It feels no less than a privilege to be one among such a diverse cohort at this premier B-School, where each one of them, are going to be no less than a future business leader. Also being taught by such renowned faculty members, who not only help us broaden our vision on business issues but also help us fetch bigger life lessons to succeed as a leader.
But more often than not, most of us at B-Schools find ourselves stuck in a myopic bubble, with mostly short term goals such as exams, grades, and placements in mind, which of course, I do believe are important, but not the most important aspect of an MBA. Somehow this myopic vision may take away the real-life learning because somewhere down the line in pursuing our dream for that big shot job, we forget to take bigger life learnings which would go a long way for success in life in general and the business world in particular.
Beyond the knowledge about business subjects, business schools give us a perfect environment to become a better and smarter version of ourselves. The extremely competitive environment sometimes exposes us to the extreme level of insecurities, but it’s only up to us to keep ourselves away from giving in to the urge of joining the rat race. We should rather take this competitive setting as a learning exercise to help us be a more secure person, which is what will serve us a long way in life. As rightly indicated by a common economic concept that price war, in a competitive setting, pushes all the competitors down to their marginal cost and ultimately out of business. Similarily utter competition among each other has the potential to rip us out of our individuality. The real matrix of success is not about how better we are from the individuals surrounding us, but it’s about how better or worse our newer version becomes as compared to our previous one.
Moreover, there are so many people from diverse backgrounds with a set of thought processes, some being completely contradictory to our own set of beliefs, also gives us an opportunity to have dissenting arguments, which may give the job at hand completely new direction. But before that, we will have to learn to agree to disagree and be at comfort and respect with other’s individuality. More often than not we find ourselves stuck in the vicious cycle of cribbing about differently opinionated individuals, and rather than benefiting from those differences we whine about them, but we must remember than whiners are not winners.
Hence instead of just moving around in the scary spiral of the much used and abused B-School phenomenon of FOMO: Fear of Missing Out, we should rather be scared on not ending up with FOMI: Fear of Missing our Individuality.
-Suhani Varshney | ISB PGP Co’20