A Dilemma we all go through at some point in our life

Person1: Yaar, I am confused and can’t decide what career to pursue? Whether should I go for job or MBA or do research or something else?

Person2: Do MBA dude, make money and enjoy life!

Person3: Don’t think about just money alone. Money is not everything in life and does not necessarily bring happiness my friend. Life after MBA has its own problems and is full of stress and tension.

Person2: What non-sense are you talking? We are living in an 8% plus inflationary economy with prices of everything from food to petrol, house etc. going over the roof. And you’re suggesting not to think about money? And doing a job is full of misery rather than MBA. After an MBA you would be the boss and you can delegate work to people working under you. They will have to go through the stress and tension while you earn a fat salary.

Person3: You’re mistaken my friend. Even if you are the boss, you will be accountable to someone or the other. And your life will be mundane doing similar things day after day, listening to presentations, reading reports, writing reports and making presentations. Do some research, utilize your creativity and make a difference to the world.

Person1: This is not helping me clear my confusion.

Person2: Go for MBA dude!

Person3: Do research!

…

Making the right career choice is a dilemma we all go through at some point is our life. Most of us think of making more money with least possible effort and chose a career path accordingly but are neither happy nor satisfied with what we end up becoming. The right career path should be made by first identifying what is special about ourselves that we can do better than most of the people around and then being among the best in it. Money should not be the primary criteria to make this choice.

Don’t think about money! How can one be happy without enough money to live a descent life and having to compromise with your desires due to lack of enough money?

Money alone does not bring happiness. With a fat salary you will be happy only on the day you get your salary but rest of the time you may not enjoy your work. The key to have a good and enjoyable life is to first identify your uniqueness i.e. how are you different from rest from rest of the crowd? What skills and natural talent you posses which may not be with many other people and you enjoy doing them with your heart and mind together. Then identify an economic activity which utilizes those skills to the full and chose a career path accordingly. Money will come depending upon the criticality of your skills in industry or any other place you work i.e. how important that skill is and by the economics of that skill i.e. by the demand and supply of the people with that skill.

Then why not develop skills for an MBA and make lots of money? After all hard work is the key to success and you can develop your skills if you work hard.

Hard work alone cannot bring success. Every human being is different, with different likes and dislikes and different natural talent – something which you can naturally do much better than others and enjoy it too. God has created each one of us differently with something unique which we often never realize about ourselves. Like in the movie Tare Zameen Par; there are some skills and talent which we are gifted by God, but for a variety of reasons, never pursue them. So if we pursue these gifted skills and talents we would enjoy doing them and the determination to work hard for them would come effortlessly and naturally as we would do it with our heart and mind together. Working hard for some other skills would be more difficult as one part of our consciousness would be saying – “This is so boring! I don’t understand it! I am not enjoying it”. These thoughts will derail you determination and you would struggle to work hard. Hard work is important since without it you can’t do anything but hard work alone will not guarantee success and happiness. It’s like salt in your food. Without salt nothing can be tasty, but salt alone doesn’t make food tasty; you need different spices for different dishes to taste good which is like your natural talent and skill.

This entire god gifted natural talent thing is rubbish! If you work hard for MBA and earn lots of money you will be happy. Also, after facing so many tough competitive exams and finishing engineering, why should one stop short of MBA? Why would one like to be bossed around by someone who didn’t work hard for engineering but becomes your boss by doing an MBA?

Lets answer that one at a time. If you are doing MBA for money alone, then there are better career options. An MBA would fetch you a salary of say 1 crore, on the other hand playing cricket can fetch you 6 crores before the start of the tournament (IPL). Worse still instead of studying for CAT / GMAT and you may mug up the books till fifth standard and get 5 crore (Kya Aap Panchvi Pass Se Tez Hain). The point behind bringing out such examples is to state that money is like fashion, it will change from time to time and from one career option to other. The amount of money you make in a career is determined by the skills required for excelling in that career, how critical those skills are or what is the demand of that skill, how much money is disposable for people with that skill and what is the supply of the people with that skill. In context of cricket, you need people with good cricketing skills and who are great crowd puller, so that advertising companies are willing to pay any absurd amount of money. If tomorrow something else becomes more popular or cricket becomes less popular, all the money will flow somewhere else. Similar is the case with MBA, engineering or any other skill based careers. If there is more demand for people with such skills more money will be paid to them and if the economic scenario changes salaries will go down. Thus running after one career option or the other based only on monetary considerations is an absurd idea which will neither make you happy nor satisfied. Every skill based career option has enough money for having descent and sustainable living standard depending upon the criticality, demand and supply of those skills. Thus as I said earlier, it is of paramount importance to identify you own uniqueness, natural talent and skills and choose career options based on that. Money will definitely come by as you would naturally enjoy working hard to excel in your chosen career. Now coming to the second question of being bossed around by somebody who didn’t work hard for engineering but becomes your boss by doing MBA, this thought itself reflects one’s ego which is a detrimental quality in the long run. One must face the reality, especially in industry that different skills are required for the overall success of a company and these may have different levels of significance. Engineering requires certain set of skills and Managerial work requires skills different from that of engineering and at the same time they may be very crucial. Engineering requires in-depth technical knowledge for solving problems with known solutions which need to be engineered or optimized for a given situation whereas Managerial work requires superficial understanding of a wide range of topics for sound decision making. Being a good engineer does not necessarily mean being a good manager as that requires a different set of skills. And also, hard work is not an engineer’s monopoly. Every human being is capable of working hard. What differentiates the results from person to person is again his or her natural talent. Working hard for MBA may give one a 1 crore salary, but similar efforts on cricket field can get someone like M S Dhoni (who doesn’t even have B-Com degree yet) a cool 6 crores before the start of IPL. Same is the case of a non-engineer becoming a manager if he or she has the required skills and can work hard to develop them.

Then how to know what skills one posses?

This is precisely the purpose of our education system which is almost never understood nor realized. Our education system from schooling to college and beyond is supposed to recognize the skills and natural talents of the students and nurture them so that they can develop them in a professional manner. The choices at different stages; whether to take science, commerce or arts after 10th; whether to go for engineering, medicine, commerce or arts after 12th; whether to go for job, research, MBA, Entrepreneurship or something else after graduation etc. should be made based on your interest and whether you naturally posses the skills prerequisite for these career paths and whether you enjoy them. (Some of you may be revolting with the slogan – “I was born intelligent and education ruined me” but it is your choices which are the cause of this problem which are in most of the cases forced upon us for a variety of reasons). The unfortunate truth is that at almost all stages these decisions are made keeping in mind future monitory prospects, social status and prestige and pressure by your parents and peers and many a times your fate and circumstances which gives you little or no choice. So many of us end-up being forced to take up engineering, because of better monetary prospects and then forced again into MBA for the higher salaries. Off course money is important, but this should not be the first consideration in choosing a career path, it can and should be a secondary consideration. The first consideration has to be your interest and your natural talent as this is what will sustain your growth in the long run. Choosing a path purely on monitory consideration will probably make you happy on the day you get your salary but if you don’t have the interest and don’t enjoy it, you’ll be cursing yourself and the system around you for your miseries and unhappiness. In the long run, if you have chosen a career path which is not of your interest, you will have a constantly nagging regretful thought of not having done something which you liked and enjoyed from the bottom of your heart; and this “friction” will constantly de-motivate you and will keep retarding your efforts in you chosen career. Choosing your career path based on your interest and natural talent causes a chain reaction – your interest motivates you to excel in your chosen path and your natural talent makes you work hard effortlessly. Once you are among the best in your chosen career, you command respect from your peers and by people who wish to employ you and will give you money based on your standing and what is economically feasible i.e. criticality, demand and supply of your skills. Success and eventually money will come if you are among the best in what you are good at i.e. your natural talent. If you are good in sports and enjoy it, especially cricket, then instead of torturing yourself with 4 years of engineering and 2 years of rigorous imprisonment of b-schools and earning a mere 1 crore salary in some investment bank (which may be at the risk of being closed down); play cricket and work hard to be among the best cricketers in the country and get 6 crores or more thanks to the IPL. If you are witty and good at stand up comedy; a rare talent, then work hard and be innovative to try a shot at The Great Indian Laughter Challenge and be famous if you are really good at it. Acting again is a talent which if nurtured properly can make you rich and famous, provided you are really good at it.

But there are many people working in theatres who spend an entire lifetime without earning money or being famous. Why should one go for a career path with such uncertainties?

You are quite right in pointing that out. But such uncertainties are there in all career paths. Not all MBA degree holders become successful. Secondly, as I said earlier, recognizing your natural talent is most important and then one should choose a path where such skills are useful, not necessarily acting in movies etc. For instance, in case of acting, the basic talent and skill lies in hiding your own expressions and pretending to be someone else or expressing and communicating something else in a very realistic manner. This is indeed a very important leadership skill necessary in motivating people in very difficult times and crunch situations. This skill can be used in a constructive way, such as while leading an army and motivating your soldiers to defend your country, or a more familiar example of cricket, the way good captains like MS Dhoni, Shane Warne etc. hide their anxieties, keep their cool in crunch situations and motivate their team by setting an example and leading from the front. Great leaders, politicians (an endangered species these days), entrepreneurs, CEOs, marketing, HR executives and managers need these skills so that they can motivate people effectively and get things done. CEOs need good communication and acting skills to energize their employees and cleverly hide their anxieties so that the bitter truths do not de-motivate the work force. Marketing executives need excellent communication skills to make an effective sales pitch, cleverly hiding their short comings and winning confidence of major customers and clients. HR managers need such skills in attracting and retaining good people in their company by cleverly using words and their acting skills to paint a paradise in the minds of their prospective employees even though it may not be completely true. Having said that, these skills are more often misused; by most politicians, bad managers such as that of Enron, by marketing people who try to sell bad products as if theirs are the best, or HR managers who try to fool good people to join not so good companies; but that is the harsh reality of life, you need to be clever enough to separate the good guys from the bad guys as cunning people will always try to fool the gullible.

Wait a minute, you were earlier discouraging us from taking up MBA and now you are suggesting that even a person with good acting and communication skills can be good manager? How can such a person even qualify their entrance exam?

To clarify again, what I am stressing upon is that you should first ask yourself – what is your natural talent and skill? And if the answer matches the skill set required for management, only then you should go for MBA, not just for the sake of money. As far as entrance exams are concerned, you should not feel disheartened if you can’t qualify for one exam or the other. Non-engineers especially commerce students with good enough mathematics and analytical skills too can clear them if they have the talent and the will to work hard (in that order). First ask yourself – Do you have what it takes to be a good manager or whatever your career path may be. If yes, then the world is out there to acknowledge your skill and talent if you can demonstrate it. Lalu Prasad Yadav, the railway minister, didn’t need an MBA degree to be called himself a management guru by great B-Schools from IIM-A to Harward etc. Dhirubhai Ambani didn’t need an MBA degree to be a successful entrepreneur. Albert Einstein was considered incapable of taking up science, but that didn’t stop him from becoming the greatest scientist in recent times. They had what it takes - the natural talent and skills required for their career path and could demonstrate it be acknowledged by the world. Quite frankly all these degrees whether Engineering, MBA or whatever are just pieces of paper which work as a proof of your skills only at the entry level in industry or any other institution. Whether you are actually good at it or not depends on your work which you can demonstrate. If you have the required skills then the degree is just a formality, whether you get it from IIMs by cracking CAT or from other places by qualifying GMAT etc. If you find it tough to qualify, the online forums and coaching institutes are there to tell you the tips and tricks of qualifying these exams. Remember, these are exams are just obstructions which you need to overcome cleverly, if you have the skills and natural talent, nothing lies between you and success. Coming back to the quest of finding your natural talent and skills, try recalling your achievements from your school days to the present. If you have organized events on a large scale such as school events and college festivals and gave your best shot in making them successful and enjoyed doing so, you have what is takes to be a good manager. If while asking for sponsorships for these events, you were clever enough with your choice of words, expressions (acting skills) and communication skills to make people believe in you even if you were not telling the whole truth, you have what it takes to be a good marketing person. And if you did so with unwavering determination and against all odds, you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Indeed good management, leadership and entrepreneurship is all about sound decision making, getting things done by inspiring and motivating competent people by effectively communicating your ideas and having tremendous will power and determination to ensure accomplishment of your goals against all odds. If this is true about you then management and entrepreneurship is the apt career for you. Technical knowledge and intricacies are secondary here as people for that can be hired or it can be outsourced. On the other hand, if your expertise and interest lies in problem solving especially in the areas of science and mathematics and you have thorough understanding of the basic concepts, then engineering and research is the right career path for you. Engineering is all about solving problems with known solution or set of solutions which need to be tweaked around for a given situation. Research on the other hand is all about solving problems with no known solution or only partial solutions. This requires one to be imaginative and capable of thinking out of the box apart from being thorough with the basic fundamentals behind the problems. Similar is the case with all other career choices, but the underlying theme is the same – find the skills deemed necessary for that path and ask your self whether you have it. Towards the end, I would just say that to make your education fruitful, relevant and for yourself, there is one assignment which you must do by yourself by the end of your graduation or post graduation (Engineers are used to copying assignments at the last moment, but do this one yourself and within the deadline. ;) ) – Recognize your uniqueness and natural talent and skill which you enjoy and identify an economic activity where you can exploit it to the full.

In case you got bored in between and have scrolled to the bottom, the summary of the above is – First recognize your natural talent and skill which you enjoy on a sustainable basis and choose your career path accordingly with money as a secondary rather than primary consideration. If it arouses any curiosity you may scroll back up to read though again.