The Way of the Wall Street Warrior

CHAPTER 3Be the Holy Trinity of Deals: Your All-Important First Email

With your research at your fingertips, it's now time to reach out with that all-important first email. The first thing to realize is that the emails you send are treated like spam. So how do you grab the attention of the interviewer? The same way you started reading about the Financial Crisis of 2008 and ended up scrolling pictures of NBA Players Megan Thee Stallion Has Dated: click-bait!

Give prospective employers a reason to click through and learn more about you by creating that perfect email that will get their attention. Be different, but be succinct. Err on the side of brevity. People are busy and their return on time invested (ROTI) is critical, so value your email recipient's time as if it were more important than your own, which it is.

Make Me Give a Damn

The first thing that will catch your reader's attention is a memorable subject line that summarizes the email's key message. This leverages another cognitive bias, attentional bias, the tendency to pay attention to some things while simultaneously ignoring others. It explains a person's focus on only one or two choices, despite there also being several other possible outcomes. It's another one of those brilliant scientific acumens that translates into solid, practical advice, in this case: Nail it in a sentence! This is all the more important in this era when the average Internet user has a shorter attention span than a goldfish.¹

Be the pitch, ...