (but I was really kind of a wannabe). I studied up on the history of the school, practiced saying the names of the important alums and remembered the titles of the courses I thought would be impressive to say I wanted to take. I did almost everything to look and sound the part but wear the school colors, and trust me, I thought about it. My test scores weren’t stellar, and I had no family connections to the school, but I wanted to get in so badly.

I was convinced that going there was my ticket to the television news career I had dreamed of. So when the admissions officer asked me what else I wanted to know about the university, I pounced on my time to shine, asking my rehearsed, well-researched, confident-sounding questions. Then she started asking me more about my proclaimed love for journalism and media. She asked me which papers I read, and I said something like, “I love the New York Times, skim USA TODAY for good digests and am a closet politico junkie with the Washington Post.” She said, “Oh, great. And I’m sure you’re like me and can’t get the morning started without the Journal.” I smiled and nodded. I had no idea what the Journal was.

A few years later, I was at that school I so intensely craved to attend: the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. By then, I thought I was done with the “fake it ’til you make it” shtick of doing cursory research and focused on really nailing my work once I was there. In fact, I thought I was the bee’s knees of broadcast journalism when I received a big award while I was a student. It was a big, fancy shindig with bubbly and bow ties— my chance to meet some of the people in TV news whom I looked up to and admired, including the legendary Helen Thomas. Eek, Helen Thomas!! As in, the first woman ever to sit in the front row of the White House pressroom. I wanted to be like her with her badass red suit. She frequently got to ask the President the first question he would take. This was akin to meeting the biggest celebrity you can imagine. She was my idol. I worked up the courage to introduce myself in front of the people she was chatting with. I proudly said my name, shook her hand and told her what an honor it was to meet her. And then the group proceeded to talk about shorting the stock market. I smiled and nodded.

I was embarrassed that I couldn’t join the conversation, because it was a topic that totally stumped me.

It wasn’t until after I graduated from college that I finally snagged my high school crush. He was the chisel-jawed, blue-eyed editor of the school newspaper and the only person I knew who’d scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs. He was the geek-chic guy who quoted Tolstoy and Dave Matthews in the same breath. He was brilliant, and I was absolutely smitten.

We talked about a future together. We talked about the home we would share and the kids we might have. He was the only person with whom I could wax poetic about almost anything (I thought at the time)—politics, music, history, philosophy, you name it. Then he told me his dream of becoming a hedge fund manager. I smiled and nodded. (I thought a hedge fund had something to do with gardening.) You get the point: there was a lot of ignorant smiling and nodding going on in my teens and early twenties.

My younger self thought she knew a lot. But hedge funds, shorting stocks and the Journal were definitely not on the list, and I was too scared of looking dumb to admit it. So instead of asking a question when I didn’t know what someone was talking about, or actually looking it up later, I continued to smile and nod, too nervous to confront the topics that scared me the most. And I pretended all the way until our breakup, when my boyfriend told me that we couldn’t date anymore because I wasn’t smart enough to get along with his finance buddies.

Okay, he dumped me because I was clueless about the subject he loved most. Getting dumped by Mr. Future Hedge Fund Manager was equal parts devastating and motivating: I became determined to be a person who could hang out with those Wall Street guys. It wasn’t so much about the fact that I had been dumped by a boy, but that I had been exposed as not knowing or understanding such a crucial topic. It was like Elle Woods possessed me. I began by reading the Journal every day. At first it looked like complete gibberish. Then it started to look like Chinese, and after a few months it morphed into something quasi-understandable.

I was still speaking only broken Wall Street when I got a great and super intimidating TV job offer to be an on-air business reporter for a national show on the floor of the major stock exchange in Chicago. I was beyond freaked out, but I took the job becauseI knew I could—and would—learn the language. And I did. Fast-forward about five years, and I was named the anchor of the only global show on the most popular business network in the world, CNBC. (And yes, that means that it covered pretty hard-core financial news.) By then, I not only understood the language but also spoke it fluently—to the world. And if I can do it, you can too.

xo,

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