Wednesday, September 17, 2008

THE MOST EFFICIENT CONSTRUCTION COMPANY IN THE WORLD

With a title like that you must be wondering, what kind of construction company can become known as the most efficient construction company in the world. Well, somehow I seem to keep coming back to the same theme. It's the one in your head. That's right, it's known as your brain. The world around you, the life you have, your MBA opportunities, your business school career, essentially life as you've come to know it as a mental construct, created by energy and thought. Think about how fast things go from idea to inception in today's world. Think about how much has changed in just 10 years from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. The failure of Friendster resulted in the success of Myspace and Facebook. People can micro blog and tell you every detail of their life in on Twitter. The rate at which information transfers is something that was inconceivable a few years ago. Only something as efficient as your mind can construct and conceive such rapid innovation.

So, what does that have to do with my MBA intern position, business school career success, etc? If all of it is a mental construct created by energy and thought, that means that you can ultimately control how successful or unsuccessful you are in your business school career. It all really depends on what the focus of your life is on a daily basis. In the early part of my career I worked in sales and I spent about 80% of my time fearing that I wouldn't make quota and wouldn't have a job. That thought pattern carried over into other areas of my life, and needless to say it was a self-destructive pattern. If there's anything the first year of my MBA program taught me, it was how to control my focus and be aware of self-destructive thought patterns and tendencies.

The other night I had dinner with a high school friend who is now a doctor. When I asked her about residency she described some rather stressful experiences like trying perform a surgical procedure at 3am after no sleep, where one slip could cause somebody to die and nobody was there to help. She was an extremely mild mannered person in high school, but I could tell the experienced had actually made her quite a bit tougher, in a good way. So, I guess what the point is that life, your business school career, your MBA internships, and life in general will all throw curve balls at you, and it's not what happens but how you react to what happens that will determine your success as an MBA graduate

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