The MBA

As an MBA student with 2/3rd of it done, I should be good at well, managing. Managing people, managing product launches, managing corporate finances, managing pricing issues... yup, they teach all that and more at B-School.

But what about managing yourself? That's one part that seems to get more and more difficult to manage. This is no surprise. Our lives get increasingly complex. The responsibilities we take up, the knowledge we acquire, the personalities we encounter... even the number of friends we have on Facebook keeps increasing as we grow.

Is this self-imposed complexity in our lives out-pacing our ability to manage it? Gandhi had once said, "Be the change you want to see in the world". I would add that that we manage ourselves the way we aspire to manage the world.

The Flexibility of Happyness

Loved hearing Daniel Gilbert's talk on why we are such poor predictors of what makes us happy. However, the good news is that we can change what predicts our happiness. Daniel calls it the Synthetic Happiness... one where we can be happy on things we are not supposed to be happy about! Which leads me to think, don't we all do well in jobs that we are truly passionate about? And don't you need to be happy about the job to be passionate about it? Thus if passion can be synthesized in our minds, then we can come to love any job out there.

To borrow from someone's famous words, Ask not for a job you will be passionate about. Ask what passion can you bring into the job you've got!