Mark Twain once wrote:
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”
That was in 1887.
Twain had one decisive advantage.
He had never met Roman Chätsy.
Roman is walking down Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. Headphones in. Good mood. A Swiss television presenter sticks a microphone in front of him.
What are you listening to?
A podcast.
About what?
AI. Private credit. Markets.
Everything that makes markets go around, right?
Right.
A wonderful word.
What do you do?
Sales.
What do you sell?
ETFs.
How do you like the job?
Very much.
The market, Roman explains, is an evolving story. There is always something new. You change the pitch. You talk to clients.
And, as he puts it, he is currently a little:
chätsy.
Not chatty.
Chätsy.
This matters.
There are people who stop halfway through a sentence because they cannot find the correct word.
Roman is not one of them.
If the German word does not arrive, an English one will.
If the English word does not arrive, something sufficiently close to English will do.
The sentence must keep moving.
Markets do not wait either.
This may be the first law of modern success:
Never let vocabulary interrupt momentum.
Other people hesitate.
Roman speaks.
Other people formulate a thought.
Roman has already moved on to the next pitch.
Then the presenter asks the question that, in Switzerland, carries roughly the same social elegance as asking someone about a contagious venereal disease:
How much do you earn?
Roman does not hesitate.
Multiple hundred.
And walks away.
One has to admire the phrase.
Not two hundred thousand.
Not three hundred thousand.
Not “I would rather not say.”
Multiple hundred.
It is not a number.
It is a state of mind.
And this is where Mark Twain returns.
Ignorance.
Confidence.
Success.
Multiple hundred.
Case closed.
We could stop here.
We could laugh at Zurich finance bros.
At English that works mainly because it is pronounced with sufficient certainty.
At people who can turn an ordinary sentence into a business concept simply by replacing one German verb with an English noun.
We could say:
The man is in sales.
Of course he talks.
That is what he is paid for.
And apparently not badly.
But then the story becomes a little less funny.
Because Roman did not decide that day to publish his philosophy of life.
He did not write a manifesto.
He did not call a press conference.
He did not spend three weeks preparing for a television interview.
He was walking down a street.
Someone held a microphone in front of him.
He answered.
Perhaps for two minutes.
Then he walked on.
The conversation did not.
Suddenly a man became a character.
The Wolf of Bahnhofstrasse.
The Chätsy Guy.
Multiple Hundred.
People who have never met him now supposedly know who he is.
And perhaps that is the part we underestimate.
Roman comes from a particular world.
Asset management.
Sales.
Bahnhofstrasse.
Pitches.
Clients.
Markets.
English words wandering through German sentences as though they had always lived there.
In that world, his language clearly works.
Perhaps it works extremely well.
Every subculture has its own dialect.
Doctors speak differently from construction workers.
Academics differently from mechanics.
Social workers differently from investment bankers.
Inside the group, nobody hears the strangeness.
The code feels normal.
Then television takes a person out of that habitat and puts him in front of an entire country.
And suddenly everyone hears the code from the outside.
What sounds confident in its natural environment can look grotesque somewhere else.
That is not even especially unusual.
Take almost anyone out of their professional environment and let them speak unfiltered for two minutes.
A consultant.
A social worker.
A psychologist.
A politician.
A startup founder.
A professor.
Then cut out the strangest twelve seconds.
Almost any of us could become famous.
Unfortunately.
Because modern public life has a strange relationship with proportion.
Two minutes of our lives can acquire a longer half-life than ten years of our actual character.
Once, you said something stupid at a party.
Four people heard it.
By Tuesday, three of them had forgotten.
Today, you say something stupid on Bahnhofstrasse.
By Tuesday, 800,000 people have seen it.
And one of them may be sitting across from you in a job interview next week.
That changes things.
Not only for Roman.
For all of us.
We all have different versions of ourselves.
Not because we are fake.
Because human beings live in contexts.
We speak differently to friends than to employers.
To our children differently than to clients.
At work differently than at two in the morning in someone’s kitchen.
Context tells us which parts of ourselves are relevant.
The internet barely cares.
It takes one moment from one context and distributes it to all the others.
And suddenly the statement is no longer:
Roman said “multiple hundred” during a spontaneous street interview.
It becomes:
Roman is Multiple Hundred.
A moment becomes a personality.
A sentence becomes a biography.
A fragment becomes a person.
And now things get uncomfortable.
Because it would be easy to think this could only happen to someone like Roman Chätsy.
The finance guy.
The pitch guy.
Not us.
But that is probably wrong.
Maybe tomorrow a social worker is walking happily through a pedestrian zone.
A microphone appears.
“What do you think about immigration?”
He answers:
“I think it is more complicated than people admit. Some people integrate very well into the labour market. Others face serious difficulties.”
A perfectly reasonable sentence.
Then comes the cut.
SOCIAL WORKER: IMMIGRATION CAUSES SERIOUS DIFFICULTIES
Twelve seconds.
Ten thousand comments.
Three former colleagues forward the clip.
The next employer Googles the name.
And suddenly someone is spending five minutes explaining what he actually meant.
Unfortunately, the clip is twelve seconds long.
The clip wins.
Perhaps that is the real story of Roman.
Not that a man on Bahnhofstrasse said funny things.
But that we live in a time when a casual moment can cross the line between something we said and something we supposedly are.
Roman walked down Bahnhofstrasse in a good mood.
Someone stopped him.
He talked.
He laughed.
He said “chätsy.”
He said “multiple hundred.”
Then he went home.
The conversation did not.
Mark Twain may have lived in a more comfortable age for confident people.
Back then, perhaps success really did require only two things:
Ignorance and confidence.
Today you may need a third.
The extraordinary luck that nobody happens to be filming.