This is not the post I expected to write.
It has the right title, but the content is very different.
The summer before I started my MBA at Wharton I thought about what a successful experience would look like. Two years ago I wrote a blog post talking about starting grad school. As I did so, I imagined what I would write two years later when it came time to graduate.
I knew I would write about Moana. I just didn’t realize it would be this post.
Wait so Erik for the past two years you have been planning on writing a blog post comparing yourself to a fictional island princess?
Yep. Be honest, you would’ve been surprised if I hadn’t.
I freaking love Moana. Great movie. Even better soundtrack.
As I pictured what a successful MBA experience would look like, I couldn’t help but think of the song How Far I’ll Go.
Much like Moana has spent her whole life called by the horizon of an endless sea, I have felt compelled to pursue entrepreneurship. That’s been my line where the sea meets the sky.
I entered Wharton expecting that a successful experience would be something like starting my own company to pursue post-graduation. At the very least, I thought I would be joining a high-flying startup ready to experience the world of hypergrowth. This post then would’ve been about how entrepreneurship has been calling to me my whole life and I couldn’t help but climb into my little sailboat and make for the horizon with the Disney princess-esque confidence that my destiny lay somewhere beyond the reef.
But this is not that post.
Please don’t be distressed, my faithful reader. Though this is not the post that I was expecting, it is not a sad post. Quite the opposite in fact. My MBA experience turned out very different than how I expected it would.
And I couldn’t be happier.
But before I get to what is next, I want to discuss the path that got me here.
The Path Revisited
I’ve written before about my belief that the mystical “path” that everyone tells us we need to be on is a lie. I have taken a professional path less traveled. Whenever the opportunity presented itself I opted to veer away from the well-worn path. This strategy got me where I am today, and I don't regret it, but I do sometimes wonder if it was the right one.
Part of me wonders if it was motivated by a lack of patience on my part. I can have a tendency to spend too much time thinking about what is next instead of living in the present. In some ways, this can be a good thing. It motivates me and helps me think long-term. In other ways it hampers me. It keeps me from being content with what I have and it causes me to become frustrated if I don't feel like I am growing and progressing.
This one, a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing. Hmph! Adventure. Ha! Excitement. Ha! A Jedi craves not these things.
From the outside looking in my path may seem nice and clear. You get good at making it seem that way when applying to MBA programs.
If you ask me my story I will tell you how everything I have done is according to a north star. How each step in my journey set me up perfectly for the next one and how each has marched me towards my goal of being a builder of great things.
There is truth in that story. A lot of truth in fact. But isn’t the whole truth.
The whole truth is that my path has looked far straighter and more purposeful in hindsight. (As I am guessing most people's do). I haven't always had a grand plan. Whenever I thought I did, those grand plans have inevitably been discarded as I have grown and matured and realized they were facsimiles of what I thought I wanted.
When I first graduated from undergrad I thought I would spend my career as a venture capitalist. I thought I would be the person to say “yes” to entrepreneurs trying to change the world. I thought that’s how I would leave my mark. Then I became disillusioned with a world that, to quote a good friend, had an altogether too high “ratio of noise to substance.” I became frustrated by seemingly ever-present grifters and entrepreneurs more interested in being the modern rock stars our society labels “founders” than in actually building a business.
Eventually, I realized I didn’t want to be a VC. I wanted to do something more substantial. I wanted to work on the other side of the table. I thought I would take everything I had learned as an investor and catapult myself to success as an entrepreneur. The fact that I didn’t have any real expertise or a problem I wanted to solve was inconsequential. I would go to grad school and slingshot myself onto the stage at conferences wearing my company’s logo t-shirt beneath a sports jacket so I could wax lyrical about how my company was changing the world.
Well, I tried that. Didn’t work.
In my first year at school, I worked on my own startup idea. The idea had some promise, but it was in a space that was quickly growing too hot, serving customers I didn’t really understand, and leveraging absolutely zero unique insights or connections that made me the right person to start that company.
So I scrapped that and spent my MBA summer interning at a promising startup in a space I was passionate about from my time as an investor. I enjoyed the work, the team, and the fast-paced startup environment, but something still didn’t feel quite right.
I realized with my background as an investor and my MBA education startups would love to hire me. But only for general business/operational roles. Roles that required someone who was smart and good at problem-solving. Roles that would further cement my status as a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. I realized I didn’t want to continue being a mile wide and an inch deep. I wanted to develop skills, expertise, and know-how that I could leverage no matter what I did in the future.
In some ways, I think I have been too harsh on "the path". I see other people who paid their dues and built a foundational skillset in a particular area or industry and I can't help but be envious. In contrast, sometimes I feel like an anchorless ship drifting upon the currents of my own aspirations.
After two years at Wharton, I see the path a little bit differently now. Instead of a pre-ordained beeline directly to your life’s great work I believe it is instead a much more iterative process. A series of experiments.
Have a hypothesis. Test it. Learn from the outcome. Re-orient and plan your next experiment.
I thought I wanted to start my own company. I tried that and realized I needed to have more of a unique insight/skillset to anything I might one day start.
I thought I wanted to work at a startup. I tried that and realized that I didn’t want to be a generalist or part of the crew on someone else’s ship.
In some ways, the next step in my career seems like a far cry from what I expected to be doing post-graduation. But if you zoom in a bit, the journey from there to here has been a series of iterative stepping stones as I learned more about myself and what I wanted from my career.
The Next Experiment
Earlier I said that my path only really looks clear in hindsight. The truth is that the only real undercurrent my path has ever had has been my desire to build something important. I didn’t know what that would be or how I would build it. I just knew I wanted to build something and that I wanted that something to matter (defining what matters is a conversation for a different time).
This desire to build was what motivated me to be an investor. It’s what motivated me to try being a founder and then an operator.
It’s taken me a long time to realize that if I want to be fulfilled professionally I need to build something.
And so for my next experiment, I am going to a place where I can actually learn how.
This week I’m starting as a Product Manager at Capital One and I couldn’t be more excited.
I am excited to learn how to build products. How to work with engineers and to guide software development. How to delve deeply into the needs of customers and prioritize solutions that solve their biggest problems.
For all of my career, I have wanted to “build” without really knowing what that entailed.
And I am excited that I am finally taking the time to learn.
When I started at Wharton, I didn’t really expect to be taking this kind of role or joining this kind (or size) of company post-graduation. But I am confident in the path I have followed to get here and that this next step is the right one for me and my family. Here’s why.
It’s A Wonderful Life
One of my all-time favorite movies is It’s a Wonderful Life. Besides being a Christmas classic, it also is an evergreen story of a man who finds meaning, not in what he thought he wanted, but in the relationships he stumbled into following a path he was pressured into. I’ve written about how my biggest surprise from my Wharton experience has been my lesson that what I do matters less than the person I become along the way.
I am trying to be more like George Bailey. I am trying to build a wonderful life. A life that is less focused on what seems cool or what I think I want and more on becoming the best man, husband, father, and friend I can be. And I believe this job is the next step in that journey.
When I started at Wharton, I expected my next steps to be defined by the Moana song “How Far I’ll Go.”
At the end of the experience, I now realize that what I am looking for in the next stage of my career in life is better explained by a different Moana song, Where You Are.
Moana, stay on the ground now
Our people will need a chief and there you are
There comes a day
When you’re gonna look around
And realize happiness is where you are
In an ironic twist, my MBA journey actually represents the opposite of Moana’s. She was held back by feelings of family pressure and longed for the adventure of the sea. I started Wharton longing for the status and adventure of entrepreneurship and unexpectedly found myself in a place where my priorities had shifted towards family, relationships, and seeking contentment.
I believe in the principles with which I decided to join Capital One. I believe that it is a role that will allow me to focus less on where I am going and more on the person I am becoming along the way.
Three quick anecdotes (that may or may not become full-blown blog posts at some point) that I think hammer home the transformation I have experienced over the past two years:
Opting out of Pie Eating Contests
One of the most transformational experiences I had at Wharton was participating and then being a leader in a program called P3. P3 stands for Purpose, Passions, and Principals. It is a small group program where we read through the book Springboard by the legendary Wharton Professor Richard Shell who created Penn’s famous “Success Course”.
The program entails spending six weeks discussing big questions such as “what do I want from life”, “what are my core values”, and “why am I pursing the goals I am”.
I think it would be a useful book to read for anyone at any stage in life, but it is especially appropriate during a time of transition such as grad school.
The book includes a variety of memorable anecdotes, but my favorite is about an entrepreneur who goes to his trusted lawyer asking for recommendations on who to hire as an in-house counsel. The lawyer, who is a partner at his firm, offers to take the job himself despite the offering being for much less money than the lawyer is currently making. Surprised the entrepreneur asks why the lawyer wants to leave his high-powered role and the lawyer responds that “It is just a question of more pie.”
He goes on to explain:
“Working the way I have all my life is like a pie-eating contest. I worked in high school to get into a great college. Then I worked in college to get into a great law school. Then I worked at the law school to get a job at a top-flight law firm. Then I worked at the law firm to make partner. I’ve finally figured out that it is all just a big pie-eating contest. You win, and the price is always… MORE PIE. Who wants that?”
For most of my career, I have been chasing more pie and boy, is it easy to continue to do that at a place like Wharton. When everyone is interviewing for the upper echelon of banking and consulting firms you begin to wonder if maybe you should be too.
I am going to Capital One because of what I intend to learn there. But I am also going to Capital One because it is a place that treats its employees like people. A place that prioritizes balance and where I can live in the area my wife and I have always talked about building our family. Capital One represents an opportunity for me to opt out of pie-eating contests. I still want to work hard and ambitiously, but my focus isn’t simply the accumulation of more pie, but on personal fulfillment and growth.
Gryffindor to Hufflepuff
This one is quick but revealing. You know those sorting hat quizzes that tell you what house you would get sorted into in Harry Potter? Going into school I always was a Gryffindor. I wanted to be the hero in every story. I wanted to be the person in the limelight for having saved the day. Recently on some post-graduation travel, my friends and I were taking the sorting hat quiz and discussing our results for fun. For the first time in my life, I was sorted into Hufflepuff. At first, I was indignant.
I am not a Hufflepuff, I am a Gryffindor!
But even as I heard myself thinking that I realized that it was an incredibly poignant example of the growth I had experienced over the past two years.
When I entered Wharton I wanted to be a courageous leader. The daring knight who saved the day.
As I leave Wharton I am much more focused on being a better person. Being a kind, loyal, ethical, and hardworking man.
Maybe you’ll find this anecdote a bit silly, but for anyone who is familiar with Harry Potter, I think it does a great job of capturing my changed priorities.
A picture of the lake next to my family’s cabin in Norway.
The Mondays and Tuesdays
Post-graduation I got to spend some time traveling around Europe. A big highlight was getting to go to Norway to spend some time with my relatives on my dad’s side of the family. While spending some time at the Berg family cabin in the mountains, we went for a hike and I ended up spending the bulk of the time talking with my Aunt Hilde. She wanted to hear about my Wharton experience and we discussed many of the topics I have written about in this post. I told her that my priorities had shifted and that I was more focused on my family and on finding contentment versus always looking toward the horizon.
That’s when she told me about her husband Leif. Leif passed away from cancer when I was younger, but his presence still looms large in my family. On top of being my Aunt’s husband, he was also my dad’s childhood best friend and so his loss hit my family hard. He was an exceedingly kind man with a larger-than-life sense of humor that brightened any room he entered. My aunt told me about how when he was diagnosed with cancer, she asked him what he wanted to do with the time that he had left. Did he want to travel? Were there items that he wanted to check off his bucket list?
I’ll never forget what she told me his response was.
“I just want the Mondays and Tuesdays.”
Here was a man with limited time left. And all he wanted was as much of his normal everyday life as possible. He wanted to work for as long as he could and spend time with his family and friends as he always had.
There are rare moments in life when someone tells you something and you immediately know that it is going to stick with you for the rest of your days.
My Uncle’s idea of “the Mondays and Tuesdays” was one such moment for me.
I don’t know where my path is going to take me. I don’t know if I am going to stay at Capital One for three years or thirty. I don’t know if we are here to stay in Virginia, as we expect, or if something unforeseen will draw our family elsewhere.
But whatever happens, I know that if I can find a way to fall in love with my Mondays and Tuesdays, I’ll have a pretty good shot at leading a worthwhile life. Admittedly, this is probably something that is easier said than done, but I think my newfound strategy of prioritizing relationships and the journey of becoming a better version of myself every day is as good of a path to a good life as any.
Thank You
Thanks for following along over the past couple years. I wrote with less frequency and regularity than I would have liked, but my priority was fitting this blog into my grad school experience and not the other way around. I am sure I will have more thoughts and insights on this transition in the weeks and months to come. I’m not sure how this blog will change as I re-enter the working world. I’d love to keep writing and I hope you continue to follow along.
Journey before destination.
Erik