The 23-year-old who resigned from JPMorgan without a new job: "I chose to walk"

If you're 23 years old, and you got a job with JPMorgan after two internships and an unlikely degree from a hospitality college, would you leave again with nothing else lined up? 

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Seemingly, yes. In a viral post on LinkedIn, Paul Roussel, a former trading services analyst at JPMorgan in Geneva says he chose to walk out. "Life’s too short to ignore what pulls you forward," he declared. "We spend most of our life at work — and at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is waking up excited about what you’re building."

We spoke to Roussel, who is impressively resolute. His parents didn't want him to leave JPMorgan. "Their attitude was that finance is great and that JPMorgan is an amazing company where everyone wants to work," he says. "They told me to stay. But I thought, 'I'm 23 years old and if I don't take a risk now, I won't.'"

Roussel joins a long list of people who've quit finance, although he joins a shorter list of people who've quit finance without anything else arranged. He wasn't a banker working 80-hour weeks at the bank in Geneva, but a trading services analyst, working in the middle office on the execution and settlement of securitized trades. 

Roussel says it's not unusual for JPMorgan to hire from his hospitality college for these roles: "You have a lot of internal stakeholders and you need to be a good communicator. It's a kind of sandwich job between the markets, between what investors want and what the traders can do." 

The job can be stressful, and yet Roussel insists it's not JPMorgan, but him. "JPMorgan is a great company," he says. "People there are very talented and cool. They're stressed, but in a good way that generates productivity. I made very good friends, with people in Geneva and the traders in London."  

It's not unusual for people to want to escape settlements jobs and to become traders. And indeed, Roussel says he went to London to meet the traders and that there seemed a real possibility of moving into a trading job.

But then he had a revelation.

"I started to think about whether this was what I really wanted to do in my life," he says. "Whether it was what I wanted deep in my heart." 

Roussel reached the conclusion that it wasn't. "I think it is just my personality that didn’t match this massive corporate job," he says. " – I like to talk and to have fun and it’s a very serious environment."

His departure has struck a chord. Over a thousand people have liked his post, some praising him for his "powerful decision." Roussel says he was deluged with questions about what he's doing next. He doesn't know. "I'm exploring things," he says. "My focus will be on starting something myself." 

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