There have been times over the last couple of months where I have been struggling.
I have written before about how getting my MBA at Wharton is a realization of a life-long dream. But sometimes there is a double-edged sword to achieving a dream.
I have been orientating myself towards getting my MBA for so long, now that I am here, I have been at a bit of a loss for what I want to do next. This question has caused me an undue amount of stress and anxiety over the past few months, but I am happy to say that I feel like I have worked through it and come out on the other side. I want to share how I grappled with some of these existential questions and where I landed.
The Green Grass of Measurability
There are a lot of things that make the MBA experience unique. One of them is how condensed it feels. Two years is a relatively short amount of time to pack in the learning, relationships, growth, and career moves that you expect to make. If we are being honest this probably creates challenges for all of us at one point or another. A common area where this rears its head is with jobs. Many of my fellow students started recruiting for their summer internship almost as soon as they arrived in the fall. Others are only now starting to work on figuring out their summer plans. This mismatch creates a recipe for comparison and anxiety. Maybe you are practicing cases while your friends are out celebrating. Or maybe you are anxiously twiddling your thumbs as all your friends start to receive offers and you are just getting started on your search.
I definitely fall into this second camp. Now, I knew this was going to be the case. I knew going in that I wouldn’t be part of a straightforward recruiting process. My chief goal at graduate school was and is to launch my own business. And even as I do explore less-entrepreneurial paths, there is absolutely zero part of me that is interested in the sort of jobs that hire using that kind of process-heavy structure. Even still, it is hard to not be envious of the clear feedback loops those processes entail. I have found myself envious of my peers’ ability to measure where they are at and how they are doing within their job search even if the jobs themselves are of no interest to me. The grass really is always greener.
The Great Work Trap
When it comes to big decisions about careers or life or marriage or anything else, the path forward is often littered with mental traps. One of the most common traps that I have written about before is the belief in a “path” that no longer exists (or maybe never really did). Another one I discovered for myself is the Great Work Trap.
My first semester at school I was mostly focused on making friends, getting my family settled in a new city, and remembering how to be a student again. As I started to find my sea legs a bit towards the tail-end of the semester, my attention started to turn to what I would be doing over my summer internship and post-graduation. For those who don’t know, your summer internship during your MBA is generally seen as a very important stepping stone towards whatever you want to do post-graduation. There is a lot of pressure to find the right opportunity over the summer especially for jobs with more structured recruiting processes like banking or consulting.
As I started to spend time thinking about what I wanted to do, I found myself getting stuck. First, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. Having previously worked as a VC, there were parts of the industry that I absolutely loved, but other parts that I didn’t love so much. I also am very interested in getting operating experience either at an early stage startup or through starting my own venture. Do I try to go back into venture and find a firm that is a better long-term fit? Do I try to get a taste for the operating side of things? Do I try to start my own thing at school with the guard rails, free-time, and lowered opportunity costs that it affords?
In some ways, I still don’t have the answers, but after spending way too much time thinking about it and talking with people who are a lot wiser than me, I have learned to let go of some of the questions.
I think I have looked towards getting my MBA as this inflection point in my life and career for so long that I have simply been putting too much pressure on myself. I had been trying to figure out what my Life’s Great Work would be so that I could launch into it like a slingshot after I graduated.
I’ve come around to realizing that life very rarely works that way.
I think the journeys towards the great works of our life tend to only appear in hindsight.
Very few people point to the distance, decide what their career will look like, and then unnervingly succeed in pursuing that vision. I now believe that when done right, careers are much more iterative processes. You run a bunch of experiments. You double down on the things that are a good fit and you cut out the things that aren't. I like to think of Boyd Varty’s concept of tracking. You explore and you find a clue of where you want to be. That clue leads you to the next one. Sometimes you lose the trail and have to circle back around. But if you are patient, you will eventually track your way to where you want to be.
We also put unnecessary pressure on ourselves because we lack perspective. Careers are long. Much longer than we give them credit for. Too many of us, myself very much included, place undue importance on figuring them out as quickly as possible. In undergrad, everyone acted like their first job out of college was the end-all-be-all that would define the course of their life. How many of your friends were still working at their first job even just a few years after graduation? 1? Maybe 2? And yet here we are again just a few years later acting like our life will be a success or failure solely based on the summer internship we get over the summer.
What I am looking for in my work
So now that the pressure is off a bit where have I landed? First, instead of trying to figure out exactly what I want to do, I set out to figure out the aspects of a job that were important to me. Probably the piece of content I have recommended to more people than any other is a great Wait, But Why post on picking a career. It is the first resource I recommend to friends or colleagues who are struggling to figure out what they want to do next and as such a few weeks ago I decided to work through it myself. If you feel like you are just going through the motions and want to try to find some direction in your life, give yourself two hours, a pen, some paper, and dive in.
The post includes a series of mental exercises to think through the “yearnings” that are important to you and slowly sort through what your priorities are. Here is my professional yearnings hierarchy for any job or career prospects.
My Professional Yearnings Hierarchy
The Non-Negotiable Bowl - Lines in the sand that I will never compromise on
To be valued
To be respected
To work with incredible people
The Top Shelf - Absolute priorities that I will be looking for no matter what I do
To learn something new every single day
To be intellectually challenged
To have the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with people
The Middle Shelf - Things that are important to me but that I can compromise on so long as my Non-Negotiable Bowl and Top Shelf yearnings are satisfied
To be given autonomy
To have skin in the game
Bottom shelf - Things that would be nice to have
To be given a variety of work to do
To be appreciated
The Trash Can - Things that I may sometimes find myself tempted to want, but that I need to actively fight against letting have any bearing whatsoever on my life decisions
To be admired
To work at a prestigious firm
To work in a career where I can acquire status and fame
You are building your own house
Once I had thought through what I was looking for I had to decide what I actually wanted to do next. Instead of committing to a path, I have decided to focus on becoming the type of person who builds. The advice is the same as I give to anyone who wants to be in a relationship. Focus a little less on finding someone to date and focus a little more on becoming the kind of person someone else would want to date.
I don’t know what my life’s great work is. I don’t know what my career is going to look like.
But what I do know is that I want to be a company builder. That can look like a lot of different things and I can get valuable skills from all sorts of different endeavors. Instead of focusing on finding the exact right career, now I want to focus on going somewhere where I can have my work yearnings met and can build the skills to become the type of leader, builder, and entrepreneur I know I want to be. Whether I put those skills to use next year or many years down the road.
One of the most impactful books I have ever read is the book Chop Wood, Carry Water. One of the stories in the book is about a master architect who has made a career building some of the most beautiful houses in the world. After a long and storied career, he decides to retire but his boss asks him to build one last house. He begrudgingly agrees but he doesn’t put his usual love and care into the project. Once the house is built, he goes back to his boss to finally resign for good and his boss gives him the keys to the house he had just built as a thank you for a career of excellence. All this time the architect had been building his own house and he had no idea. If he had known he would’ve put much more effort into it than he did.
It’s easy to forget that we are building our own house. It’s so easy to get caught up in where we are doing or our next move or what we will do after school.
What’s hard is to remember is that much more important than what we are doing is who we are becoming in the process.
It’s taken me a lot of self-reflection and frustration to remember that.
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