3 LIFE LESSONS THAT I TAKE AWAY FROM 2017

2017 is coming to an end and I look back feeling happy, grateful and at peace. 

While 2016 was the year of “sobering up” – a year in which I felt my life and overall drive was decelerating and one that gave me more limitations than opportunities – 2017 for me is the year of realignment. I think throughout my two years at Stanford I kinda lost a bit of myself. Something that was compounded by an unhealthy relationship I was in for the vast majority of this year. But this year, especially the last quarter of it, allowed me to realign myself, to find my voice, and to reconnect with my core and my essence.

Among the highlights of this year for me were definitely graduating from the GSB, the massive career risk I took by joining a Beijing-based company, and allowing myself to fall in love and to follow my heart. There was also the photography work I got to do for major brands like AirBnB, Virgin Mobile, and after many attempts, also Apple. Or my travels that allowed me to see and reconnect with a number of friends all around the world. Maybe on top of it all though was my activism against the travel ban and the Trump administration. 

Thankfully, on the lowlight-side of things, there isn’t much to mention, well, apart from the most obvious thing which was Trump and his stupid travel ban. If anything at all, it was that unhealthy relationship that consumed a lot of my mental energy throughout this year. But in hindsight, I am just happy to have made that experience and to have learned the things I did. Oh, and I gained 2kg over Christmas… that kinda sucks. And I still massively suck at speaking Mandarin which is just a painful daily experience in my current life – and something that makes me feel like a bit of a failure considering how much I love learning languages. 

This was a year with a lot of highs and lows, but thankfully they all ended up teaching me great life lessons.

Realizing how awesome you are and demanding to be treated accordingly

My story: Earlier in 2017, through pure chance, I connected with someone super charming and like-minded. We hit it off so well, that after just a few days, I knew I wanted to meet her in person – even though she lived on the other end of the world. One visit became two, then three then four visits that we did back and forth between the locations we lived (we are talking about 10+ hour flights). We truly fell for each other and were determined to make it work, no matter what. 

Yet as unique as our story was, and as amazing as our connection was, we were simply different people with different needs. She wasn’t able to meet mine, and I wasn’t able to meet hers. Yet we kept trying and trying. And while I don’t blame her for the way she was acting, because I think a lot of it was due to the situation we found ourselves in, the way I was being treated in the end was far from how I deserved to be treated. Yet I kept going with it, obsessed with this idea to make it work, and not realizing how toxic and hurtful things had become. Throughout this all I was slowly losing myself, my self-esteem, and my self-worth. Only until we parted.

The lesson: The truth is that you don’t intentionally or willingly enter a situation in which you allow someone to be mean or ungrateful towards you. You rather unknowingly morph into those situations, step by step, day by day. And only when you are deep in them, you start to realize that something is off. And until that point, you really don’t know how to get out of it quickly or easily – because you are so focused on achieving whatever drove you into that situation in the first place (winning someone’s heart, becoming friends with someone, etc.). 

Looking back, I was just too obsessed with a certain outcome in my personal life and really wanted to give it all and make it possible no matter what. And that zealousness drove me to a place where I had momentarily forgotten my awesomeness (yes, you got that too!) and the way how I deserved to be treated. I kept finding excuses and justifications for the other person’s behavior, by mostly looking to fault myself and by being forgiving forwards them. Only when I let go of the person, with time and distance, I realized what situation I had gotten myself in. What I took away from it this year is how important it is in life to not compromise on your own awesomeness and to let go of people who don’t treat you as you deserve. It’s easily said, but also easily forgotten. 

Opportunities are where others don’t dare to go to

My story: When I graduated from the GSB this year, I wasn’t too excited about my job prospects (which were actually pretty good). I had already worked in Silicon Valley for many years, and while 260 of my class of 400 were going to stay local, many of whom I count as close friends, I just wasn’t pumped about the outlook of continuing my pre-MBA lifestyle and ending up competing for the same jobs as my classmates.

Convinced that China is the new frontier in technology, a perspective I had developed during business school, I was determined to find a Chinese tech company that wanted to expand internationally – and then be the person who would help them do that. So only two weeks after graduation, I packed my bags, bought a round-trip ticket to China, and went there to find a job. 

I took language classes in the morning and helped a friend’s start-up in the afternoon. And during the remainder of the time, I just tried to find companies whom I could help go international. After just six weeks of searching, and a lot of help through my Stanford network, I ended up finding a gig that was exactly what I was looking for – and so much more. I love what I do, I learn a shit ton, and I feel aligned. In the end, the opportunity I got and the level of responsibility I was entrusted with, one that is making me punch above my weight, reflects all that risk I was willing to take, and that is a very satisfying feeling. 

The lessons: When I boarded that flight to China, I didn’t know where I was going – I was going to look for a job in a market where I had no credibility, with limited knowledge, a language I didn’t master, and where I neither had friends nor network. Yet in the end, I was able to find something amazing because I had the courage to take a massive risk and try something that other people were not willing to try. I was willing to leave behind the comfort and safety I had ahead of me and go to a place with absolutely no certainty. But I was determined and I was convinced that I would succeed.

What I learned along this journey is how one can find big opportunities in places where others are not looking. And it’s not that they are not looking because they don’t think there would be any opportunities, but because the search for opportunities in those places is hard, is uncertain, is risky, and uncomfortable. But the reward, if successful, is even bigger. And that’s a lesson that I learned this year and that will most certainly influence all future decisions that I will be making in my life.

Sometimes you don’t choose your fight, but your fight chooses you. 

My story: The days leading up to the travel ban, I had a sense something bad was going to happen. And when the ban was issued, I felt like I got hit with a sledgehammer. The country I call home was degrading and humiliating me as a second-class resident and basically showing me the way out. I waited about a day to think about how I wanted to react to it, but then I decided that if you fuck with me, I’m gonna fuck with you. 

So I went public with my story. And within a few hours, I found myself speaking to all sorts of major news outlets. And before I knew it, I was on the frontline of demonstrations and rallies, chanting, speaking, resisting. I was even asked to co-sign an official lawsuit against the government. Thinks just got crazy and for the weeks that followed, I was fully consumed by what was going on. Yet this wasn’t just a fight limited to two weeks. The travel been was re-issued and re-blocked for the third time just a few days ago, so the fight is not over yet. 

The lesson: This was such a massively turbulent time for me early 2017. I suddenly found myself in a position in which I never wanted to be in. And with the decision to speak up, I had to assume a leadership role I had never been in. I was mobilizing my audiences, I was being vocal, I was public, exposed, vulnerable. It felt difficult, yet it also felt right. Looking back, I did everything right. I fought back and I resisted. 

There were two things that really stuck with me from that time. One is how quickly a situation can change and how you can suddenly find yourself giving 200% of yourself, your time, and your energy. There must have been a turbo switch somewhere in me that the travel ban triggered – because I have no idea how I was able to resist so forcefully and make it through so many sleepless nights in a row (or write a full 10-minute speech just five hours before I was scheduled to talk in front of thousands of people at a rally). As shitty as the situation was, it was amazing to see how it unlocked so much in me. The other thing I learned is that sometimes you don’t choose your fight, but your fight comes and chooses you. And that’s exactly what happened. 

2017, thanks! 2018, bring it on.

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I'm Back

I’m back. 

Back after taking a break from writing for the past four months or so. 

After running this blog for almost four entire years, my willingness and readiness to share had taken a massive hit. A lot happened this year which was gradually moving me away from my essence – the things that drive me and the things I am good at. To the point that I didn’t recognize myself anymore by the time September came around. So I had to hit the breaks and take a break. 

And so I did. Instead of sharing my thoughts here the way I used to, I just kept journaling privately. I think I filled some 40-50 of pages over the past few months, just writing down all my hopes, thoughts and emotions. There was a lot going on, and I made sure to capture them all until I ran out of pages and had to reorder my journal. 

But it took some time. It took some healing, some reflecting, some letting go. It took a lot of self-work, tough conversations, and simply time. It’s not uncommon to end up being misaligned with yourself in life. But it’s very important to realize that quickly and to realign yourself. And that’s what I was doing for the past four months. Realigning myself. Finding my voice. Reconnecting with my core and my essence. 

Life is beautiful and I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you again.

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The Stoic way of facing your fears

Many years ago I was going through a tough time during which I had started to think very negatively of things. So a close friend shared a story with me which impacted me for many years to come. 

"The story was about this one guy who was profoundly afraid of water. Going into a pool or an ocean was unthinkable for him. Washing hands and showering felt like torture. Anything related to water would make him want to run away. It was a phobia he had developed in his teens and that was haunting him day after day ever since. Yet one day on a party, two other guests grabbed him, and threw him into the pool. It was meant as a prank and those guests didn’t know he had a severe water phobia.

At first he was throwing around his hands in panic, fearing for his life, but shortly after he realized he was able to stand on his feet since the water level was less than his height. And so he did. He was standing in the pool, with his head above the water, and as it turned out, he was all fine. The water started to calm down, he started to calm down, and he wasn’t dying as he thought he would be. All the fear he had in his mind was unjustified. So he climbed out of the pool and dried himself. He had to (unintentionally) confront his phobia head on to realize that it was all in his mind."

The reason why my friend shared that story with me was because he wanted to show me that sometimes we think of things in the "worst case scenario" and that we spin stories in our head of how bad things will be if they happen. But more often than not, once they happen, they are actually not as bad as we thought. And that our anxiety and fear of certain outcomes is completely unjustified and irrational.  

This thinking roots in the philosophy of Stoicism, which was born in Greece, but then matured in Rome. And what Stoicism tries to promote is kind of a muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances. The notion that our beliefs about how staggeringly awful something is going to be – once they are exposed to and examined – just do not match the reality. 

For Stoics, the ideal state of mind isn’t necessarily trying to think positively. It’s more a mental state of tranquility, by cultivating a calm indifference toward’s one’s circumstances. An effective way to do that is to not shun negative emotions and experiences, but to examine them up close instead. Stoics argue that most of us go through life with certain beliefs about what people, situations, events will make us feel sad, anxious or angry. That the loud coughing of your classmate irritates you. That the loss of your purse bothers you.

Yet they argue that if you look closely at those experiences, you will realize that none of those events is negative in itself, but that the suffering we feel is caused by the beliefs we hold about those situations. The classmate’s cough isn’t annoying per se, but that it’s our belief that we need to pay attention in class without distraction which makes it annoying. And the loss of a purse isn’t negative in itself, but we perceive it negatively due to our belief that we caused ourselves a massive inconvenience. 

It’s important to highlight that Stoics are not arguing that negative feelings don’t exist. Or that they should be brushed away. They merely want to point out the mechanism through which stress arises. Even an event like a lost job isn’t a negative event in itself, it’s merely an event. Ultimately it’s our beliefs that cause distress. And with that, Stoics argue against thinking positively because ceaseless optimism about the future will only make you suffer a greater shock once that future doesn’t occur.

They therefore recommend dwelling on the negative outcome (they call it “negative visualization” or “the premeditation of the evil”). Facing the worst case scenario head on to realize that even when it goes wrong, it probably won’t go as wrong as you thought it would. Once you imagine exactly how wrong things can go in reality, you will soon realize how some of your fears were exaggerated. If you lose your job, there are ways to find a new one. If you lost a relationship, there are ways to be happy as a single. Confronting these worst-case scenarios often shows that no, the world and your life won’t be over. Yes it will hurt, but it won’t be as bad as you think it will be. And that you will be back on your feet before you know it. 

This is exactly what happened with the guy who was thrown into the pool. He had to forcefully confront his worst-case scenario to realize that it wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. And once you learn to expose and then embrace these worst-case scenario thoughts, you will teach yourself a state of mind of tranquility. One that will allow you to go through life with much more calm and composure. 

(this piece was inspired by the second chapter “What would Seneca Do?” in the book “The Antidote” by Oliver Burkeman)

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Why I do what I do – Writing

So, you are about to read the 100th post here on my blog. I started writing in December 2013, less than 4 years ago. That was when I launched my personal website and my blog, The Positude. 

It all started when I was going through a period of post break-up pain. I was quite the mess back then, so I started reading a lot of self-help books and seek the company of people who had a positive influence on me. So after months and months of trying to lift myself from the whole I was in, I felt I had learned a thing or two about how to (re)gain a positive outlook on life. And that’s why I wanted to share those lessons. So I started writing. 

While it all started as an attempt to help others benefit from what I was learning, I was gaining a lot myself. Pouring my thoughts and feelings into my blog became a cathartic experience. As someone who thinks a lot, I struggle with having too many unstructured thoughts. What writing allows me to do is to crystalize and prioritize the important things in my mind. It puts structure into a mental arena that is generally pretty chaotic. 

What later fueled my motivation to write were the reactions I got by some – people who read my posts and in one way or another were able to relate to what I was sharing. Most often because my writing helped them gain a new perspective on situations they had been through themselves. Every now and then one of my readers would summon up the courage to write and share their story with me, and those were the moments I realized that I am not alone on this journey and that there are others who are going through similar experiences. And more often than not, their journey helped me change my perspective as well. 

Now, 100 articles later, I look on a writing rhythm of “every other week”. Was I planning to write that much? Nope. Do I think I am particularly gifted at writing? Certainly not. So why am I writing then? 

Well, I am writing because it’s fun. It gives me an opportunity to reflect over the things I experience and learn as I walk through this journey called life. I do have a personal, hand-written journal in which I write much more personal thoughts, but my blog has become the platform where I hope to share my life’s “aha” moments. The situations that taught me a lot and which I think can help others change their perspective, too. Funny enough, I sometimes go back and read my old posts when I go through similar situations again. It helps to read about the things I learned the previous time and then try to avoid making the same mistakes the new time around.    

Some might wonder if I write to get noticed, to get recognition, or to influence people’s perception of me. On that, all I can tell you is that not a single time have I checked the stats of how often my posts are being read. My thoughts are just out there, and if someone is curious enough to want to learn more about me, they can find them and read them. 

Going forward, I plan to write even more. It has been such an act of healing and learning, that I couldn’t imagine stop doing it. And sure, it gets personal at times, but I do wonder if being publicly vulnerable will ever fire back on me, but so far it has only attracted good things and people into my life.

Thank you for reading, please feel free to follow by subscribing to my newsletter on the right side of this page. 

This is the second post in my series “why I do what I do” – hoping to provide more color on some of the decisions that I make in my life. I plan to write about the things that drive me and what I hope to achieve. The first post was about “My love for Iran.”

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Cherishing the shitty things in life

My broken car window

Last year, two pretty shitty things happened to me. In May, my apartment building caught fire and in November, I got my car broken into (and plenty of valuables stolen). Not gonna embellish this – both of these events rank 9 or 10 on a 10-point shittiness scale. 

While both events naturally caused me to feel flooded with emotions like frustration, despair and vulnerability, they also brought a rather unexpected set of feelings: excitement and gratitude. Yes, you read that right, I actually felt excitement and gratitude.

I was feeling excited about the fact that both of these things were things that had never happened to me before and that I was experiencing something new for the first time. And I felt grateful for life giving me a learning opportunity that would eventually make me a better person. 

Now to understand why I felt that way, you need to understand one of the ways how I look at life. For me, life is a lot about the experiences I make. Each new experience is something that makes my life richer – richer in knowledge, wisdom and stories to share. Yet it isn’t just the good experiences – the travels, the friends, the fun stuff – that counts as a life-enriching experience. It’s also the bad experiences – the break-ups, the losses, and yes, also the apartment fires and thefts. 

I remember how I was approaching my car, I started noticing something was off. There were pieces of broken glass everywhere, and as I looked up, this sad and shitty feeling dawned on me: "fuck, they broke into my car." Yet maybe an hour later, as I was sitting in my car with the cold wind blowing through the broken window, driving through San Francisco at 1am trying to find a police station to report the incident, I had a second thought: “mmh.. as shitty as it is, it’s also kinda cool to make an experience I have never made before."

Some might call this an overly optimistic – almost even forcefully optimistic way of seeing things positively, but if there is one thing certain in life, then it’s that some of the best things in life come in disguise of the worst. They seem like “the worst thing ever” the moment they happen, but they turn out to be starting points of incredibly good things to follow. It just takes a little time until we are able us to look at them that way. So no, it’s not a matter of being forcefully optimistic, it’s more a matter of shortening the time it takes for us to appreciate some of the things that rank really high on that shittiness scale. 

And the way I shorten that time, is to be appreciate of any kind of new experience in my life, the good ones and the bad ones. So next time something shitty happens, allow yourself to be frustrated, but also remember that in reality you just gained something in your life. Cherish that. 

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Growing up in between cultures

People have asked me what it was about my upbringing that made me so worldly curious. And I always say that it has been the fact that I was raised multi-culturally (even multi-religiously).

Sure, you might say this was inevitable in my case. Parents from Iran, born and raised in Germany. “More than one culture” was already my starting point. But believe me, it’s not a given. I have seen plenty of immigrant families where the default attitude was full assimilation, and not the wholehearted celebration of both home and host cultures.

With deep-felt gratitude, however, I am able to thank my parents for going the extra mile in my upbringing. They could have made my childhood all about “fitting in” by renouncing our Iranian heritage, but they didn’t. They could have also lived a life all about preserving our Iranian culture by way of fending off the German culture as much as possible, but they didn’t do that either. 

For them, it was all about finding a healthy middle ground. And I don’t think anything shows that better than the way how they dealt with the aspect of religion. While not religiously Muslim, we are certainly culturally Muslim – growing up in rural and Christian Bavaria (it’s so Christian compared to other States, it has its own Christian Democratic Party, the CDU). But that didn’t prevent my parents from encouraging me to attend Christian religion classes in Middle School. Or sending me to the local YMCA where I – no joke – ended up playing biblical characters in musicals and plays that were aired on TV (Moses and co. were Middle Easterners, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch after all).

And next to religion, they were always there to help me walk this very fine and ambiguous line of cherishing my Iranian heritage – for example by way of learning Farsi, visiting Iran, building strong ties with relatives back home, or learning the customs. Yet at the same time adopting the culture of the country we called our new home, namely many of the things that immigrant (Muslim) families struggle with: eating pork, drinking alcohol, dating, what have you. 

But there were also moments I remember where walking that line was not so easy. I have this memory of sitting in the back of the car, I must have been 10 years old, while we were driving to Italy for vacation. And I remember how I was looking at the beautiful landscape and expressing my liking with the word “geil.” Now geil is colloquial for “cool/awesome,” but it’s literal translation is “horny.” And while my parents knew that it was being used colloquially, they didn’t like it. So they forbade us to use it. Everyone was allowed to use it, but we were not. 

Adopting these seemingly minuscule elements of a culture might seem insignificant to some, but the degree to which you play along – culturally speaking – matters. At the end of the day, even if you adopt 95% of what your host culture has to offer, you are probably going to get judged on those 5% that you don’t. Especially if you already don’t look like the rest. 

I am not sure how aware my parents were about the way how they raised me. If all these efforts were intentional or accidental, but it’s those very efforts that allowed me to be aware of my heritage, appreciative of my host culture, and curious about all the other cultures foreign to me. The question of whether I am Iranian or German actually never really came up until much later in my life when I left Germany and found myself in positions in which I had to talk more explicitly about my upbringing. 

Looking forward, the challenge I’m facing is that I am already someone who is in between two cultures. Culturally speaking, I am neither fully Iranian, nor fully German. So I have always wondered what part of my identity I will be passing down to my children. A question that is likely going to be compounded by two additional factors: one, the country in which I will raise children, and two, the person with whom I will raise those children with. My future partner could easily be someone who brings another (or even two other) cultures into the relationship.

It’s a whole different level of complexity, but it’s also a massive opportunity to raise a new generation that has a very multifaceted identity and unprecedented levels of cultural fluency. 

Mom and dad, while you will likely not read this, I thank you wholeheartedly for everything you’ve given me and for raising me the way you did. Super geil of you. 

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What you seek is seeking you

In one of the last conversations I had in San Francisco before I boarded my flight to Shanghai, I heard something that stayed on my mind for quite some time. The comment came from someone with whom I had met under very serendipitous circumstances a few years back. After hearing about all the reasons why I wanted to go to Shanghai and the things I was hoping to achieve, she just said: "be careful not to attach yourself to any outcome. Rarely does it manifest itself when you do."

A part of me wanted to believe her, but another part in me didn’t: "why wouldn’t I want to strive for the outcome for which I was going abroad in the first place?” It just didn’t make sense to me. For me, it seemed that not attaching myself to an outcome would mean that I wouldn’t be doing enough for that outcome to occur. So she clarified: "if you can find a way to let go, what you want will find its way to you – assuming you are working, remain focused, and stay present."

Now admittedly, there is a lot of kumbaya in the notion of “what you want will find its way to you,” but after giving it some serious thought, I realized that I had heard something similar once before. Namely a fable about a guy who was chasing a butterfly. I couldn’t find the actual story anywhere, and I also don’t remember where I heard it in the first place, but here is how it went more or less:

There was a guy who was inside his kitchen looking outside the window into the garden. He noticed a super beautiful butterfly whose colors and patterns just mesmerized him. He instantly jumped up, dropped everything and ran outside trying to catch the butterfly. He was so in love with what he saw, he wanted it no matter what. So he ran up and down, chased the butterfly around all corners, put up nets, traps, just tried everything. But after minutes of running back and forth, he was out of breath, all sweaty, giving up his on his goal to catch the butterfly. Exhausted, he sat down on his patio, and moments later that butterfly slowly approached him, flew around his head, and then sat down on his nose. 

In many ways, the "what you want will find its way to you” notion was very evident in this story about the guy and the butterfly. What happens is that by wanting something really bad (a specific outcome in this case), we channel all our stress and anxiety and actually make that outcome less likely to happen. We push it away, scare it, distance it from us. But if we shift our minds to a place of patience, to self-control, to complete peace with whatever outcome, we create the right environment for what we want to come to us, to attract it, and awaken it. 

But for that to happen, we need to be at complete peace with ourselves and with whatever the universe will serve us. Being ok with whatever the outcome there may be, as indifferent as it may sound, actually makes it most likely for us to effectuate what we actually want. And as my friend pointed out, this is not an act of indifference or laziness. It’s an act of working hard, remaining focused, and staying present – and not to stress out over what might or might not happen.  

Rumi’s word are often mistranslated or misinterpreted. And while the title of this post (a Rumi quote) can be looked at from different angles, for me it fits the notion of this post – what you seek is seeking you .. you just need to allow it to flow to you, painlessly and effortlessly. 

Now not everything I came to Shanghai for happened the way I wanted. Sometimes, I admit it, I’m too attached to a specific outcome. Sometimes, I want something so bad that I make it harder on myself (and everyone else involved). But then again, I am not perfect. I’m a human being that is work in progress. I am a living and breathing person who feels love as much as he feels pain. And while I can’t turn back time to undo mistakes, I care enough to learn and improve going forward. 

This is to living a life less attached to outcomes. 

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Writing my own life's story

In one of the “last lectures” that I had at Stanford, our professor, Joel Peterson, encouraged us to ask ourselves what we are solving for in life. He continued to push: "what does winning in life look like for you?" I couldn’t make much sense of that question in that moment, and frankly I totally forgot about it right after, but a few weeks later the answer became very obvious to me. 

I haven’t really shared this publicly yet, but days after my graduation I put all my belongings into storage and temporarily moved out to Shanghai. It was a rather spontaneous decision, but I had many life-sized questions on my mind – both personally and professionally – and just had to come out here to look for answers. 

It all started about over a year ago. Together with about 30 of my classmates, we were standing on the balcony of a restaurant overlooking Shenzhen, a major city on mainland China that boarders Hong Kong. Lined up in a circle, we were putting jade-stone wristbands around the wrist of the person next to us, one by one. And once someone put the wristband around the hand of their neighbor, the person was asked to share what they were taking away from that trip to China. 

As my neighbor closed my wristband, I addressed the group saying: "this might be my last day in China, but this is going to be the first day of my future relationship with China.” Fascinated by what I had experienced, I felt a strong desire to make China part of my life’s story going forward.

As I was reflecting about that moment last week, it dawned on me what I was solving for in my life. I was solving for writing an incredible life story. "Yes, that is it!” ... I am not solving for ending up on the Forbes list of the world's richest people. I am not solving for the most impressive CEO-career or being the most social person the world has seen. But one of the things I am solving for in life is to write a damn good story. A story worth sharing. One that has many gripping chapters, full of joyful moments, of adventures from all over the world. 

Now what does that mean? It means that one way I gauge the decisions I make by how much they allow me to make this a really interesting life story. Yes, the decision to move out to China on the basis of a simple hunch – while many of my old and new friends stayed in the Bay Area to pursue promising and well-paying careers – was really scary.

But I didn’t let that fear stop me from going after what I felt was the right thing to do. Instead, I told myself that no matter how this China thing is going to turn out, it will make me richer and my life’s story more interesting. Even in the worst case, if I come back hurt, disappointed, and in doubt of my own judgement, it will always be an interesting chapter in this story called life. 

Just like the many books we read in our lives, some books we can’t put down after we started reading them. Others we want to put away and just cut our losses as the story doesn’t capture us. We are all given a pen with which we have the chance to write one such book ourselves.

I have decided to write my story the most interesting way I can. One that reflects my love for life, my appetite for risk, my passion for people and my presence in a world without boarders. So yes, winning in life for me means living a life that is a story worth sharing. 

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So you want to apply to the Stanford GSB?

I was dreading this post for a long time, but after I’ve been getting more and more messages from folks asking me about my business school application experience, I figured it might be worth sharing some of my thoughts. 

To say it loud and up front: I am not an admission consultant and I am in no way representing the admission office at the Stanford GSB. The following thoughts are all my own – and with that, they are absolutely unproven and only reflect my own experience of applying to business school – I would even say they are baseless and they could even be misleading if you relied on them as your single data point. So have a read, but don’t take it as the single source of truth. Ok, phew, I hope that was clear. 

Now let me get started by telling you that if you are looking to learn about the right/best way to apply to business school, there ain’t one. Each year ~8,000 people apply, and ~400 get in. Each of those 8,000 applications is different, and each of those 400 is different. There is no one way, and there is no right way of applying. So please detach yourself from the idea that you will get in if you follow steps A, B, C.

That said, I do have some thoughts, some advise to share with you. I will structure them by application criteria.

GMAT

Gosh, I hated the GMAT. I carried those books with me for years (I think I accumulated 16 books in the end). I took the test three times, and each time I went through hell. Standardized tests are just not my thing. I always screwed up the quant section, while doing pretty ok on the verbal section. Only on my third attempt I finally got the score I was hoping for. It finally started with a 7, but it was still below the GSB average (737 for this year’s incoming class). 

Now, my personal belief is that the GMAT is still a hygiene factor in your application. If you are in a +/- 30 window around the average, you are probably ticking a box and everything is fine. I think only if you are lower or higher than that, it might work for/against you. To be clear, I just made up the number "+/- 30" to illustrate an idea. 

With my score, I felt I was ticking a box and I was then able to focus on the other parts of my application. Now, people often ask me how I finally improved my quant score, well, I found this one document that had the hardest quant questions. So I took that document and worked through as many as possible. At least I tried to cover as many topics as possible. Started with the easier ones and then went towards the harder ones until I felt confident with the concepts tested. Here the link to the document.

When to apply

My own application story is a funky one. I applied 2nd round for the Class of 2016 and didn’t get in. I was waitlisted – for like 3 months – and then dinged. Then I first decided to ditch business school all together, but made a last-minute decision to reapply for 1st round for the Class of 2017. I made that decision 19 days before the 1st round deadline and was favored by the fact that both essays and recommendation letters were reduced to two each that year (down from three). Both times I got an interview spot, but the second time around I wasn’t waitlisted but got in straight.

Now one might look at my story and simply conclude that 1st round application was all it took for me to get in, but that would be foolish. I continue to believe that you have better chances 1st and 2nd round over 3rd round, but I would refrain from stating any significant difference between 1st and 2nd round applications. If I had to boil it down to some specific advise, I would say: 1) the sooner you apply the better, but 2) only apply when you are certain that your application is at its best. Example: if that requires you to sit out 1st round to submit a much better application in the 2nd round, I would do that. 

You might ask why not third round? There are many reasons for that. First it works against you a bit. You would get notified quite late (June I think it is?) and it gives you much less time to prepare (anything from leaving your current (work) environment to finding housing etc.). Second, by the time 3rd round candidates are processed, most spots in the class have been filled with applicants from the first two rounds. 

Essays

The GSB essays are quite the essays if you ask me. Especially the core one “What matters most to you and why?”. It took me weeks and weeks to write that essay. I sometimes come across my first versions of that essay and I can only laugh at them – it was quite the process. And even if you don’t get in, writing that essay is so worth it. 

First off, I want you to know that there isn’t anything that the admission office “wants to hear.” If you go into your essays with the attitude that you need to say things that they want to hear, you are off to a really bad start. Seriously, don’t think you need to show yourself as a humanitarian, or an entrepreneur, or a risk-taker or whatnot. Just don’t. 

What they want to learn about is you. The real you. You and no one else but you. 

I wrote my essay about how it matters most to me to live a live beyond my circumstances and to inspire others to do the same. I know others who wrote about their families, about running, about all sorts of things. There is no mold, there is no right way. 

The best way is to write about yourself. About the things that make you, you. The things that keep you going. The “whys” behind your “whats” (your whats are listed on your resume, so don’t waste time recounting those) – but do talk about what drove you to make the decisions you made. Show your true you. Make yourself vulnerable, but stay authentic. Make sure it reflects your tone, and not the tone of anyone else. 

The one thing I always like to say to folks who ask me about the essay is: it’s not about who you are – all applicants are great and awesome in their own ways – but it’s about can you show who you are. I repeat: can you show who you are? The real question is if you can actually show who you are. If you can open up and dissect yourself with that essay and help an outsider see the whys behind your whats. 

Recommendation letters

By the way .. in your essays, don’t talk about your accomplishments. Don’t sing your own praises, let your recommenders sing your praises. It’s tempting to write about how much of a big deal you are, but it’s much more credible if others do that. 

So my key advise for recommendation letters is to ask folks who can best talk about you. At its core, what matters more is how authentically and accurately they can talk about you, not what title or what school’s MBA is attached to their name. Sure, you might not wanna ask your tennis teacher who taught you for 10 years as a teenager, but someone who can talk about you because he/she got to know you really well – the more recent the better. I ended up choosing my then current manager and my former director with whom I had worked very closely and who were able to provide deep insight into how I think and perform. 

If the person you are choosing is someone who asks you to write the letter for them to sign, you are most definitely choosing the wrong person. That said, I did send some notes to my recommenders, letting them know about the content of my essays and asking them to focus on certain periods of our interactions that I thought would be most beneficial for the admission officers to know about (and to ensure that there is no significant overlap between my recommenders with both of whom I worked simultaneously at some point). But again, this is very basic guidance and you wanna make sure you don’t do more than that. 

The waitlist and my second application

People love to ask about what my waitlist experience was like and how my second application differed from my first one. Let me talk about the waitlist first.

The waitlist was a massive pain. In my mind, I was either expecting a yes or a no, not a maybe. But there it was, maybe. And then again 6 weeks later. And then one more time 6 weeks after that, until a few weeks after that I was “finally” rejected (yes, it felt a bit like a relief after all that waiting). I was not ready for that torturous waiting. So after each time they told me I am on the waitlist, I allowed myself to send them an email with all noteworthy changes and updates (I got a promotion, I started a new project, etc.). After two of such emails, I decided to step things up and got a professional camera studio to do a 90-secon clip. Two days after submitting that video, I got turned down. Now I don’t think it was related to the video, but what I hope it shows you that you can do your very very best, and it might still not be enough – keep that in mind.

And about my second application, the content of my essays didn’t really change that much. I was still the same person with the same things that mattered to me. But I did allow myself to go into even further depth. So I dug deeper and deeper (that was about a 10% change to my essay). Another 10% change to my essay came around the fact that I now had a story that many other applicants didn’t have: I had applied, was waitlisted, was gut-wrenchingly rejected and decided to reapply. I figured that’s something that only I can talk about and that would make me unique, so I spent another 10% of my essay talking about that experience. 

I can’t tell you what got me in. Again, there wasn’t significant difference in my applications from one year to the other, but things just worked out. Right timing is a big component that is not in your hands. 

Interviews

I was fortunate to go through two interviews (for each year that I applied). My first interview was very standard. A senior VP of a tech company, met at his home, we talked for 60 minutes, he asked me 10 behavioral questions, we connected super well on a particular mutual friend, and I later learned he gave his thumbs up. But I still didn’t get in. 

The second year around, I met the interviewer (it’s always an alum btw) at his office. He started off saying he will only have two main question for me. Both of them were behavioral, and we spent about 30 minutes on each of those. For example, one was about “a time when I clashed with my manager”… yet the amazing thing about that interview was that instead of giving me 5-6 minutes to provide a prepared answer, we spent 30 minutes on it. And we went deep, super deep. He would push me, question me, challenge me. And there is no prep in the world I could have made to give him rehearsed answers. He was really able to access “my thinking DNA.” It felt both vulnerable but also amazing that I was able to show so much of my real self to him – independent of whether he liked it or not. We then spent another 30 minutes talking about business school and life in general. Loved the guy. 

Ah, one more thing about interviews, I got my interview invitations at the end of that 2-3 week window during which they send out invitations. Don’t read too much into it if you get your invite towards the end. I think they send those invitations on a rolling basis. 

Final thoughts

I don’t wanna get into the topic of whether “business school is the right thing for you” – I feel that merits a whole separate blog post (not that I would ever be able to answer that question for anyone out there, you need to know), but happy to share thoughts. 

If you have any questions about what I wrote, please leave behind a comment and I will respond to it as soon as I can. I want to highlight once more that all the thoughts I shared here are reflecting my own and that I do not represent Stanford’s admission office in any way. 

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Finding happiness in misery

There is a Chinese saying that goes 否极泰来 (pǐ jí tài lái). It roughly translates as “out of the depth of misfortune comes bliss” or “the good emerges when the evil has reached its extreme.” Which in essence isn’t that different from some of the English sayings like “after rain there’s a rainbow.”

Now the reason why I wanted to write about it is because I have found a lot of meaning in it. It’s something I tell myself whenever things are not going well in my life. It’s this constant reminder that most things in life have a cyclical pattern. That a low is followed by a high, and that a high is often followed by a low. 

So what happens is that whenever I go through times of despair or misery, instead of ignoring my pain, I own it. I fully acknowledge that I’m feeling shitty and I give myself the right to feel that way. After all I’m not a machine, but a human being that is capable of feeling a wide range of emotions – the good and the bad. 

But at the same time, I remind myself that it’s all cyclical and that whatever is gonna happen next, it’s probably gonna be better than what I am experiencing now. So while I am embracing my pain, I also start to feel excitement for what is going to come next. Sure, I don’t know what that’s going to be, but chances are it’s gonna be something good. Chances are that in a few days from now, I will smile again and be happy. 

Anticipating what is going to come next helps put the pain of the now into perspective and mitigate it. It shifts my mental energy into an area of forward-looking anticipation and hope. And before I know it, I’m in a situation of misery, but I am already feeling excitement of all the good things that are going to happen next. "Sure, I’m going through some tough shit, but hey, a lot of amazing things are soon going to crash into my life and that’s kinda exciting”

The danger of this way of thinking is when someone starts to think it reversely. Meaning that when one goes through times of happiness, instead of being present in that moment, they start worrying about whatever bad thing might happen next – merely on basis of the cyclical pattern of life. Basically allowing worry to be the thief of joy. However, I certainly hope it has a different effect. That one appreciates good times more because chances are that those times won’t last forever. 

We all might be familiar with that saying, but I doubt we all are capable to stare into misery and defy it with a smile and a sense of excitement for all the good things that are going to follow. But that’s exactly the way I hope to deal with my own moments of misery going forward. 

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