Cherishing the shitty things in life

My broken car window

Last year, two pretty shitty things happened to me. In May, my apartment building caught fire and in November, I got my car broken into (and plenty of valuables stolen). Not gonna embellish this – both of these events rank 9 or 10 on a 10-point shittiness scale. 

While both events naturally caused me to feel flooded with emotions like frustration, despair and vulnerability, they also brought a rather unexpected set of feelings: excitement and gratitude. Yes, you read that right, I actually felt excitement and gratitude.

I was feeling excited about the fact that both of these things were things that had never happened to me before and that I was experiencing something new for the first time. And I felt grateful for life giving me a learning opportunity that would eventually make me a better person. 

Now to understand why I felt that way, you need to understand one of the ways how I look at life. For me, life is a lot about the experiences I make. Each new experience is something that makes my life richer – richer in knowledge, wisdom and stories to share. Yet it isn’t just the good experiences – the travels, the friends, the fun stuff – that counts as a life-enriching experience. It’s also the bad experiences – the break-ups, the losses, and yes, also the apartment fires and thefts. 

I remember how I was approaching my car, I started noticing something was off. There were pieces of broken glass everywhere, and as I looked up, this sad and shitty feeling dawned on me: "fuck, they broke into my car." Yet maybe an hour later, as I was sitting in my car with the cold wind blowing through the broken window, driving through San Francisco at 1am trying to find a police station to report the incident, I had a second thought: “mmh.. as shitty as it is, it’s also kinda cool to make an experience I have never made before."

Some might call this an overly optimistic – almost even forcefully optimistic way of seeing things positively, but if there is one thing certain in life, then it’s that some of the best things in life come in disguise of the worst. They seem like “the worst thing ever” the moment they happen, but they turn out to be starting points of incredibly good things to follow. It just takes a little time until we are able us to look at them that way. So no, it’s not a matter of being forcefully optimistic, it’s more a matter of shortening the time it takes for us to appreciate some of the things that rank really high on that shittiness scale. 

And the way I shorten that time, is to be appreciate of any kind of new experience in my life, the good ones and the bad ones. So next time something shitty happens, allow yourself to be frustrated, but also remember that in reality you just gained something in your life. Cherish that. 

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Growing up in between cultures

People have asked me what it was about my upbringing that made me so worldly curious. And I always say that it has been the fact that I was raised multi-culturally (even multi-religiously).

Sure, you might say this was inevitable in my case. Parents from Iran, born and raised in Germany. “More than one culture” was already my starting point. But believe me, it’s not a given. I have seen plenty of immigrant families where the default attitude was full assimilation, and not the wholehearted celebration of both home and host cultures.

With deep-felt gratitude, however, I am able to thank my parents for going the extra mile in my upbringing. They could have made my childhood all about “fitting in” by renouncing our Iranian heritage, but they didn’t. They could have also lived a life all about preserving our Iranian culture by way of fending off the German culture as much as possible, but they didn’t do that either. 

For them, it was all about finding a healthy middle ground. And I don’t think anything shows that better than the way how they dealt with the aspect of religion. While not religiously Muslim, we are certainly culturally Muslim – growing up in rural and Christian Bavaria (it’s so Christian compared to other States, it has its own Christian Democratic Party, the CDU). But that didn’t prevent my parents from encouraging me to attend Christian religion classes in Middle School. Or sending me to the local YMCA where I – no joke – ended up playing biblical characters in musicals and plays that were aired on TV (Moses and co. were Middle Easterners, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch after all).

And next to religion, they were always there to help me walk this very fine and ambiguous line of cherishing my Iranian heritage – for example by way of learning Farsi, visiting Iran, building strong ties with relatives back home, or learning the customs. Yet at the same time adopting the culture of the country we called our new home, namely many of the things that immigrant (Muslim) families struggle with: eating pork, drinking alcohol, dating, what have you. 

But there were also moments I remember where walking that line was not so easy. I have this memory of sitting in the back of the car, I must have been 10 years old, while we were driving to Italy for vacation. And I remember how I was looking at the beautiful landscape and expressing my liking with the word “geil.” Now geil is colloquial for “cool/awesome,” but it’s literal translation is “horny.” And while my parents knew that it was being used colloquially, they didn’t like it. So they forbade us to use it. Everyone was allowed to use it, but we were not. 

Adopting these seemingly minuscule elements of a culture might seem insignificant to some, but the degree to which you play along – culturally speaking – matters. At the end of the day, even if you adopt 95% of what your host culture has to offer, you are probably going to get judged on those 5% that you don’t. Especially if you already don’t look like the rest. 

I am not sure how aware my parents were about the way how they raised me. If all these efforts were intentional or accidental, but it’s those very efforts that allowed me to be aware of my heritage, appreciative of my host culture, and curious about all the other cultures foreign to me. The question of whether I am Iranian or German actually never really came up until much later in my life when I left Germany and found myself in positions in which I had to talk more explicitly about my upbringing. 

Looking forward, the challenge I’m facing is that I am already someone who is in between two cultures. Culturally speaking, I am neither fully Iranian, nor fully German. So I have always wondered what part of my identity I will be passing down to my children. A question that is likely going to be compounded by two additional factors: one, the country in which I will raise children, and two, the person with whom I will raise those children with. My future partner could easily be someone who brings another (or even two other) cultures into the relationship.

It’s a whole different level of complexity, but it’s also a massive opportunity to raise a new generation that has a very multifaceted identity and unprecedented levels of cultural fluency. 

Mom and dad, while you will likely not read this, I thank you wholeheartedly for everything you’ve given me and for raising me the way you did. Super geil of you. 

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What you seek is seeking you

In one of the last conversations I had in San Francisco before I boarded my flight to Shanghai, I heard something that stayed on my mind for quite some time. The comment came from someone with whom I had met under very serendipitous circumstances a few years back. After hearing about all the reasons why I wanted to go to Shanghai and the things I was hoping to achieve, she just said: "be careful not to attach yourself to any outcome. Rarely does it manifest itself when you do."

A part of me wanted to believe her, but another part in me didn’t: "why wouldn’t I want to strive for the outcome for which I was going abroad in the first place?” It just didn’t make sense to me. For me, it seemed that not attaching myself to an outcome would mean that I wouldn’t be doing enough for that outcome to occur. So she clarified: "if you can find a way to let go, what you want will find its way to you – assuming you are working, remain focused, and stay present."

Now admittedly, there is a lot of kumbaya in the notion of “what you want will find its way to you,” but after giving it some serious thought, I realized that I had heard something similar once before. Namely a fable about a guy who was chasing a butterfly. I couldn’t find the actual story anywhere, and I also don’t remember where I heard it in the first place, but here is how it went more or less:

There was a guy who was inside his kitchen looking outside the window into the garden. He noticed a super beautiful butterfly whose colors and patterns just mesmerized him. He instantly jumped up, dropped everything and ran outside trying to catch the butterfly. He was so in love with what he saw, he wanted it no matter what. So he ran up and down, chased the butterfly around all corners, put up nets, traps, just tried everything. But after minutes of running back and forth, he was out of breath, all sweaty, giving up his on his goal to catch the butterfly. Exhausted, he sat down on his patio, and moments later that butterfly slowly approached him, flew around his head, and then sat down on his nose. 

In many ways, the "what you want will find its way to you” notion was very evident in this story about the guy and the butterfly. What happens is that by wanting something really bad (a specific outcome in this case), we channel all our stress and anxiety and actually make that outcome less likely to happen. We push it away, scare it, distance it from us. But if we shift our minds to a place of patience, to self-control, to complete peace with whatever outcome, we create the right environment for what we want to come to us, to attract it, and awaken it. 

But for that to happen, we need to be at complete peace with ourselves and with whatever the universe will serve us. Being ok with whatever the outcome there may be, as indifferent as it may sound, actually makes it most likely for us to effectuate what we actually want. And as my friend pointed out, this is not an act of indifference or laziness. It’s an act of working hard, remaining focused, and staying present – and not to stress out over what might or might not happen.  

Rumi’s word are often mistranslated or misinterpreted. And while the title of this post (a Rumi quote) can be looked at from different angles, for me it fits the notion of this post – what you seek is seeking you .. you just need to allow it to flow to you, painlessly and effortlessly. 

Now not everything I came to Shanghai for happened the way I wanted. Sometimes, I admit it, I’m too attached to a specific outcome. Sometimes, I want something so bad that I make it harder on myself (and everyone else involved). But then again, I am not perfect. I’m a human being that is work in progress. I am a living and breathing person who feels love as much as he feels pain. And while I can’t turn back time to undo mistakes, I care enough to learn and improve going forward. 

This is to living a life less attached to outcomes. 

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Writing my own life's story

In one of the “last lectures” that I had at Stanford, our professor, Joel Peterson, encouraged us to ask ourselves what we are solving for in life. He continued to push: "what does winning in life look like for you?" I couldn’t make much sense of that question in that moment, and frankly I totally forgot about it right after, but a few weeks later the answer became very obvious to me. 

I haven’t really shared this publicly yet, but days after my graduation I put all my belongings into storage and temporarily moved out to Shanghai. It was a rather spontaneous decision, but I had many life-sized questions on my mind – both personally and professionally – and just had to come out here to look for answers. 

It all started about over a year ago. Together with about 30 of my classmates, we were standing on the balcony of a restaurant overlooking Shenzhen, a major city on mainland China that boarders Hong Kong. Lined up in a circle, we were putting jade-stone wristbands around the wrist of the person next to us, one by one. And once someone put the wristband around the hand of their neighbor, the person was asked to share what they were taking away from that trip to China. 

As my neighbor closed my wristband, I addressed the group saying: "this might be my last day in China, but this is going to be the first day of my future relationship with China.” Fascinated by what I had experienced, I felt a strong desire to make China part of my life’s story going forward.

As I was reflecting about that moment last week, it dawned on me what I was solving for in my life. I was solving for writing an incredible life story. "Yes, that is it!” ... I am not solving for ending up on the Forbes list of the world's richest people. I am not solving for the most impressive CEO-career or being the most social person the world has seen. But one of the things I am solving for in life is to write a damn good story. A story worth sharing. One that has many gripping chapters, full of joyful moments, of adventures from all over the world. 

Now what does that mean? It means that one way I gauge the decisions I make by how much they allow me to make this a really interesting life story. Yes, the decision to move out to China on the basis of a simple hunch – while many of my old and new friends stayed in the Bay Area to pursue promising and well-paying careers – was really scary.

But I didn’t let that fear stop me from going after what I felt was the right thing to do. Instead, I told myself that no matter how this China thing is going to turn out, it will make me richer and my life’s story more interesting. Even in the worst case, if I come back hurt, disappointed, and in doubt of my own judgement, it will always be an interesting chapter in this story called life. 

Just like the many books we read in our lives, some books we can’t put down after we started reading them. Others we want to put away and just cut our losses as the story doesn’t capture us. We are all given a pen with which we have the chance to write one such book ourselves.

I have decided to write my story the most interesting way I can. One that reflects my love for life, my appetite for risk, my passion for people and my presence in a world without boarders. So yes, winning in life for me means living a life that is a story worth sharing. 

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So you want to apply to the Stanford GSB?

I was dreading this post for a long time, but after I’ve been getting more and more messages from folks asking me about my business school application experience, I figured it might be worth sharing some of my thoughts. 

To say it loud and up front: I am not an admission consultant and I am in no way representing the admission office at the Stanford GSB. The following thoughts are all my own – and with that, they are absolutely unproven and only reflect my own experience of applying to business school – I would even say they are baseless and they could even be misleading if you relied on them as your single data point. So have a read, but don’t take it as the single source of truth. Ok, phew, I hope that was clear. 

Now let me get started by telling you that if you are looking to learn about the right/best way to apply to business school, there ain’t one. Each year ~8,000 people apply, and ~400 get in. Each of those 8,000 applications is different, and each of those 400 is different. There is no one way, and there is no right way of applying. So please detach yourself from the idea that you will get in if you follow steps A, B, C.

That said, I do have some thoughts, some advise to share with you. I will structure them by application criteria.

GMAT

Gosh, I hated the GMAT. I carried those books with me for years (I think I accumulated 16 books in the end). I took the test three times, and each time I went through hell. Standardized tests are just not my thing. I always screwed up the quant section, while doing pretty ok on the verbal section. Only on my third attempt I finally got the score I was hoping for. It finally started with a 7, but it was still below the GSB average (737 for this year’s incoming class). 

Now, my personal belief is that the GMAT is still a hygiene factor in your application. If you are in a +/- 30 window around the average, you are probably ticking a box and everything is fine. I think only if you are lower or higher than that, it might work for/against you. To be clear, I just made up the number "+/- 30" to illustrate an idea. 

With my score, I felt I was ticking a box and I was then able to focus on the other parts of my application. Now, people often ask me how I finally improved my quant score, well, I found this one document that had the hardest quant questions. So I took that document and worked through as many as possible. At least I tried to cover as many topics as possible. Started with the easier ones and then went towards the harder ones until I felt confident with the concepts tested. Here the link to the document.

When to apply

My own application story is a funky one. I applied 2nd round for the Class of 2016 and didn’t get in. I was waitlisted – for like 3 months – and then dinged. Then I first decided to ditch business school all together, but made a last-minute decision to reapply for 1st round for the Class of 2017. I made that decision 19 days before the 1st round deadline and was favored by the fact that both essays and recommendation letters were reduced to two each that year (down from three). Both times I got an interview spot, but the second time around I wasn’t waitlisted but got in straight.

Now one might look at my story and simply conclude that 1st round application was all it took for me to get in, but that would be foolish. I continue to believe that you have better chances 1st and 2nd round over 3rd round, but I would refrain from stating any significant difference between 1st and 2nd round applications. If I had to boil it down to some specific advise, I would say: 1) the sooner you apply the better, but 2) only apply when you are certain that your application is at its best. Example: if that requires you to sit out 1st round to submit a much better application in the 2nd round, I would do that. 

You might ask why not third round? There are many reasons for that. First it works against you a bit. You would get notified quite late (June I think it is?) and it gives you much less time to prepare (anything from leaving your current (work) environment to finding housing etc.). Second, by the time 3rd round candidates are processed, most spots in the class have been filled with applicants from the first two rounds. 

Essays

The GSB essays are quite the essays if you ask me. Especially the core one “What matters most to you and why?”. It took me weeks and weeks to write that essay. I sometimes come across my first versions of that essay and I can only laugh at them – it was quite the process. And even if you don’t get in, writing that essay is so worth it. 

First off, I want you to know that there isn’t anything that the admission office “wants to hear.” If you go into your essays with the attitude that you need to say things that they want to hear, you are off to a really bad start. Seriously, don’t think you need to show yourself as a humanitarian, or an entrepreneur, or a risk-taker or whatnot. Just don’t. 

What they want to learn about is you. The real you. You and no one else but you. 

I wrote my essay about how it matters most to me to live a live beyond my circumstances and to inspire others to do the same. I know others who wrote about their families, about running, about all sorts of things. There is no mold, there is no right way. 

The best way is to write about yourself. About the things that make you, you. The things that keep you going. The “whys” behind your “whats” (your whats are listed on your resume, so don’t waste time recounting those) – but do talk about what drove you to make the decisions you made. Show your true you. Make yourself vulnerable, but stay authentic. Make sure it reflects your tone, and not the tone of anyone else. 

The one thing I always like to say to folks who ask me about the essay is: it’s not about who you are – all applicants are great and awesome in their own ways – but it’s about can you show who you are. I repeat: can you show who you are? The real question is if you can actually show who you are. If you can open up and dissect yourself with that essay and help an outsider see the whys behind your whats. 

Recommendation letters

By the way .. in your essays, don’t talk about your accomplishments. Don’t sing your own praises, let your recommenders sing your praises. It’s tempting to write about how much of a big deal you are, but it’s much more credible if others do that. 

So my key advise for recommendation letters is to ask folks who can best talk about you. At its core, what matters more is how authentically and accurately they can talk about you, not what title or what school’s MBA is attached to their name. Sure, you might not wanna ask your tennis teacher who taught you for 10 years as a teenager, but someone who can talk about you because he/she got to know you really well – the more recent the better. I ended up choosing my then current manager and my former director with whom I had worked very closely and who were able to provide deep insight into how I think and perform. 

If the person you are choosing is someone who asks you to write the letter for them to sign, you are most definitely choosing the wrong person. That said, I did send some notes to my recommenders, letting them know about the content of my essays and asking them to focus on certain periods of our interactions that I thought would be most beneficial for the admission officers to know about (and to ensure that there is no significant overlap between my recommenders with both of whom I worked simultaneously at some point). But again, this is very basic guidance and you wanna make sure you don’t do more than that. 

The waitlist and my second application

People love to ask about what my waitlist experience was like and how my second application differed from my first one. Let me talk about the waitlist first.

The waitlist was a massive pain. In my mind, I was either expecting a yes or a no, not a maybe. But there it was, maybe. And then again 6 weeks later. And then one more time 6 weeks after that, until a few weeks after that I was “finally” rejected (yes, it felt a bit like a relief after all that waiting). I was not ready for that torturous waiting. So after each time they told me I am on the waitlist, I allowed myself to send them an email with all noteworthy changes and updates (I got a promotion, I started a new project, etc.). After two of such emails, I decided to step things up and got a professional camera studio to do a 90-secon clip. Two days after submitting that video, I got turned down. Now I don’t think it was related to the video, but what I hope it shows you that you can do your very very best, and it might still not be enough – keep that in mind.

And about my second application, the content of my essays didn’t really change that much. I was still the same person with the same things that mattered to me. But I did allow myself to go into even further depth. So I dug deeper and deeper (that was about a 10% change to my essay). Another 10% change to my essay came around the fact that I now had a story that many other applicants didn’t have: I had applied, was waitlisted, was gut-wrenchingly rejected and decided to reapply. I figured that’s something that only I can talk about and that would make me unique, so I spent another 10% of my essay talking about that experience. 

I can’t tell you what got me in. Again, there wasn’t significant difference in my applications from one year to the other, but things just worked out. Right timing is a big component that is not in your hands. 

Interviews

I was fortunate to go through two interviews (for each year that I applied). My first interview was very standard. A senior VP of a tech company, met at his home, we talked for 60 minutes, he asked me 10 behavioral questions, we connected super well on a particular mutual friend, and I later learned he gave his thumbs up. But I still didn’t get in. 

The second year around, I met the interviewer (it’s always an alum btw) at his office. He started off saying he will only have two main question for me. Both of them were behavioral, and we spent about 30 minutes on each of those. For example, one was about “a time when I clashed with my manager”… yet the amazing thing about that interview was that instead of giving me 5-6 minutes to provide a prepared answer, we spent 30 minutes on it. And we went deep, super deep. He would push me, question me, challenge me. And there is no prep in the world I could have made to give him rehearsed answers. He was really able to access “my thinking DNA.” It felt both vulnerable but also amazing that I was able to show so much of my real self to him – independent of whether he liked it or not. We then spent another 30 minutes talking about business school and life in general. Loved the guy. 

Ah, one more thing about interviews, I got my interview invitations at the end of that 2-3 week window during which they send out invitations. Don’t read too much into it if you get your invite towards the end. I think they send those invitations on a rolling basis. 

Final thoughts

I don’t wanna get into the topic of whether “business school is the right thing for you” – I feel that merits a whole separate blog post (not that I would ever be able to answer that question for anyone out there, you need to know), but happy to share thoughts. 

If you have any questions about what I wrote, please leave behind a comment and I will respond to it as soon as I can. I want to highlight once more that all the thoughts I shared here are reflecting my own and that I do not represent Stanford’s admission office in any way. 

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Finding happiness in misery

There is a Chinese saying that goes 否极泰来 (pǐ jí tài lái). It roughly translates as “out of the depth of misfortune comes bliss” or “the good emerges when the evil has reached its extreme.” Which in essence isn’t that different from some of the English sayings like “after rain there’s a rainbow.”

Now the reason why I wanted to write about it is because I have found a lot of meaning in it. It’s something I tell myself whenever things are not going well in my life. It’s this constant reminder that most things in life have a cyclical pattern. That a low is followed by a high, and that a high is often followed by a low. 

So what happens is that whenever I go through times of despair or misery, instead of ignoring my pain, I own it. I fully acknowledge that I’m feeling shitty and I give myself the right to feel that way. After all I’m not a machine, but a human being that is capable of feeling a wide range of emotions – the good and the bad. 

But at the same time, I remind myself that it’s all cyclical and that whatever is gonna happen next, it’s probably gonna be better than what I am experiencing now. So while I am embracing my pain, I also start to feel excitement for what is going to come next. Sure, I don’t know what that’s going to be, but chances are it’s gonna be something good. Chances are that in a few days from now, I will smile again and be happy. 

Anticipating what is going to come next helps put the pain of the now into perspective and mitigate it. It shifts my mental energy into an area of forward-looking anticipation and hope. And before I know it, I’m in a situation of misery, but I am already feeling excitement of all the good things that are going to happen next. "Sure, I’m going through some tough shit, but hey, a lot of amazing things are soon going to crash into my life and that’s kinda exciting”

The danger of this way of thinking is when someone starts to think it reversely. Meaning that when one goes through times of happiness, instead of being present in that moment, they start worrying about whatever bad thing might happen next – merely on basis of the cyclical pattern of life. Basically allowing worry to be the thief of joy. However, I certainly hope it has a different effect. That one appreciates good times more because chances are that those times won’t last forever. 

We all might be familiar with that saying, but I doubt we all are capable to stare into misery and defy it with a smile and a sense of excitement for all the good things that are going to follow. But that’s exactly the way I hope to deal with my own moments of misery going forward. 

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Not knowing where I'm going

In many ways, I was always hoping that during my time at the GSB I would magically find out the answer to the question of what I want to do with my life. Truth is that I didn’t. I tried many different things, but the answer never came. At least it never came in one piece – it never “hit” me. 

While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I did see some of my classmates being laser-focused on certain career paths, industries or professions, and then go all in – making the best use of the Stanford network and resources. Some were interested in education for example and optimized their classes and time accordingly. Others knew from the beginning they wanted to build a venture, so they worked tirelessly on start-up ideas and networked with VCs up and down Sand Hill Road. And in many ways I somewhat wish I had the chance to do the same. To be more intentional about my education there. 

While the answer never came in one piece, it did come in form of little pieces. Like puzzle pieces that would help me complete a picture that is still a piece "work in progress." In hindsight, the GSB wasn’t a time of finding out what I wanted to do, but more a time of trying out different things and realizing what I did not want to do.

I tried working on a travel start-up and realized it didn’t feel authentic. I took an in-depth class on Private Equity and disliked it. I worked with a professor on building an investment thesis for Iran and realized that my love for Iran isn’t strong enough for me to pursue a career there. I went to work in Venture Capital and while it felt intellectually stimulating, it just didn’t fulfill me. On the other hand, I found myself loving the language classes I was taking. I loved my summer in South East Asia and decided to spend more of my future career in Asia. 

So, yes, I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about the things I love and and the things I don’t love.

One thing that school showed me is that when you don’t know where you are headed, you need to test your ideas and then make quick go/no-go decisions. That way, I was able to fend off stupid ideas that in hindsight only seemed interesting in that moment, and I was able to identify passions of mine that shined through over and over again. 

With each of these go/no-go decisions, the picture gained more clarity. And with more clarity, the more meaningful and intentional became the decisions that I made as a result. Like I was gaining increased visibility over the path that I am on. 

After these two years of trying a lot of things and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, I realized that I would rather want to be on a heck of journey and see where it takes me than follow the directions to a destiny that I already know. With that, yes, I am still figuring sh*t out, but instead of worrying about where each decision is taking me, I try to enjoy all the turns – and wrong turns – I am making. 

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Having a bias for action

The most flattering thing ever said to me is that I “not only talk the talk, but I also walk the talk.” I couldn’t make such sense of it at first, but over time I saw what people meant.

Whenever I come across something I like, or develop a new idea that get excited about, I just go and do it. If I really want it, I don’t let anyone or anything come in between. There are no excuses that hold me back or obstacles that deter me from pursuing what I set my mind on. In fact, I can’t think of anything in my life that I really wanted to do, but didn’t go out and do. Not saying I always succeeded, but I tried.

I live my life with a strong bias for action, and in the following I hope to encourage you to do the same. 

What do I mean with having a bias for action? 

It means that you – shocker – actually go and do what you feel you want to do. That if a crazy idea comes across your mind, you don’t fall into “let me come up with 193 reasons why this is not going to work” mode, but you go and make it work.

At the very least you give it a shot. And even if it doesn’t work out, you feel shitload of pride for having given it a shot, but above it all, you proved to yourself, and to the world, that the ideas that cross your mind, don’t just end up in a graveyard of ideas that never find fruition. 

So what’s keeping us from having a bias for action in our lives? Society does. 

The other day I came across the example of Huntington Hartford, who had inherited a fortune of $90M and spent $80 of that "chasing his dreams in the Bahamas.” He then passed away in 2008 at the age of 97. Yet instead of celebrating the fact that he spent his fortunate on pursuing his dreams, outlets like the NYTimes portrayed his life as a failure.

The way how his life was reported on is telling of how society expects us to behave. Our character is more often measured in our net worth than in our actions. Life is often deemed successful when we have more at the end than what we started with, not on basis of how much we explored, experienced, or put into action. As a recent HBR article pointed out: "We say “you can’t take it with you” but we be­have and judge as though you can."

This is the culture we live in, one that puts safety ahead of satisfaction. One that emphasizes the have to over the want to. One in which we are perpetually subjected to expectations. Expectations that suffocate our creative ideas and dreams, and that burry them underneath all the musts and have dos – societal expectations of what is the "right thing to do." 

What else is keeping us from doing what we want? Ourselves. 

We are probably our biggest enemy when it comes to living out our dreams and living with a bias for action. So many things we want to do, and so many more excuses we find not to do it. 

I have never done this before, I don’t have time, I don’t know the right people, what if I screw up, English isn’t my first language, oh, I just do it later. If there is one thing we are all really good at, it’s finding reasons to say no. 

Yet turns out life doesn’t get easier as we get older. Things get more complicated, our responsibilities pile up, and as we build families, we will have less and less time for ourselves. The sooner we start taking action on what matters to us, the more satisfaction will we achieve in our lives. 

Don’t let your fears and excuses prevent you from taking actions on the things you want to do now. Don’t spend your life making decisions, take actions. There is no better time to do it than now. Some of us spend their lives making up their minds, and then we die with songs unsung. The music is in us, but we don’t let it out.

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Chasing the lives of others

Today was the last lecture of my all-time favorite class at the GSB, called MGE (Managing Growing Enterprises). While it’s taught by number of instructors here at the school, I ended up taking the section taught by David Dodson and Graham Weaver – two incredible human beings. 

In his closing speech, David made a comment which perfectly summed up thinking pattern that I had been observing in myself and others for the past few months. He urged us to "not chase the lives of the other 406 people in our class."

Now this something that everyone might easily agree with. Why would you chase another person’s life, right? But if you are anything like me, I am sure you have found yourself in a position in which you compared your life and your decisions with the life and decisions of others. This is particularly tempting in an environment in which everyone is ambitious and constantly pushing their limits to new heights. 

You might see a classmate get into a management trainee program at a hardware company, and you suddenly wonder if you should also be joining that trainee program or the hardware space is what you should actually be focusing on. You see your friend decide to start a business in the healthcare space, and you ask yourself whether you should also work in that industry. 

What bothers me about this mode of thinking is that instead of listening to yourself and trying to figure out what the real right path for you is, you are rather looking at what other people have decided is right for them, and then try to emulate it. Basically you are copy/pasting their path onto yours. I even come across the career advise to find people whose career you admire and then try to "make similar decisions."

Now I don’t have any problem with finding inspiration in the decisions of others. If your friend started a successful podcast, you might also want to do the same. If a classmate is moving to China because they think it’s a promising market to work in, then maybe this is something that could also be of interest to you. But the important differentiation is that you, too, need to want to do it. And not just because you saw your friend or classmate doing it.

The bigger point I am trying to make here is that I believe that each human being on this earth has their own unique universe-given path to follow. And that it is a thousand times more important to figure out what your plan is than trying to see if other people’s life plans could work for you. 

To tie this back into David's comment about the students in my class, the 407 of us got into the Class of 2017 for everything that made us unique. And I hope that each of us continues to pursue their own unique path going forward.

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Understanding (and Questioning) our Beliefs

I have always been quite fascinated with the beliefs we hold as humans and how they carry us through our lives. All the things we believe in – where do they originate from and how are they shaped over time? 

One of the most powerful stories I have heard that made me understand how detrimental or beneficial our beliefs can be, is a Chinese fable about a farmer. 

A farmer and his son had a beloved stallion who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbors exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild mares back to the farm as well. The neighbors shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the mares and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The villagers cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all the able-bodied boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, still recovering from his injury. Friends shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

What I found so powerful about this story is how the farmer is able to separate his emotional responses from the incident as such. While everyone else held the belief that something was particularly good or bad, he didn’t allow himself to make such judgement because he decided to not hold that same belief.

Most of us go through life under the delusion that it is certain people, situations, or events that make us sad, anxious or angry. When you’re irritated by a colleague at the next desk who won’t stop talking, you naturally assume that the colleague is the source of the irritation. When your flight has a massive delay, you surely surmise that the airline is the source of your misfortune. 

If you look closer at your experiences though, you will eventually be forced to conclude that none of those experiences is negative in itself. Indeed, nothing outside your own mind can properly be described as negative or positive at all. What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.

The colleague is not irritating per se, but because of your belief that getting your work finished without interruption is an important goal. The airline is not source of your misfortune, but it’s your belief that you are entitled to be arriving somewhere at a certain time. 

If you didn’t judge interruptions to be bad, would you be annoyed by it? Obviously not. If you didn’t put so much value on being on time, would you allow yourself to be so consumed by it? Surely not. As Shakespeare made Hamlet say: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” 

This is the mechanism of how stress arises. Even losing your home and your job or a loved one, from this perspective, is not a negative event in itself. In itself, it’s merely an event. To which you might respond: but what if it really is bad? Lacking a home and an income, you might perish from starvation or exposure. Surely that would be bad? But the same relentless logic applies. What makes the prospect of starvation or exposure distressing in the first place? The beliefs that you hold about the disadvantages of death. 

I am not trying to argue that these things are not distressful events that can have far-reaching consequences in your life. My goal is merely dissecting the beliefs we hold and hopefully help you understand that judgements are in our power, and that our emotions are determined by our judgements.

We can always step back and ask: is it other people/situations/events that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people/situations/events?

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