APURVA HENDIThere are two periods in my life, the period before February 2020 and the period after. Plainly, what I am trying to say is that last month has been conclusively different from the rest of my life. Most moments of this period have been very uncomfortable for me. And even though I don’t know the outcome (yet), which is really all I’ve been working for, I have come to realize that I have already won this game. I decided to write about it because it is not another success story where a certain Goal X ought to be reached in Period Y and with some ups and downs, it finally happens or not, and lessons to be learned are in order. It is about moments of epiphany, on the way to the path of success/failure. I should also tell you what this is not about - it’s not about the outcome or the success of my GMAT, it’s not a sob story or my attempt at taking the sting off the pent up GMAT pressure. If there’s anything I’ve learned well in the last few weeks, it is to think critically and reason out, so I’m going to do just that and produce substantial evidence and grounds for calling myself a winner even before the decision day.
Off of the many times that I thought about my career and future, a rather serious one struck me and stuck with me around 2 years ago and that’s when I first decided that I wanted to get into a top b-school in 2020. Let’s call this Plan A. Additionally, I went on to declare it to my father so it was set it was stone. Let's call this Event A. So life happened and as it turned out, I hadn’t been putting in the required work even though I realized what I had signed up for. Soon, it all boiled down to the fact that I lacked the courage to sacrifice my comfortable lifestyle and study for the GMAT. The constant excuse I gave myself was that I had a bad good habit of doing everything perfectly well and if I couldn’t have it like that then I may as well just wait until I “feel” like it. This marks the birth of procrastination in this story. For those of you who know me, you’ll know that I procrastinated taking the test until now (one and a half years later) when Uber decided to do me a favor and lay me off. (It’s not as bad as it sounds. If you have to know, the company got acquired by Zomato in an all-stock deal and none of the employees were absorbed by Zomato and thank god for that). This was, I quote “a blessing in disguise”. Rightly so because it gave me the luxury of time without having to really account for it as a break that I took to pursue Plan A. The ones who care about holding an exceptional CV will agree with me here.
The last 20 odd days have given me everything I’ve wanted for the last one and a half years - disappear from society, stay home, put in the hours, study for GMAT, have my me-time, take a break, workout and overall be super productive. While it seemed doable, it really wasn’t. Not at first. It was very different. The routine was what I created, the schedule was what I made of it, I decided the amount of work to be put in in a day. Was it good enough? Was it sufficient? I couldn’t tell. There wasn’t a team, a penalty, a boss, or a 2020 planning committee present for me to conveniently point fingers at, had things gone south. It was all me and my plan to make Plan A work. It was overwhelming - the vast concepts, the lack of time to practice, the discouragement from the mock scores and more importantly from people. My first and biggest problem was a lack of focus. The last time I studied anything was 3 years back, during engineering. It also doesn’t help that I haven’t really been the best student. I couldn’t sit in a place for more than 30 mins and focus on a topic. And the whole deal was about single-minded focus to learn some and practice more. I tried having a couple of Red Bulls, a bunch of coffees, popping Modafinil to stay up and study more. The only thing they were successful in is ruining my sleep cycle. So in two weeks of this routine, I started functioning on the Eastern Standard Time, probably the only other thing that is remotely in sync with my American b-school goal, other than binge-watching House of Cards whilst eating Almond Roca.
Now that I was pressed for time, I had to fix this problem and fix it quickly for I had about 2 weeks left before my test day. To help myself, I decided to stay up for all 24 hours and sleep at a time that will help me rise at an early AM. For a change, I succeeded. I started rising early, putting in the most productive hours in the morning, taking an afternoon nap and then pacing it out during the rest of the day. I ensured that no matter at what time I slept, I rose early every single day from then on because it worked for me. 'Besabariyan' was my morning anthem. I even tried focused breathing exercises to promote focus and it was all kind of set in motion. I couldn’t complain. While things had started to look up here, during other times, I used to let my mind wander and negate all the positivity; I would look up - different permutations and combinations of Verbal and Quant raw scores and set high expectations for myself, current MBA candidates from my favorite b-schools and feel like I haven’t done anything to deserve that, that I don’t have any ‘aukaat’ for it. I would constantly compare my mock scores with other people’s best scores and feel bogged down, even though I realized it wasn’t fair. And the times I did do well on mocks, I would dissect the results and tell myself that the test scores were inflated due to repetition. My mind had soon come to be an address to all my worst fears. Someone who had said that I suck at Math, another who had said that a kid could do better than I, the little voice in my head that said that I am mediocre and that I probably don’t have it in me - all of us resided in my mind, quite comfortably, doing our jobs, until one night.
One night, while I was crossing off the present date on the calendar that I had made for myself, I noticed an ancient note that I had stuck on my wardrobe sometime after Event A (roughly about a year ago). It was a self-fashioned sticky note with three bullet points reading:
* Rise at 5 AM, every day
* 1 hour of GMAT, every day
* Breathing exercises before sleeping, every day
Well, you don’t have to be a genius to guess that this is my documentary, corroborative evidence, and proof, telling me that I had already won. I had had one of my biggest breakthroughs, collaterally. And this, I can tell is mightier than my probable best score because this is going to stay with me for a long time. It was the conscious arduous, uncomfortable situations that I put myself into and the obsession of refusing to give up until it felt like second nature, that worked.
While I agree that this may be sacrilege for all early risers, for the ones who have taken the test and done well, or not, for the ones who went to b-school without thinking so much, or writing an article about it, each of our struggles is different. And unique. And it is up to us, to be honest with ourselves and recognize, acknowledge, and give ourselves credit when it’s due. I still have a couple of days before D-Day and I haven’t really lost my mind yet knowing that this may not be my only attempt. But it sure empowers me to know that it is going to be my best attempt and for what it’s worth, it has already given me a gift that won’t stop giving, for a long time. What I keep telling myself these days is something I read somewhere (and it couldn’t come at a better time in my life) “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re probably right”.