If you’re like me, growing up with limited financial means yet a strong desire to change the world for the better, you crave the high-stress, high-reward environment of jobs on Wall Street or in big law, which give you the feeling that your decisions matter.

However, if you’re like me, you’ve also come to understand that these jobs often result in burnout or the collapse of your personal life — where your work becomes your identity and you never live a truly meaningful life.

The way to solve this problem, as mental health researcher and podcaster John Delony states in his book “Building a Non-Anxious Life,” is to view your life as a glass cup that fills and empties with water. Too little water causes dehydration, and life then becomes unbearable. Too much water causes the cup to overflow, and life once again becomes unbearable. The question to ask yourself before choosing a high-pressure career​ is not whether you can endure it, but whether your cup can sustain it.

Once you view life from this angle, a corporate job can help you learn to be sustainable and avoid burnout, making the long hours worth the payoff needed to change the world for the better.​

If you ask the students who are drawn to these careers, many of their favorite movies are probably “The Wolf of Wall Street” or “Margin Call,” and their favorite TV shows are “Suits” or “Matlock,” as they give you a peek into a world where the stakes are real and the pressure is constant. These movies and TV shows are not a one-to-one copy of what real life looks like working in a big law firm or on Wall Street, but they capture enough real-life events that display the intensity and pressure of these lifestyles.

​Take, for example, a scene from “Margin Call,” where the senior partners of an investment bank are holding an emergency meeting at 4 a.m. to discuss a firm action that needs to be taken immediately. Most people would say that no work-related task is that important, and that the discussion could wait until regular hours.

But being up at 4 a.m. isn’t a problem if you view it through the lens of a glass cup; as long as the problem you solve comes with a high reward at the end, you will be filling your cup, or life, with thrill and excitement.​

Here is where people succumb to burnout. After pulling an all-nighter, instead of doing a task to empty out their glass cup like spending time with a loved one or doing something fun, people immediately add more stress back-to-back, causing their cup to overflow.​

People’s cup sizes vary, and as a result, some people can tolerate more water than others. Some have the mental and emotional capacity to handle 4 a.m. meetings and 100-hour workweeks, while others may only have enough to handle 40 hours.

​But at the end of the day, no matter the size of your glass cup, we must all take the time to empty it out with whatever activity we see fit.

​The best place to figure out your cup size and what empties it is during college. Join clubs, take difficult classes, work a part-time job, send more than 100 emails looking for your dream internship and try finding your one true love on a dating app. Fill your cup with stress, thrill and the sense of impact until you feel it overflowing inside. Then spend time figuring out what tasks help empty that cup. Join the cooking or baking club at university, attend the student film festival on campus, go to a local card show, read a fantasy book or play video games. Try as many tasks as you see fit to lower the water level in your cup. Being in college gives you the freedom to test and understand your limits.

​Working long hours is easy to respect, but sustainability regarding long-term value is harder to practice. Lots of people can push through long hours for a season of life, but fewer learn to manage what fills their cup. Before choosing a high-pressure career like Wall Street or big law, ask yourself not whether you can handle it, but whether your cup is large enough to handle it. Ambition is not about proving how much stress you can hold —- it’s about knowing how to keep your cup from overflowing.

Kevin Charles is a fourth-year finance and accounting management major. He can be reached at [email protected].

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