How To Stop Living on Autopilot—and Other Lessons Learned
A lot of people will tell you that you need to be busy to be successful.
Take my father, for example, who so kindly enlisted me to rake the entirety of our property and lay fresh mulch for half an hour (which translated from Dad time equates to ~5 hours) the day before my calculus midterm. Naturally, I met this request with a level of friction: “Why can’t one of my sisters do it? They aren’t in midterms”, and he replied, “if you want to get something done, you should give it to the busiest person” A popular proverb dating back to the 1800s, suggesting that when you are faced with a large task you should call upon someone with a track record of accomplishment. It’s something I have carried forward with intention for years—resulting in me being in way over my head countless times—but also leading me to accomplish things I would consider beyond my most outlandish ambitions as a student entering business school.
Like I said, a lot of people will tell you that you need to be busy to be successful, but rarely is it discussed how to be busy in the right way, and how to stay afloat when it feels like everything is crashing around you.
In the spirit of being a student-run publication, it feels only appropriate that we begin with a few protective disclaimers. For one, I am not constitutionally positioned to provide my peers any advice, but I will classify myself as somewhat well-endowed in studies of self-help and habit-building. Just ask the bookshelf in my room. Also, it is not recommended to consume all this advice at once or try to emulate each of the four principles discussed today. Rather, take inventory of what may serve you best and ingest the remaining pieces however you feel. It should be a personal experience.
Taking a step back, it goes without saying that as a first-year student you are prone to a fusillade of critical decisions—whether to attend that accounting lecture you almost always sleep through, deciding which extra-curricular societies to join, and most consequentially, which friends and career paths are actually worth pursuing. It’s easy to get overwhelmed under these conditions, but fortunately the raison d'être of this article is to share a variety of learnings that pertain to the undergraduate experience—both anecdotal and from varying literatures which have inspired an effort to be great by choice.
Stop Living On Autopilot
As students, we have long been taught that to make effective decisions, you must first conduct a process that involves an in-depth familiarization with the topic at hand, a careful evaluation that stresses each alternative, and ultimately arrive at a decision that will produce the best outcome. While I’m not here to dispute the value of this in academia, I will argue that decision-making relating to personal development and career trajectory demand an entirely different approach. Simply, the real world does not move at the static pace that your textbooks lead you to believe, and there’s a good chance that no matter how much time you take, your decision will likely be wrong anyway. In fact, the average Canadian will have approximately 7 different employers in their career anyway—so why waste precious time at an institution that is designed for you to engage in a multitude of risk-free experiences?
Typically, you won’t have all the information you need to make informed decisions about your career objectives right away—and the unfortunate reality is that many students succumb to a holding pattern of “waiting to gain experience” so they can decide what they do and do not like. This is what I like to call “Autopilot”. Stanford lecturer Scott McNealy argues that rather than wasting your time stressing to make the right decision (i.e., should you pursue the field of technology vs. finance vs. sales, etc.), make the decision right. Merely selecting the “best” option doesn’t guarantee that things will turn out well in the long run, just as making a sub-optimal choice doesn’t doom us to failure or unhappiness.
Howard Marks famously said, “Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted…good times teach only bad lessons”. Therefore, make a swift decision—rooted in your gut feeling and intuition—as early as you can, and recognize that it's practically impossible for you to come out of it less knowledgeable and battle-tested. In the contemporary context of securing internships, building a resume, and professional development, getting there first is half the battle—and it often leads to outsized potential for success. Think as if you are building yourself like you would a business; one of the fundamental competitive advantages is being a first-mover, forging a path that is not yet ridden with footprints.
As students, we are profoundly malleable—and in building an arbitrary plan of action, you can continue to refine your network and sources of mentorship to closer align with your evolving sub-goals over time. In practice, this can be as simple as setting up coffee chats with various upperclassmen who have taken a similar career path, and pestering them for their so-called playbook. In the tight-knit halls of Goodes, it is exceedingly rare to find students who are unwilling to lend a helping hand.
Ultimately, this virtuous process will only start when you realize that your locus of control resides in your day-to-day progression far more than in your one-time decisions.
Failing Fast
As you’ve come to learn, there is truly no clinical algorithm that can make your most critical undergraduate career decisions for you—nonetheless, the moment of decision itself is best treated as a morsel of the road ahead, to ensure you don’t fall behind needlessly. Think as if you were learning how to invest a $100 portfolio of securities—perhaps you might start with a book of index funds that offer market returns. What you’ve accomplished in that simple act has allowed you to earn 8 per cent on your money. So, when day one of the next year comes around, you’ve got $108 to invest now. Maybe, you are putting those $8 gains (we will assume these are tax-free) toward a singular equity that you’ve had a year now to acclimate with. And the cycle continues. It is exceedingly more valuable for you to make a decision soon and put yourself to work “in the market”.
That’s the easy stuff. The difficult part is the magnitude of failure that one must endure when going in ‘partially blind’ following a big decision. If you’ve ever found yourself skimming through any text relating to self-development, you might know that failure is entirely a mindset. Take Thomas A. Edison, for example, who famously states “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” While this is not a heavily contested notion, there is little practical advice that teaches our youth how to fail effectively.
Let’s say you are a first-year student who has swiftly decided to take interest in the field of finance, for example. You’ve lined up 3-4 coffee chats with seniors who have secured that gig at a Hedge Fund, or Bank, or whatever—and the first one goes awfully. Yes, this happened to me too. You ‘failed’ because you had no idea that investment banks don't actually make investments, and you forgot half of the other questions you wrote down. Now what you may do under normal circumstances is dwell on the embarrassment of this interaction, and try to avoid eye contact with that student in the Goodes Starbucks line wherever possible—this is wrong. Instead, you can fail fast by reaching out to that student again, explaining honestly that you are entirely new to this field and that you are desperately seeking some mentorship in advance of your upcoming chats.
Trying to predict, control, or minimize your mistakes along the way will inevitably reach diminishing returns. The effort you place toward minimizing variance often forces you into a state of paralysis in approach of your goals. All too often, we respond to failure in accordance with ego, shame, and other nasty emotions. However, these only contribute to a painstakingly slow cycle of failure. By taking on a long-term outlook to each of your micro-decisions, and prioritizing the establishment of an ‘average pace’ rather than each fluctuation, you will find yourselves progressing faster. It is difficult to do this in practice, but it’s additive value to your undergraduate experience cannot be stressed enough.
That’s why it is absolutely essential to accept that you will fail often, and place a renewed focus on iteration, rather than perfection.
Matching Expenses with Income
Relatively speaking, our third lesson is a straightforward one, both in theory and in practice. In Jim Collins’ Great by Choice, there is a lovely chapter dedicated to anatomizing successful 10X companies relative to their comparable peers. Within this chapter is a lovely table that discusses various takeaways relating to speed and outcomes. For the purposes of this lesson, let’s focus on solely the first row of this table.
While its application in a corporate context might look differently, I found myself interpreting the first ‘successful behaviour’, hypervigilance, as a critical notion in building ones’ own war chest (or, skill set). Under the assumption that you’ve managed to get yourself off Autopilot, and have developed a certain comfortability with your own micro-failures, the missing piece of the equation remains your development of tangible skills that make you an attractive candidate for the career of your choosing.
Without running the risk of oversimplifying, as an engineer, mathematician, or maybe a physicist, it is often encouraged to become a specialist—gradually zeroing in your skills to a specifically-tailored practice. When you are a business student, this looks drastically different. There is an expectation in place that you are a well-rounded communicator and team player, who possess a broadly applicable set of hard and soft skills that are uncompromisingly dynamic.
Operating in parallel with our second lesson, you will soon learn that trade-offs are inevitable in developing a marketable set of skills. You must try your hand—in a manner that is thoughtful—at absolutely every possible skill that could be required of you (ranging from interpersonal skills to building your own excel macros). What you will find is failure. A lot of it. However, by acting with hypervigilance and consistently taking inventory of what is ‘sticking’, you deduce what comes to you naturally and intuitively. These are the qualities that you should brand yourself on, carving out a tactical niche that allows you to propel forward. If you can utilize your most intuitive skill (let’s say, building financial models / quantitative work) to put yourself in the conversation, and trust that you will continue to round out those adjacent weaknesses over time (case interviews), you will find yourself a lot closer to your goals than if you try to perfect each skill simultaneously.
This is a practice I like to call matching your expenses with income.
If you suck at ‘A’ and don’t have a clear path laid out of how to get better, become exceptionally good at ‘B’. Then, use your efficacy of ‘B’ to get you in the door somewhere that you can learn how to do ‘A’. The reality is, we have to market and sell ourselves like madmen in order to break into these competitive clubs, societies, and internships—it pays to be useful at anything relevant. Then, of course, you must demonstrate a genuine interest in learning how to round out the missing pieces.
Life is a Team Sport
We are taught that one of the founding pillars of being a business student, or even capitalism broadly, is competition. If you win, someone else loses. Especially as a first, or second-year student, the forces of competition are in action all around you, and it’s quite easy to fall in the trap of hyper-individualism as a protective barrier. I’m here to tell you that this is a mistake, rooted largely in the preservation of ego.
The older you get, the more you will realize that you are not as smart as you think, and that you rely on others much more than you notice.
While you should be vigilant about your own successes, bear in mind that your peers can also be successful alongside you. These are not mutually exclusive outcomes. This is arguably the most important thing you can take away from this article.
Cultivating an unbridled sense of honesty, trustworthiness, and compassion will serve you in ways far greater than any hard skill can. The Smith School of Business is an incredible institution not only for the quality of its academic function, but that it’s strategically designed to expose you to your peers in a collaborative sense. There are a hundred unique ways to get involved, and extract micro-learnings from the people around you. This should not be taken for granted. So, when the opportunity arises, ask dumb questions—for it is immensely more valuable than saying nothing. Reach out to someone you admire and ask them for a coffee. Tell people when you are proud of them, and be exceedingly thankful for the friends you come to develop. You are remembered not for what you do, but how you make those around you feel.
At this stage in life, we are all a product of our network—so be a valuable asset in someone else’s network by being genuine, honest, and willing to admit your own failures and mistakes. Although, at times you may be feeling like you are being taken advantage of; these are core principles that should be unwavering. Each time you act against them, you are putting up a wall that you will eventually need to tear down to get where you want to go.
You never know who may become a CEO in the next 20 years. It might even be you. So become someone that others would jump at the opportunity to work for.