This is a topic I think about a lot, whenever I try to untangle my value added in the deals I work on. I'm probably the best paid person working on these, but does that reflect the work done. At times, I feel like I'm just watching others work and signing off on that work. The power to get a EUR 100M check signed is "worth" something to others, typical gatekeeper power, right? And yet... On some deals I know that someone else could have done it fairly easily; on others, I do believe that I created something worthwhile. The first offshore wind farm I worked on would not have been built without the financing, and I essentially invented big parts of the whole financial structure, with a couple of other people, to make it acceptable to all the relevant entities that signed off on it. So how much is that "worth", beyond the fact that having the hand on the till, I can heavily influence the price paid for it?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes