Investing

What “Drilling School” Taught Me About Successful Investing

Mariko O. Gordon, CFA
4 min readNov 12, 2021
Photo by WORKSITE Ltd. on Unsplash

My boys, ages sixteen and thirteen at the time, didn’t get me. When I confessed that, as a kid, I asked to go to summer school, they looked at me in horror and disbelief.

How could they be related to such a geek?

What can I say? I love learning stuff, a natural inclination that had held me in good stead in my former business life. Investing was perfect for curious cats like me — it’s a career that compels you to leverage your experience, continually learn new things, and pull it all together in a way that makes it near impossible to be bored.

So, given a chance to attend a Drilling for Dummies class (oil and gas, not Marines), there was no holding me back.

Shell held classes in Louisiana for its non-geological staff, something they also made available to Wall Streeters. They wisely figured that even the bean counters at corporate HQ ought to know how all those beans come to need counting. Plus, it helped the white-collar cost centers appreciate and respect the hard and dangerous work that the revenue-generating roughnecks did.

Our instructor was Mark Venettozzi, a charming and funny guy.

Mark had been a high school teacher before going to work in the oil field, and eventually…

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Mariko O. Gordon, CFA

Built $2.5B money mgmt biz from scratch. Coaching badass women to build & love their businesses, manage their finances, and make sure the thrill is never gone.