the starting period of my mba journey was a bit of a train wreck the high of letting it finally sink
in that i made it into that school was followed quite quickly by the realization that i wasn't
keeping up i hadn't figured out how to socialize without an agenda i hit rock bottom probably two
and a half months in there feeling like i made a mistake that i wasn't meant to be there and that i
was truly alone what came from that was probably the biggest learning of that entire journey
the one thing i'd approached differently if i was to do it all over again i had a bit of a love-hate
relationship with academic institutions i love learning and i being challenged with stuff that
i get really into and then i do well the mistake i made or would make even during my undergrad
is that i would see a given subject or challenge through a lens of is this directly relevant
to me and if it's not i'd have a tad bit less enthusiasm with how i would approach that subject
now i wasn't asking the right questions in the first instant what is it that i want to
get out of this and how do i overcome hurdles or challenges that poses gravity problems gravity
problems being problems that you can't change you can't suspend gravity you work around it by
building something that keeps you suspended in air the challenge should not have been can i focus on
all these different terms and formulas and stuff to memorize but how do i see myself using this in
real life what's a likely scenario and then play through it i'll never be an accountant
but i want to be able to read a balance sheet for any company i invest in where i get excited about
somebody's product or service offering because you are in a formative state every time you expose
your neurons to a disruptive way of thinking you very quickly check externally look to the outside
to the people around you to benchmark yourself how am i doing and how is everyone else doing
and then surprisingly it becomes irrelevant how others are doing because i have identified a
higher level purpose definition that is specific to me my bigger picture what that also does is
it doesn't assume that i know what's important to others or what others are thinking because that's
where benchmarking yourself becomes destructive when you think you are the same but somehow
others are better so because i was focused on the task in isolation i had no real motivation to do
well in my first two months until i was told you are really not doing well and then it became about
not dropping out and that reset everything in fact i started doing extremely well from that point
onwards because i knew i was doing it for myself by the end of my first six months i had a massive
aha moment i realized that going into the mba my fear had been that turning my attention towards
all this dry finance accounting and statistics stuff i would lose my creative edge the emotional
energy and rawness with which i would invest myself in pretty much everything
that i would become some stiff mba shirt somebody i wouldn't want to be at that point of that six
month mark though i felt more myself than i ever did before i was the go-to guy for video
productions in my class obviously i had started to focus on quantitative courses that had a
heavy communications component i had produced insead's coverage stage show
together with two of my peers i had found all the reasons why i needed to be there
and that gave me a purpose a purpose that wasn't defined by just a task by what others were doing
but what was unique about me and it's easy to sit here today and suggest
find your purpose early on and i'll also allow it to change to evolve with you as you progress it's
more than that there will be things you can't just ignore gravity and you work around it and
then it's about seeing the challenges you will be facing in the context of who you are i had a
first glimpse of that as i felt i was getting too close to becoming something i didn't want
to be a dropout whether that would have happened or not is another question i've actually never
heard of anybody dropping out of business school this may have been far off but it felt a bit too
close and with that it gave me a sense of identity of who i didn't want to be and i would execute on
that the me version with foresight would have probably given myself a bit more room and time
to come to terms with why i would like to succeed at this not benchmarked against others but against
who do i want to be tomorrow and likes and dislikes with that and i also talked about
the importance of understanding how you work and function in a previous video think about
who do i want to be tomorrow versus who i was yesterday and that's what i would spend more
time on and ideally grow more confident in i know this is rather convoluted and messy but basically
the expectation should not be because you enter a system where everybody is being treated or
initially rated the same that everybody is in fact the same way the way you are and the way you are
not is something you ideally start figuring out as you get into your mba and do not believe anyone
else will know you better than you know yourself and hence make decisions on your behalf the real
reason why you're here is one that only you can come up with and that will make all the difference