You have to get up

‘‘Sandy told me you have to resign. So, I said ‘OK’. I called my wife and told her, ‘I have to tell you something, it isn’t a joke.’ I was concerned about my three daughters, who were then 12, 10 and 8. I didn’t want them to hear about it in school, or read it in the papers. I sat them down and said, ‘Girls, I want you to know I resigned...I was fired.’
‘‘The youngest one said, ‘Dad, will we have to sleep on the streets now?’ The middle one asked, ‘Can I still go to college?’ And the eldest said, ‘Can I have your cellphone now, because you won’t be needing it.'

‘‘It was my net worth that was involved there, not my selfworth. I remained the same person that I was the minute before, and I was determined that my values and behaviour wouldn’t change. Of course, there were times when I was depressed. I would walk into a room and people would treat me like a leper. But often, while jogging in Central Park, I’d be asked, ‘Are you Jamie Dimon?’ and when I said yes, they’d pat me on my back and say ‘Yeah!’ as if I was Robin Hood.
‘‘Everyone has their ups and downs. Tell me one person you admire, not just in business, but in life, and you’ll find they had their share. Nelson Mandela walked out of prison after 27 years, magnanimous to his captors. You have to get up, brush yourself and move on.’’

‘Will we sleep on the streets now?’

Vikas Singh | Times News Network, June 25, 2009

JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon’s life could be straight out of a Jeffrey Archer novel—he was hired out of Harvard B-school by a billionaire who became like a father to him before they parted ways; he went from being heir-apparent at the world’s largest financial services company to working at a smaller, struggling bank; a few years later, he returned from Chicago to New York in a blaze of glory and now heads America’s largest and most influential bank (with assets of about $2.3 trillion). Today, he is arguably the world’s most powerful banker (at least in the private sector). It’s an empowering tale in an era of job losses.