Prof Deepak Malhotra - HBS - 2012 Speech to Graduating Harvard MBA Students

Deepak Malhotra Deepak Malhotra is a professor in the negotiations organizations and markets unit at the Harvard Business School he teaches negotiations in the MBA program and in a wide variety of executive programs his teaching is widely praised as evidence by winning an HBS faculty award from the MBA class of 2011 11 Professor maler has published several books his most recent I moved your cheese has been translated into 15 languages and is currently a Wall Street Journal bestseller deo's research focuses on negotiation strategy trust development competitive escalation and Inter International and ethnic dispute resolution he will talk about none of these today follow him on Twitter at Prof motra and without further Ado please join me and welcome him to the stage [Applause] AG good afternoon how are we doing it is my pleasure to be here with all of you today it's not only my pleasure it's also my honor uh to be here one of the easiest questions I've been asked all year is when the Student Association reached out and and asked whether I would join all of you you this afternoon for this talk and that was an easy yes uh one of the most important relationships that I have in my life is my relationship with my students and although most of you were not a student in my classroom uh I wouldn't pass up on the opportunity to engage with you at least once uh before you graduate which reminds me uh let me be among the first perhaps to congratulate you on graduation which is only a couple weeks ago uh it's it's pretty close uh I don't think I'm being premature in congratulating you I think most of you are going to make it uh certainly all of you seem to think so because you're not preparing for exams right now you're sitting here uh we'll see how that works out uh but it's great to be here with all of you and uh I'm going to leave some time at the end for questions uh I'm very cognizant of the fact that most meaningful conversations tend to be dialogues not monologues uh this of course will be mostly a monologue hopefully we'll have some time at the end to do some Q&A and if not and if you want to have a dialogue afterwards uh feel free to reach out to me either later today if I'm uh still going to be around for a little while or sometime in the future as mentioned in the very nice introduction what I'm going to be talking about is not really related to what most of you uh know me for which is negotiation and dealing with conflict uh and perhaps my work in my more recent book what I'm going to be talking about today is something quite different and I want to kick off the conversation with an observation and the observation is the following there are a lot of people in this world that have it pretty tough there are people in this world who have very very big problems and by my estimation almost none of those people are in this room today in fact I think we'd all agree that it's quite the opposite the people in this room today represent you know the top one 100th of 1% maybe the top 1,000th of 1% of the people on this planet when it comes to Future wealth potential future health potential Freedom Liberty social networks the opportunities that you have just about by any of these really nice measures this is about as good as it gets and here's the observation what we know is that many of you will be happy in the years that follow and that's a big problem imagine for a moment that one of these people who has almost nothing in the world who has really big problems they've lived through war or famine their children go to sleep every night hungry or scared or both one of these people runs into you on the street in a couple years and asks you are you fantastically happy are you like really happy and your answer is no not really and then the person asks you why not what explanation would you give to this person how would you make it make sense to this person that would be a difficult conversation and one of the things I want to talk about today is this over the two years that you've been here or almost two years you've been here you've heard a lot of conversation about what it is that we want from you we want you to be great managers we want you to be great leaders we want you to be ethical we want you to solve the big problems in the world let's set all of that aside for this afternoon at least for this hour let's set that aside and just focus on one thing here's what I want from all of you what I would like all of you to be is happy all right let's set what should be a low bar let's just make sure that everybody leaving this place is Happy given all the opportunities you have ahead of you if people in this room can't be happy then that's it's a shame it's also a slap in the face of the people out there who would give anything to have a thousandth of the opportunity you have for themselves or for their kids because if we can't do that if we can't walk away from here and and a few years from now be very very happy with the choices we've made and the life we're living then that's a problem and that's what I would call a tragedy and I use that word in a literal sense now you're like what did I walk into here this is getting pretty dark all right it's it's going to get better don't worry uh when I use the word tragedy I I mean that in the literal sense we've had tragedy with us in literature for many years thousands of years people have been talking about tragedies in the literature and one definition and you can have lots of different definitions for what makes for a tragedy but one definition of a tragedy is the following a story in which the protagonist suffers extreme sorrow as a consequence of a grave error or a personal faing that combines with external forces and circumstances or to put it more simply the measure of tragedy is the following it's the distance between how happy you could or would or should have been and how happy you actually are the greater that distance the greater that disparity that's the measure of tragedy in this story here's what you could have been here's what you should have been here's what you had the opportunity to be if there was never that opportunity it's not a tragedy it's just a pathetic situation it's just a bad situation it's a tragedy when we can imagine this person this hero this protagonist could have been this happy but here's where they ended up and what leads to that disparity what leads to that difference in stories and in people's lives is usually a combination of two things circumstance and choices difficult circumstances and poor choices and what's interesting here is that for the group of us in this room we don't have the ability to blame circumstances too much for us most of it's going to be about the choices so that's what tragedy is so what would be the opposite of tragedy what would happen if we take that Delta between what could have been and what is how happy we could have been and how happy we are what if we could eliminate that difference what if that Delta was Zero what kind of story would that be and I'm going to suggest to you that a word that captures that story is genius now genius has come to mean something particular in society we think of Genius as someone who's really good at something someone who's the best at a certain thing Einstein genius Mozart genius Michael Jordan genius all right but the word genius actually comes from a slightly different place if you go back to the roots of where genius really comes from it used to mean something a little bit different it didn't refer to being exceptional at something it referred to the essence of something what you might call the essence of a person or a thing the Ness of something and by this definition it makes less sense to ask is this person a genius and much more sense to ask what is this person's genius what is their genius and what I'll suggest to you is responsible for eliminating the Delta between how happy you could be and how happy you are is the extent to which you understand and embrace your Genius what makes you you what is your essence and create a life and make the kind of choices that allows you to exhibit that genius every day so that who you are and what you're doing are not two different things you're not at work with a game face on going through the motions and then when you come home or on the weekend you get to be you that is not exhibiting genius in your life and so what I want to talk about fundamentally are the choices we make that create one story or another a story that you look back 50 or 60 years from now and ask yourself was that a tragedy or was that pure genius so what I want to talk about are some of the choices and perhaps some of the habits you may want to consider cultivating to make sure that the story ends up maybe where you want it to end up so that everybody in here can look back a couple years from now and say am I happy fantastically so yes I was lucky to have these circumstances but then I made the right choices so that's where this is going to go and I'll start with an idea that we don't talk much about at the Harvard Business School in fact we don't talk much about it in Business Schools generally we don't even talk about it much in society as being a particularly good thing but here is my most immediately actionable advice for you quit to be more specific quit early and quit often be the best quitter you know and just to make sure I'm being clear about what I do and don't mean about this let me use the word in a sentence here's what I mean if you would mind take a moment and close your eyes you don't have to but play along if you don't mind and if you are lucky enough to have a job or something lined up for the summer or the fall imagine that job for a moment what you're going to be doing after you graduate just imagine that for a moment and ask yourself am I really excited about this is this what I always wanted to be doing at this stage in my life is this what I dreamed of doing is this what I really really really want to do and if the answer is no then I suggest you quit and you quit now and save yourself some time quit early quit often as I think about my own career as I think about the stuff that I get to do now and I love my job I love every aspect of it I didn't get to have a job that I love now I'm not saying anybody else would love it I love it but I wouldn't have found this job uh by making good decisions I would go as far as to say that I am worse than the average person and probably considerably worse than the people in this room at making good career decisions I tend to make the wrong decision many times the thing that I happen to be good at the thing that I was luckily quite good at from an early age was being a good quitter I would identify what I don't like and not waste time justifying to myself that it's okay I should still do it and I would just quit when I went into college I was an undergrad for three years I formally changed Majors five times all right and I actually changed schools once in the middle as well computer science no psychology no secondary education majoring in English and math no criminal justice no economics yes and then I graduated and I got a job at a very nice consulting firm which I won't name because three months later I hated it and I noticed a lot of people near me hated it as well some people loved it it was perfect for them that's exactly what they should have been doing but I wasn't one of those people so I quit again I thought well what am I going to do with the rest of my life no idea maybe I'll be a high school teacher I always thought I'll be a high school teacher okay I'll start substitute teaching at my old high school so I became a sub and while I was doing that I started practicing martial arts I thought maybe I'll open a martial arts school at some point in my life and I started thinking about business maybe I want to start a business in the world of Education sort of a tutoring business so I Incorporated that and started thinking about how I'm going to get some clients and at the same time I was thinking about getting a PhD and being a game theorist so I applied and got in to a few schools to study managerial economics and Game Theory and then I quit most of those things and I went to Northwestern un University to become a game theorist it was fantastic for about four months and then I realized you know the modeling is cool the math is great the economics is very fun but this is not who I am and so I quit again and by now I was starting to worry myself like maybe I'm one of those people who'll never find something until I did and I switched departments and I ended up studying negotiation and decision-making and then I took some time off to study ethnic conflict and it really became clear that this is exactly what I should be doing with my life and I couldn't have made that decision when I graduated from college I didn't even know this job existed I can look back and tell a nice story about how all the things I was interested in teaching Consulting research analysis having no boss etc etc all of a sudden all come together in this job but it didn't happen by charting a path it did happen by quitting quitting often and quitting early so by the time I got hired at this great school I was 26 years old and a whole bunch of quitting under my belt quit early quit often two last things I'll say about quitting before we move on to something else I could talk about quitting all day uh first I'm not saying quit something because it's hard I'm telling you to quit something because it sucks it's just not for you it may be for everybody sitting near you but it's not for you quit it don't spend years justifying why you got to do it if you have the opportunity quit the second thing I'll say quitting is not for the weak quitting takes strength quitting often takes more strength than perseverance cultivate the strength to quit and make it a habit it allows you to say no to a lot of things and yes to the few things that maybe you didn't even know were perfect for you now of course after you do all this quitting you got to do something with your life you can't really just keep quitting so what are you going to do what job should you take what career path should you follow obviously it's going to be different for the 900 or so mbas that we have graduating this year everybody's different everybody's going to do something very different you could decide to do something in the Arts something in engineering starting a business working in management you could do a million things but here's one thing here's one feature that should be a part of everybody's job and everybody's career track and everybody's future it's the one feature that ties all of you together as MBA students it's what the MBA students mission is in life you know it's it's hard sometimes to talk about the mission of an MBA student because we're going to have a debate about what that really is it's easy in other fields you go to the med school ask people what's your mission what's your purpose in some language or another they'll tell you our purpose is to create Health to create a healthier Society got it go to the law school what's your purpose create Justice go to the Ed School what's your purpose create education create a more educated or learned Society business school what's your purpose what are you all supposed to do what have you been prepared for trained for educated to do and I would suggest that one answer to that question is is you are trained to create value you have the ability you have the training you have the practice of being among the best in this world at finding ways to create value where it needs to be or could be created you can see a problem and try to figure out how we would best fix it you can look at a system that's broken and think about how to improve it you can think about a need or a demand that's unfulfilled you can think about how to fulfill it how do we bring together the resources bring together the people create the system create the processes create the structures the channels that we need to solve problems that create value everyone in here should be a value Creator whatever it is that you want to do in whatever field it may be create value make sure that what you're doing creates value and people of course think of creating value in different ways but fundamentally it comes down to two buckets there's two kinds of people there are those who figure out how to create value first and then worry about how much money they're going to make later the assumption is if I create a lot of value I'm going to have the opportunity to monetize some of that value and I'm going to get paid but we're going to find a way to create value in whatever area we want business non- business doesn't matter we're going to create value and then we're going to get paid these are the people we we call mbas and then there are those who figure out how to make money but don't really create value for anyone to find a way to position themselves in a certain way create certain structures that make sure they get paid even though they're not really creating value for anyone we call these people thieves don't be a thief the value you create in society should be the up bound of how much money you make now how much you make up to that is up for negotiation it's up for discussion it's up for argument it's up to principles of fairness Etc but the value you create in society should serve as an upper bound of how much you take home if you're taking home more than the value you're creating in society you're falling into bucket number two find a way to create value find a way to create value in an area in a passion in an aspect of the world that makes sense to you of course you know we've been talking about careers and jobs it's not really the only place that's going to have an impact on your happiness in fact my guess is for most of you most of the time your day-to-day happiness is going to be much more a function of your relationship with people than it is going to be about the job you have so it'll be it'll be close but those relationships are going to matter and what's going to matter even more is how you handle those relationships when those relationships aren't going so well how you manage conflict in your lives now I've been studying Conflict for about 15 years I'm not saying that's a lot but it's 15 years and one of the things that I have come to terms with and understood I think at a pretty deep level is the following it turns out you don't need two people one of whom's a bad person in order to have conflict you just need two people we see good smart well-intentioned people fighting with each other all the time you don't need one person to have ill intent or to be an idiot to have a conflict good people are fighting with good people smart people are smarting fighting with smart people all the time and what helps us reconcile those conflicts what allows us to have better relationships at all levels at the levels of society internationally with each other in the house is this third point which is about empathy if you can cultivate greater empathy in your lives a phrase I like to use is learn to see the world through gentler eyes be less judgmental of other people people personally I don't care if you are a fan of Shan Hannity or Keith obman I don't care if you know the ideas of the Tea Party resonate with you or the ideas of Occupy Wall Street I don't care if it's about the coch brothers or about George Soros I really don't care what you believe but what does matter is how much you are willing to understand people who are on the other side how much you're willing to say this person passionately fundamentally timately disagrees with me on some major issues and it doesn't have to mean that they're crazy or evil are out to get me that they see the world in a fundamentally different place it's it's fantastic there's a million people who agree with you that's great but there's also a million people who don't agree with you and the question is how do you make sense of those people what do you do when you run into one of those people now I think all of us have a decent amount of empathy I think most of us are the kinds of people that try to take the other person's perspective most of the time it's just that we tend to forget it when it matters most and it matters most in two cases one is when we're in our really close Rel relationships the sad fact of the matter is that we typically behave worse with the people that we care about most you get into an argument you get into a fight you start out wanting to make a good point share your perspective try and understand where they're coming from but things start spiraling out of control and you walk away not having any patience for not having any desire for really understanding why it is that they're so angry at you why it is that they see the world so differently than you do why they think what you did was maybe not the right thing to do and the second place we tend to not have sufficient empathy is when we're dealing with people that we just fundamentally don't like at all but what you got to remember is that empathy matters most when you're dealing with people who seem to deserve it least I'll give you an example uh it's not about empathy but it's about something very related to it uh my martial arts instructor once told me the following story when he was a bit younger uh he was an instructor but he also worked on the side at this uh at this Hospital which had a lot of patients with psychological disorders and one of his aspects of his job uh as was the case with everybody who worked there was that when one of these patients got out of control maybe even got violent one of the aspects of the job was to try and bring these people under control restrain them make sure they don't hurt themselves or or hurt you get the situation under control and so he used to work here and and and whenever one of those situations would erupt it would be like you know all handson deck everybody let's try to fix this problem of course sometimes you'd be the only one there and there was no backup there was nobody else there so that was the context so anyway the the instructor is one day sitting with uh his boss in the lunchroom and the boss says to him he says let me ask you something you know when you're one of these patients and they get really physical they get violent they start attacking you and nobody else is really there do you ever use your kung fu on these people the guy looks at him he says all the time what are you talking about that's crazy you can't do that that's not even legal it's gonna it's going to get you in trouble and the instructor says you know it's it's when these people are losing their cool and they're getting violent and they're taking it out on me those are the moments when it's most important for me to keep my cool for me to keep my balance for me to try and understand why they're doing what they're doing and why they're lashing out at me and what they're going to do next and it's my Kung Fu that allows me to do that to keep my cool to keep my composure that's me using my Kung Fu every day if I didn't have that I might actually throw a punch at someone I might really lose it this is where it matters most and the same thing is true in our relationships there are people who are going to annoy you who are going to frustrate you who are going to think differently from you in ways that you just can't even imagine somebody could think the question is what do you do with it are you going to be one of those people we have too much of the sort of oneliner wrote memorizing Partyline ideologues who go around saying you know there are simple easy answers to what people say are complex problems and the simple easy answer is this and everybody who disagrees is wrong or evil or out to get you or a communist or a Hitler or are you going to be someone who says listen the reason we have a long-standing seemingly intractable debate on this issue is because smart well-intentioned people who come from different backgrounds from different perspectives sometimes dis agree you got to have that empathy you got to have the ability to look at the world through gentler eyes it can make all the difference in every one of the relationships we have of course before we can have empathy we need to have something else which gets us to humility now let's clear the air a little bit some of you walked into school not raing very high on the humility scale which is cool some of us walked into school with the exact same problem uh but then you walked into the class and what did we do we made matters worse so here's the clearing of the air this has to be said many of the answers you gave in class were wrong they were dead wrong all right yeah I said it and we didn't tell you that we certainly didn't tell you that often enough I'm not talking about the category of things that well there's no right or wrong answer I'm talking about there's right and wrong and you're wrong he said we sort of Nod along said anybody else maybe we go to the board write your answer in a smaller font than the rest of it all sorts of stuff happening hoping and you know we didn't do you any favors and that's on us but the fact of the matter is when you leave and you get out there you need to remember we have not equipped you to solve the big problems you're going to face we have equipped you to have a fighting chance when you face those problems and the extent to which you can solve those problems not the easy stuff that you could have solved before you got here the big stuff that you think you want to solve and we think you want to solve the extent to which you're going to be able to solve solve those is yes in part going to be based on your skills your confidence level Etc but also in no small part on your ability to be humble to accept what you know and you don't know to understand that there are problems that have been going on for a long time there are problems that nobody else has solved for a reason because a hundred people coming up to that problem trying to solve it themselves may not solve it that you got to bring other people in that you got to think differently that you don't have all the answers it makes a huge difference humility and confidence are not enemies they are best friends if you have one or the other you're in a lot of trouble people with lots of humility and no confidence they're not doing too much they're not taking very many actions they're not being bold but the people that have all the confidence in the world and no humility I see one of those people I see someone who's about to go down in flames and they're probably going to take other people with them you got to have both confidence with humility yes I can do it yes it can be done and what are the limits of what I can do alone or what are the limits of what I bring to the table what are the limits of everything that we have tried so far are we open to that now the good news is this the good news is uh whether our parents teach us sufficient humility whether our teachers teach us sufficient humility maybe maybe not but relatively soon in all of your lives someone's going to show up who's going to teach you humility fast and that someone is going to be your kid your children will teach you humility faster than you could have imagined in my case when my three-year-old son this is a year and a half ago came up to me and said Daddy I really want something I really want to do something what is it can you teach me how to fly teach you how to fly how do you answer that say what is this person thinking more important more importantly what have I been representing myself as right yeah step back here all right this is going to be a longer conversation all right and it also comes in a different way with your kids you look at these kids they're small and and you real iiz how much they already know and you ask yourself you I'm 30 35 years older than this person I don't know if I know much more I'll give you an example I'm talking to so as I Was preparing for this talk I decided to ask my children what I should talk about now my kids are very young uh my son is 4 and a half years old my daughter is 2 and a half years old and then I have a two and a half month old I didn't ask her uh but I went to the other two and I tried to explain to my daughter I said you know she's two and a half years old I said you know that he's going to be giving a talk he's going to be talking to students he's going to be talking to kids you know what would you say what's important so it basically came down to what would you tell someone is very important what should you always remember and she says no hitting that's pretty good all right no hitting so I say okay uh anything else she says no kicking okay anything else no punching all right how about something very different anything different from that and she thinks about it for a while and she says no hitting someone on the head with a bat right I think we're tapped out here uh let's go to my son so the following day I set aside some time to sit down with my son and I asked my son I say and he he got it a little bit more that he's going to give a talk I'd given a talk at his school once for his for the kids in his class he's he's four and a half in preschool so he he kind of got it and I said okay what's important he says be a good listener very good all right what else don't do bad things agreed anything else don't cry for small things or don't cry because of small reasons this fantastic so I push my Lu a little bit more anything else don't call 911 to talk to a fireman if there's no fire now he's never done that I don't even know where he got that but that's in top four things that people should know all right and you think about it you step away and you're like these kids sort of know you know what have we' been doing for the last 30 years what have I done since I knew that You' have been better off just having them up here all right they're much cuter they're at least as insightful but it's true you know you think about what it is that you know and you don't know and you think about your kids and it can make a big difference and I I assume most of you don't have kids right now I know most of you don't have kids right now but it's it's an amazing experience and you got to have the humility even when you talk with your kids because there's a lot that they can teach you and that's where I'm going to take the last point in all of this this is a school and so the last point should be about education and it should be about learning and so the last thing I'm going to say to you on this is you got to get your learn on here's what I mean the thing that we as people seem to be most inefficient at is learning the human body is an amazingly efficient machine when we go to work we're actually pretty efficient if we put our minds to it the one thing where we fail miserably on the efficiency scale is in learning we miss on a daily basis 99% of the learning opportunities that come our way and the reason is partly we don't have our student head on but also partly because we're very picky about what we learn and who we learn from we walk into a situation with preconceived notions about what it is that I should learn and what I want to suggest to you is you're going to learn a lot more if you're not so picky about who you learn from and what you learn if you're open to the idea of learning from every experience that you're having again I'll give you a personal example when I was practicing martial arts one of the things that would happen when you would go into the school when you'd go to the dojo is occasionally it would be sparring day and you would be paired up with someone and you had to you know put on some gear but not too much and then you would Spar and it would be physical and there would be physical contact but you were taught to you know pull your punches a little bit especially if you're going to attack someone in the face you're not going to go all out you're going to pull your punches you can go a little bit harder on the body Etc but pull your punches in any case pull your kicks Etc every so often more often than randomly it seemed I would get paired with this one particular guy he was bigger than me he was stronger than me he was higher ranked than me he was better in every way that was fine what wasn't fine was he didn't seem to understand what it meant to pull a punch so every time he came at me I'd get hit hard I mean I'd block some things but I was getting hit hard and it hurt and it would throw me off and it was really annoying and every so often the instructor would have to remind him listen you got to you know this is practice we're trying to improve you can't just go full on otherwise people aren't going to learn but he wouldn't listen or he would listen he just didn't care or he had a different philosophy about what it meant to practice or to spar I don't know but his behavior wouldn't change and it got really frustrating I started dreading walking in here and being paired up with that guy cuz the entire hour would be a waste I just spend the whole time making sure I don't get my ass kicked all right sitting there going I'm not learning a thing until and you know where this is going I realize that I've got it all wrong I am not going to learn the things I came here to learn but I can learn a lot more I don't usually get the opportunity to learn how to take a punch to the face I don't usually get the opportunity to try to keep my composure when I'm under physical attack or to remember what I'm supposed to do when the adrenaline is getting out of control this is a unique opportunity I knew at the end of the day I'm not going to end up in the hospital you know let's put it in perspective now do I want to have the mindset of going in there and getting excited about this opportunity or do I want to go in there and dread it and learn nothing it was an opportunity to learn it just wasn't in the form that I had expected you got to remember you can learn at least at least as much from a bad teacher as from a good teacher not the same thing but you can learn at least as much from a bad teacher as a good teacher if you're open to the idea of learning and like quitting like empathy like humility like the idea of making sure you're creating value this idea of not being a picky learner this is simple stuff but simple doesn't make it easy nothing I'm saying here is very complex all right it's simple not complex but that doesn't mean it's easy if it was easy we'd all be doing it all the time to the extent that we thought it made sense in our lives but these are habits we can cultivate we can cultivate the habit of looking carefully at a situation and deciding whether or not to quit and how sooning we can do it are we really creating value on the path that we have decided to move are we cultivating sufficient empathy are we stepping back and trying try to understand the perspective of the people we're dealing with do we have sufficient humility in our interactions with people and our interactions with problems are we keeping an open mind and making sure that we learn you're no longer going to be quote students but you should remain students it's going to be the most helpful thing you can do as you go forward and try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life so I'm going to close with just one last thing that is different from everything I've said so far uh it's it's not related to tragedy or to genius or which choices you're going to make or any of the five things I talked about up to here but it is worth saying your teachers care a lot about you your teachers want you to be successful they want you to be happy we want you to do great things but there's something else we want as well we like when you stay in touch stay in touch with your teachers they invest a lot in you the teachers that are here but the teachers that are not here and the teachers that aren't even at the business school stay in touch with your teachers reach out to them once in a while let them know how you're doing not just with a business school student you know think back to your elementary school middle school high school your parents call your parents tonight for crying out loud all right reach out to people these are the people that care these are the people that have done a lot to get you where you are and it's a really really nice thing not out of gratitude but but just out of remaining part of that relationship the idea of of touching base with folks stay in touch with your teachers of any form even stay in touch with the teachers that you didn't think were your teachers because you hated them if somebody taught you something they're your teacher I'm not saying call up your ex and say hey thanks all right uh but you know within the realm of normality within the realm of reasonableness reach out to the people that have helped you and say say hello and just let them know what you're doing you don't even have to say thanks people just like to hear Hello and so do that I'm going to stop uh I'm not sure if this is anywhere near what it is that you expected to hear when you got in here knowing that I was going to speak but it's what I wanted to talk about so we went with that um if there's any questions I'll take them we maybe for about 10 minutes or so8 to 10 minutes and then we'll we'll move on to the next speaker question yes ma'am I was pretty sure I'd managed to answer every question every student had but apparently not um question about quitting and how you manage perception around quitting because there's also the whole issue about Burning Bridges and so if after three months you go there realize you hate it how do you manage that because our society is not um socialized to think about quitting in the way that you have now presented it to us yeah uh so well there's two things there's the pressure you're going to get from people that have no stake in you quitting or not quitting but they just have expectations of you and then there's the people that you know the job you're quitting itself uh when I went to the consulting firm to quit I didn't just sort of call in and say I quit you know I sat down and I gave them the respect they deserved and I listened to them I was open I empathized I tried to have humility I may be wrong about this let's have a conversation about it but ultimately I also had to share with them why it was important for me to do something different and two kinds of responses came back most of the people I talked to during my exit interview were extremely supportive extremely supportive you know hey if this is what you think you got to do then then that's what you got to do and good for you better to know now than to later we understand because I hadn't been a jerk about it i' I'd been respectful about about the process there was one person who actually happened to have been the hiring manager who tore into me started telling me he's like you know what do you even know you've only been here 3 months and then he went down this path about do you know how much the company invest and new hires for the first year we don't even make any money off of you you know and we spend all this stuff and now you're taking off and and I I was feeling bad you know I kind of understand that and after a while I stopped feeling bad because he wouldn't stop yelling at me and and again I was young and I would have maybe handled it differently now but at the time I said listen I think there's a misperception here you know I understand that you know the company Maybe lost a year by you know investing in me when they could have invested in someone else but do you really think I did this strategically do you think I got anything out of those three months that I'm going to be able to use for the rest of my life what C language programming you think I'm ever going to use that again I understand the consulting firm lost a year but I lost a year of my life and a year of my life is worth a lot more to me than a year of a new hire is worth to this firm I didn't do this out of some strategic desire to steal from you so you know you got to lay it out and you got to explain here's here's why I'm doing this to the extent that you don't get into those relationships in the first place the better but if you're there if you're if you have obligations meet your obligations if you're going to put them in a hard spot understand that respect that make sure you don't put them in a in a difficult situation but then don't waste time justifying to yourselves you should stay there longer than you should reality is always a little bit murkier but quit quit often takes you a long way as for the other people in your lives some of them will understand why you're doing something different and some won't but you know as I look to the MBA students at the business school here I mean how many of you would describe yourself first and foremost as an average Harvard Business School MBA student is that who you are are you the average Harvard Business School NBA student if not then don't fall into the social pressures of what it means to be the average Harvard Business School NBA student you're you you are also an MBA student that's where the create value part comes in like all of your peers you should be doing that but who Are You That Makes You Different that should be the guiding force and yes get there in a reasonable respectful way anything else you can throw out anything you want I'll probably answer it yes sir thank you very much Professor uh I want to ask question relating to uh empathy When you mention we tend to have little empathy to people very closest to and people we don't like to me I sort of understand the second part very it's very straightforward but do you happen to know why maybe psychologically we tend to have little empathy towards the people we care about the most probably two things you know when somebody fights with us or yells at us or doesn't seem to understand us it doesn't hurt so much when it's a stranger we can write off the stranger you don't even know me yeah you're crazy I don't have to see you again but when somebody close to us seems to be judging us seems to be attacking us seems to not understand us when we think they should I think our defenses go up pretty high and we become more emotional about it we get more angry about it and when you get into that state the last thing you're thinking about doing is well let me see it from your perspective so I think that's that's one of those reasons the second reason I think is we have established relationships and established patterns in our relationships you know whether it's with your spouse whether it's with your parents or with your kids you get into a certain routine and as a result of that routine you don't update often enough as that person is changing who they are if I asked you are you a different person now than you were five or 10 years ago you'd say yes if I was to ask your parents that they may say no he's basically the same kid all right same thing with spouses is your husband or is your wife a different person now than they were five years ago basically the same person but when you ask that person are you different in this relationship they yeah I've grown a lot I've evolved we often don't see the growth coming in other people we judge them the way they always were I see this in family businesses all the time it's where it's worse where the disputes are the ugliest the father or mother who can't see the kid any differently than when they were 5 years old or 10 years old The Sibling who can't see their sibling even though now they're 45 years old any different than when they used to steal their toys and break them right we have to be better at updating when other people are trying they're trying to evolve they're trying to change they're trying to be better we got to stop using the same arguments with them that we were in the past same same judgment same language we have to update and we should feel less pressure to defend ourselves with the people that are attacking their close maybe it's a combination of the two yes sir thank you deac I think you should give this talk to the RC's before they graduate it's very powerful um I think everyone agrees with me I want to know the quit early quit often thing it works out when you're 21 22 and you're kind of like okay by age 28 I can quit my way to the ideal position and I can be really happy but a lot of us at least myself kind of moving into officially moving into adulthood and at least I try you're going through changes I know right so how would you there's an internal battle where we naturally seek we we're naturally kind of seeking to settle so there's an internal debate between doing crazy things and quitting and finding kind of your sweet spot and on the other hand just finding something that's stable and safe so how would you reconcile that battle for us in turn this is a serious problem but first just characterization wise crazy things in quitting uh I wouldn't say quitting is the crazy thing I think doing something for the rest of your life that's not right for you is crazy that's what's crazy let's do the normal thing up until we get to about 25 or 30 what's normal is not to do the same thing for too long you're in middle school for three years high school for four years college for four years work for a couple years grad school for two or three years you're constantly changing and you have lots of opportunities but when you get to about 25 or 30 you're about to settle down I don't know too many people who stop growing at 25 or 30 but we do have this pressure or the expectation that now we're going to be settled for the rest of our life for some people that's a real constraint you know their kids are going to go hungry if they don't keep doing what they're doing they didn't have an education this is the only thing they know how to do they don't even know how to get out of the village there there's real constraints so they're going to keep doing that because that's their only choice but for the rest of us what we perceive to be constraints aren't really constraints yes it's harder when I have three kids yes it's harder when I have a mortgage yes it's harder but it's not as hard as I make it out to be and in my own life I I'll give you my answer you know I don't have very fancy or or uh costly pastimes I don't buy very many luxury goods I don't go out to expensive restaurants even my favorite restaurant is now what it was in college which is Taco Bell uh and every so often uh my wife will ask me uh you know on a birthday or it's Christmas or it's you know our anniversary let's buy you something really nice let's buy you something that you'll really enjoy something let's spend some money on something and what I will often say is you know I already am spending my money on the most important luxury item I could think of the money that I have that looks like it's sitting in a bank is actually purchasing something very very important for me it's giving me the ability to quit whenever I want all that money that looks like I'm not spending that's what that is if I decide I don't think I'm going to decide this next year or even 10 years from now but I may if I discover one day that this is no longer for you that what I should be doing with my life is something different it'll be more difficult than it was when it was 21 but I foresee that and I make some arrangements for that what I would say is one luxury item if you can afford it you should certainly purchase is the freedom to quit whenever you want if the next paycheck won't show up for 2 3 four 5 years because of a change in trajectory and if you can afford it again it may be circumstances don't allow it but it shouldn't be choices that kept you down right though I will say this it's usually not the money that keeps us running down that same path It's usually the mindset money is important but mindset is the biggest problem we don't bother questioning we don't want to know we accept that you know work is work it's not supposed to be fun I'll be happy when I'm X I'll do this for eight or 10 years then I'll do this those people keep doing that and then they or 60 or 70 or 80 and they look back and say this is what I did with my life or maybe they don't even ask that and they're perfectly happy I don't know but those that do you know this is the choice you have to make it's not it's going to get harder but you can prepare for it mentally and maybe even financially all right I'm going to be mindful of hitting just about 5 o' now uh it's been my pleasure uh being here with all of you uh hopefully it was a nice time for all of you as well stay in touch uh if you want to talk about this I'll stick around after Professor Moss's uh talk with you as well so I'll be here for a little while longer and if you ever want to reach out next week next month next year whether you're one of my students or not always feel comfortable to reach out to any of us here we like to hear from you good luck with what happens next

Channel: Deepak Malhotra

Views: 533,099

Keywords: HBS, Harvard Business School, Professor, Harvard, Graduation, Speech, Deepak Malhotra, Tragedy, Genius, Commencement, Motivation, Best of EC Year, MBA

Id: D73mm29XXAw

Length: 54min 23sec (3263 seconds)

Published: Wed May 16 2012