The Vital Alliance

With a third of the aging financial advisor population set to retire within the decade, brokerage firms are scrambling to recruit and train younger advisors, as Ellen Uzelac’ s cover story (“Building Millennial Advisor Talent”) details.

The emphasis is on harnessing the younger generation’s social and collaborative relationship style as a springboard for their training and development as productive advisors.

And that makes all the sense in the world. Just as children possess a unique sense of wonder and imagination, so too as they mature they come into the true inheritance of young adulthood—the wealth of energy and ambition.

If their formative years were well spent, then the knowledge gained together with imagination maintained can lead to genuine novelty in the way they conduct their business.

It is not for nothing that so much of our technological and cultural innovation typically comes from young transformers like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Similarly, it is the younger cohort of advisors who will intuitively develop ways of gathering assets, providing service and managing portfolios through LinkedIn, Twitter and as yet undiscovered methods.

But while the rate of innovation and level of energy may (but not always!) slow down with age, something essential and valuable comes to take their place, which a quote apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain captures well:

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

Those numbers can be switched to higher and higher ages and ring even truer. What they describe is usually, perhaps overly conveniently, referred to as “experience.” But what is really meant is Difficulty, Disappointment and Failure.