AlexMBAApply wrote:
Not sure why this is surprising for some people.
Whether you have an MBA or not, you're still a human being who grows and changes over time. You have a partner/spouse. You have kids. Or if you have neither, you may want them down the road. Or if you don't, you may want to fill your life with something else aside from work. For some people, their careers are their passion and first love - for most people, it ends up being a day job. And MBA types are no different in the long-term when it comes to that. People's priorities change over time - you're NOT going to want to be a whippersnapper corporate career climber forever. Trust me on this.
A lot of MBA students and recent grads will fawn over McKinsey, private equity, blah blah blah. 10+ years later, most of these very MBAs will no longer care. No one is ranking their schools, obsessing over compensation stats, talking like a resume, etc. For most people, the preoccupation with prestige, compensation vs. peers, etc is a temporary thing. If at that point you're all about career - great. If you're all about family, great. If you're still at McKinsey, no one is going to worship you. If you're no longer at some Super Prestigious Firm, no one is really going to think less of you. So long as you're happy or making do with what you have - that sense of having to benchmark yourself vs your peers goes away.
Insightful and very well said Alex! I so agree with you. Maintaning the right balance is an art that I am learning to master. I also agree with therockobama:
therockobama wrote:
I think in the end, nobody, including you, will really care which school you went to or which companies you led; the only thing you, and probably others, will remember is the quality of life that you "lived."
There is saying in Marathi, "Ati thethe maati" literally means anything excess is dirt, and could mean that if you do anything in excess, you will spoil everything. I remember this saying since 3rd grade...
I also remember one of my classmates in middle school who unce brilliantly noted that "the superabundance of every performance is detrimental to the performer". Although his goal was to sound smarter than the rest of us --which he probably was -- I've never forgotten those words as they continue to be relevant even till this day. Too much of everything is bad.