This week marked exactly five years since my CAT result. I read a few articles with quotes from the this year's toppers and it reminded me of a time when my own life and aspirations used to be clearer and simpler. There were no tough choices, no ambiguity and very little doubt. There was a universally accepted brass ring to aim for and life was a pleasant struggle towards it. Five years later, there is no obvious next step. There are choices to be made, assuming there is any clarity at all on what those choices lead to. Motivation is a far more difficult task today than it was five years back.
But these intervening five years have also given me enough lessons to wade through these turbid waters. Like many of my peers who are hitting the quarter-life crisis, I still do not have answers and my thoughts vacillate between enjoying the fruits of past hard work to finding something meaningful to do in life. Which brings me to the first lesson I have learnt - sometimes, you wait for the motivation to come to you.
After I had topped the boards in 2009, I hit a rough patch where I thought that nothing I would ever do would match up to that achievement. Three years later, I topped the CAT and it seemed lightning had struck twice. At that point, I became convinced that nothing I would do in life could match those twin peaks. With this perceived reality in mind, I joined McKinsey and worked quietly, having accepted a mundane existence. I also read up on economics and about areas that I had found interesting in college but didn't have time to pay attention to. Outwards, I told myself that I would return to do a masters' degree, but that ambition was too loose to have been taken seriously then. However, one year down the line, I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship and thereby undertook one of the most pleasant experiences of my life. Sure, the Rhodes might be overshadowed by the other two things on my CV, but I wouldn't trade those two years for anything else. During my two years at McKinsey, I stay put and did my duty - motivation found me eventually!
But at the time of leaving McKinsey, I had a plethora of choices before me. I had landed a job in a private equity firm. A venture capital firm was asking me to drop that offer and interview with them. I had the Rhodes offer. There was the option of continuing at McKinsey. For the first time, I was faced with many choices and each choice very different from the other. Then came the second lesson - as you grow older, the choices and the associated costs keep increasing. Life cannot and will not remain as simple as it used to be. These choices, therefore, should not be treated as a burden but as a privilege. Deepika Padukone says to Ranbir Kapoor in Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani in a different context that there are many choices in life and some of the choices that we leave will no doubt be amazing. But you cannot be everywhere and hence you should enjoy the present. I do not know if working at the private equity firm would have been better or worse. I only know that I went to Oxford and that I enjoyed it.
Five years later, life seems generally less exciting. But I realise that it isn't because it actually is, but because I've become accustomed to a new normal. I have accumulated privileges, money, achievements, relations, duties and many other things that tie me to a particular way of life; and like any other 'change', there are positive and negative aspects to it. The positive is that I now have several tools and resources to pursue my ambitions and be impactful. Unlike earlier, I can actually craft what success looks for me rather than be told what it is. With time on my side, I'm not in a tearing hurry to get somewhere. I only want to make sure that wherever I get to is where I really want to be.
