homebody

Despite the ~40% decline in productivity, there is something to be said about making powerpoint slides to the tune of mother cooking up a storm and sister recapping the latest learned show choir song and dance. And yes my baby sister is officially cooler than me, she’s in the high school glee club y'all.

Alas its back to the Boston and the office tomorrow. Until December then, Ohio.

year 1 lessons

I came across a HBR article the other day entitled “You’re Probably Not Very Good at Most Things.” Initial thought – Harvard with a dose of humility at last! But on second glance, actually quite a simple and useful piece of advice for work and life.

A bit of history here. Prior to starting my first year at Duke, I diligently took some of my father’s well-meaning advice and enrolled in the Pratt School of Engineering. Duke’s many glossy brochures advertised a very reputable BME program, and engineering seemed to be a great complement to my pre-med courses as I prepared for a career in medicine. My boyfriend at the time scoffed at these plans – not that he didn’t think I could do it (he was quick to clarify), it was just that he somehow couldn’t picture me as an engineer. I had never indicated that I was ever interested in “that kind of stuff,” by which he referred to anything math, technology, or computer related. Stubborn as I am, this reaction quickly prompted a fierce determination to prove him wrong. I was going to be an engineer, and I was going to love it, damnit.

No big surprise, the girl who always preferred books to math homework realized she hated engineering and quickly defected to philosophy – but not before a grueling and painful year of trying to prove that I could like and be good at something I had no interest in, simply because I let my ego get in the way of being happy – that I could do the biggest, baddest, and hardest thing I could find, until I realized that though it may have been hard for everyone, it wasn’t all that bad for people who actually liked it. 

Which brings me to my recent decision to join Bain’s private equity group – again, the biggest, baddest, “most hard-core” work that you can do as a Bain AC. (We even have little black flags to pin up at our desks to indicate how cool we are). I have about 3 more months of the rotation to go, and I predict I will look back and recognize that I certainly learned a lot through the process. However, it has not made for my happiest days at work, and sometimes I wonder if that trade off is a smart one to make. Through less risky for a short term project, the stakes are certainly much higher when you are talking about an entire career.

That is all a lot of preamble to get to the point of the article - which is that no matter who you are (yes, Harvard students included), you are probably good at a few things, and quite bad at a lot of things. Quite simply, you should figure out what it is that you are good at, and go do it independently of what other people consider to be “baller” (read: banker/private equity/hedge fund slave) or “legit” (read: super esoteric engineering phd student discovering the next sub atomic particle). Because being good at something highly correlates with actually liking it, and that with being happy (and being happy is actually pretty great).