Being around strivers
Fair to say that most of us on this board are strivers to an extent. By striver, I mean someone who is smart, driven, and sets goals for him to achieve. In other words, someone who is striving to achieve a certain end. Being around these types of people can be good because they motivate you to raise your game. After all, hanging around losers who are going nowhere in life is probably not going to help you to stay motivated and hungry.
There is a downside, however. Sometimes it can arouse your overly competitive spirit, insecurities, and other negative feelings. Human nature I guess. For example, I recently joined the fundraising board of a nonprofit group that I'm actively involved in. We had a team BBQ to kick off the new year. Initially we discussed our fundraising goals and then proceeded to play some ice breakers, cook food, and socialize. The board is almost entirely young professionals who went to top schools, have pretty good jobs, and a lot of them are applying to top business schools this year, including myself. A number of people started talking about MBA admissions, a topic I despise discussing in public, and things got a bit obnoxious.
One guy who works at a top PE firm (pretty much all of their associates get into HBS/Stanford) said out loud, "yeah i only applied to HBS. it's harvard or bust for me." When i called him out he replied, "well i have a freaking awesome resume, so i'm definitely getting in." Now to be fair, he had about 9 drinks that night, so he was fairly drunk, but a person's inner self does tend to come out when there is alcohol in their system.
Needless to say, although i look forward to working on the board, future social events with these people might get awkward. I'm worried that if I don't get into a top 5 b-school and everyone else does, they would look down on me and not take me seriously as their co-equal. And of course, I could not help but feel envy when they start talking about their acceptances while i would have to stay quiet if i don't get in. It's a crappy feeling, similar to the way an average looking woman would feel at a party surrounded by victoria's secret models.
Avoid people who are retarded enough to base their opinion of somebody on the school they went to?
EDIT: Unless you can use them / they have a banging body
Out of curiousity, how old are you OP? I think when you start to have some achievements under your belt, the school you went to becomes less relevant (for better or worse, depending on what you accomplish after finishing school).
Double
This is Brady4MVP everyone.
You lack confidence in yourself and you need to read the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
1.) If they were truly successful, they would not need b-school. My understanding is that STAL never got a "pedigree" or an MBA and is killing it as a trader. Those are the truly special people in life.
2.) Life is not some game where you have to beat everyone else. I would argue it's not even some production possibility curve where you are somehow doomed if someone holds an absolute advantage. (Though it is always nice to be able to claim to yourself you hold a combination of skills nobody else has.)
3.) This kid has set himself up as HBS being his to lose rather than (for 99% of the population) his to win.
4.) Might be a good idea to find better friends. Extreme sports usually have a very unique cross-section of the population and there is less room for douchiness. My hang gliding instructor is a bus-driver in the off-season. And most of the guys who are at the top of their game in the extreme sports have five figure jobs with lots of flexibility and downtime. Something to think about.
5.) If you have a state school or non-target background, and you do get into some M7 school, you will be the same person and carry the same values, but people will look at you differently. Those kids from Cornell you used to hate on because you thought they thought they were better than you? Now they think you think you're better than them. And some of them will turn out to be much better than you. So all we can really do is strive for a world where we are judged based on what we accomplish rather than our pedigree.
Oh well, this is IlliniProgrammer on his fourth beer.
Good stuff Illini. These guys aren't my friends yet, but we will be working very closely together in the coming year and socialize a ton. I'm actually pretty excited.
Hard to explain, but in a group of overachievers, there is a silent sense of competition, whereby people are measuring each other. It comes in the form of innocuous questions such as, "where did you go to undergrad?," "what kind of work are you doing?" "where are you applying to b-schools?" Now I went to a pretty damm good undergrad so not insecure on that front at all. But it would be really embarrassing come next spring when the guys/gals on my board are talking about heading off to hbs/stanford, and i end up having to go to berkeley haas, for example. Fairly or unfairly they will think, "oh he's only going to haas? holy shit, he must have fucked up. what the hell happened?" What makes it worse is that almost everyone who served on this board, who went to b-schools in the last few years, ended up at hbs/stanford/wharton/kellogg/booth.
Why do you care what they think? Remember HBS isn't the be all, end all, after an MBA you are still very early in your career. There are plenty of wealthy people who never went to HBS, Wharton or even got inside the Ivory Tower in any sense of the word. I know a guy worth more than 100 mm, he's a high school grad, he owns his own company, do you think he is mad because he didn't go to HBS?
No, Mr. Reagan, you probably wouldn't have.
Well, when you are a successful two-term president who transformed the trajectory of this country, yeah, his undergrad would not have led to a better outcome.
I think college brand matters more now than ever before. Access to desirable professions are increasingly being outsourced to the admissions officers in cambridge, new haven, princeton, palo alto. I actually think that if one looks at the Forbes 400 list 20-30 years from now, we will see a very high % of ivy/mit/stanford alums, certainly far higher than now. And there will be much fewer self-made billionaires.
The best line was some dickhead reporter asked him if it's true that he was a C student in school. Reagan nods and says "imagine what I could have done had I got all A's..."
I am in a graduate program in one of those cities, and well over half of the people I meet here have state school undergraduate degrees- and truly incredible research or industry backgrounds.
Oh, I've been there. And I think I was happiest when I refused to participate in that- I hope you have that option. My goal in life isn't to beat everyone else. It's to get the human experience. And it's to help the people around me to achieve their goals.
When I retire, I only have four requirements:
1.) A 60 acre farm on one of the Great Lakes 2.) A Ford Mustang Convertible (Ideally the original 1964 Lee Iacocca model) 3.) Air conditioning 4.) A nearby place to go hang gliding.
1.) Why do you need b-school?2.) I don't think questions about undergrad are as loaded as you think. I did my undergrad at Illinois. I'm damn proud of it. You probably also went to a great school and I'm sure you're proud of it too.
3.) Undergrad is really a question about your set of experiences. If you went to a small liberal arts school like Colgate, Bates, or Yale, you got one set of experiences. If you went to a large state research institution like Berkeley, UMich, or Wisconsin, you had a much different experience. The same goes with your major.
4.) If things don't work out, you can always go be a car mechanic. Most of them are happier than bankers, anyway. That was always my Plan B.
Look, you are free to stay on the prestige/overachiever treadmill if you really want. After high school, the folks who were still stuck on it just seemed shallow to me. They didn't know what they wanted out of life; all they knew is that they wanted what a bunch of other people wanted. They were also a lot of fun to troll. (One person was over the moon that she got into UPenn and would always get pissed off when I said it was a great state school. This was when I was a state-schooler, of course.)
Roughly 60 billion human beings have walked the earth over the past ten million years. Maybe 300,000 have seen the inside of an underwater cave first-hand. 30,000 have flown a hang glider and gotten roughly the same experience a bird gets. And out of 60 billion people, one person has safely landed a wingsuit from a skydive without a parachute.
Meanwhile, probably a million people have graduated from Harvard over the past 400 years. Same with Yale, Princeton, Wharton, Oxford, and Cambridge. And though MIT, Stanford, and Chicago aren't quite there yet, they're kinda in that same category. Millions and millions of people have "prestige". Only a select few human beings, usually without college degrees, can do aerobatics in a wingsuit.
The human experience is not some prestige death march. But that is what a lot of folks are stuck on. Sometimes, I worry I'm stuck on it too, being back in school right now. Then I go hang gliding.
King of Capital & Competitive Individuals (Originally Posted: 01/23/2011)
Folks,
Currently reading King of Capital - Schwarzman's story at Blackstone. Enjoying it on and off. Some parts are very interesting. Some parts are boring (chapter 15 & 16).
Schwarzman, the author says, is a very competitive individual. There are some not-so-positive angles to it (e.g. impatience, below average people skills, control orientation, tendency to setup everything as a win or loose race etc) but let's ignore them for time being...
My goal is to be able to identify such an individual when I come across her/him. That would help me work better with her/him.
1) What are some of the salient positive characteristics/habits of competitive individuals ? 2) Where can I get more info about competitive individuals ? 3) Any books ? 4) If you can give examples - you had a colleague who acted in a highly competitive fashion in a specific situation and what happened next.
Thanks,
V
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