Many of you might be packing your bags and getting your stuffs ready, preparing yourself for the two-year ride coming ahead of you. And lots of hopes and tonnes of expectations that you all will carry with yourself apart from all the aforementioned stuffs. Each and everyone might have a different reason to pursue an MBA. Some might be stuck with a boring monotonous job which asks you to do the same thing over and over again. Some of you must of those breed who got into engineering but didn’t really understand its concepts. While for the others, it might be their parents’ dream that they want to fulfill. Some might even be the ones who knew from their acquaintances, the knowledge and value addition that this 2 year programme might do to you. Be it taking a 2 year break or getting yourself away with a monotonous job or doing an MBA because engineering didn’t suit you enough or whatever else be the reason, this two years are going to change your life. Not because it will lead you to a high profile, high earning job in some MNC, not even because you might contain yourself with tremendous amount of knowledge which otherwise would not have been possible. But it will be because of the fact that you will be 100 times closer to yourself.
Having completed a year of MBA, this is so far the best justifiable reason I believe I have come closest to, for taking the road that goes via a B-School. And I am sure all of you, at some point in this two years will realize that, in as late as the final day of your MBA or as soon as the first week of this course. If someone thinks that he/she might learn applicable philosophies of marketing reading a few chapters from Kotler or build operational strategies by analyzing a few case studies of Amazon or IKEA, trust me that is not going to happen. The investment of your life that you would be making at a B School will yield you a discovery of yourself. It will help you identify and eliminate all those doors that lead you to the places where you do not want to go. It will help you realize the fact that in trying to become a master of all trades you might be a jack of none.
This is an age of specialization, Multinational corporations are identifying their core competency and sticking to it, outsourcing the activities they are not good at. And in this era, you simply cannot remain confused about the future you want for yourself or leave it for some destiny to decide it for you. Everyone has their own core competency, a set of skills that makes one person slightly different from others. There are people who have identified it and they are successful and happy. Be it chaiwala who identified that he is good at making chai and is earning business out of it or be it MNCs that serve highly niche market. There are also lots of people who after identifying tried to get out of their safe zone trying things they are not competent at and failed rigorously. In such an era, this is the time and opportunity for you to identify who you are, what you are good at and take a leap towards achieving a goal where in you can use that set of skills you are good at. As rightly said by Steve Jobs you do not have to live with the dogma of living with the expectations of others. If you are not good at numbers, you will find a guy who is good at it. You only have to do the things you are good at.
Some day, after a few years, when you get a call from your junior or a fellow friend or even from someone you don’t know, asking you about your job or the company that you are working with or even about your business that you are doing for that matter, the response should not be “It Sucks!”. Because you have chosen it, you are accountable for it. One always has a choice. Because in the end one might not cherish the opportunities one has grabbed, but regret the ones that were missed. And that is what I believe this 2 years will do to you, identify and decide your choices. Whether it leads you to job involving a work of your choice, doing something you are good at or some business of your own focused around your core competency. Ten or twenty years down the line when you will look at your life backwards, you will be able to appreciate the kind of choices you made. And that process of identifying the choices begins now for you. Discover Yourself, all the best!
Thanks to a discussion with a bunch of friends last night that helped me write this article.