Theme Drawn from: Essay
Where the theme comes from
Seneca
Seneca was a Roman writer and politician who lived from about 4 BC to AD 65. In his essay, ‘On the Shortness of Life’ written around AD 49, he wrote, “we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.”
Seneca opens the essay by saying that it is not that life is short; it is the pursuit of worthless goals when one’s life feels wasted.
A few pages later Seneca reiterates the delusion of a ‘future’ when everything would be right for your goals.
‘You fear everything, like mortals as you are, and yet you desire everything as if you were immortals. You will hear many men say, "After my fiftieth year I will give myself up to leisure: my sixtieth shall be my last year of public office": and what guarantee have you that your life will last any longer? Who will let all this go on just as you have arranged it?’
The uncertainty of the future is what drives MBA and College Applicants to chase their goals now.
Seneca then names the cost of waiting.
‘When, therefore, you see a man often wear the purple robes of office, and hear his name often repeated in the forum, do not envy him: he gains these things by losing so much of his life. Men throw away all their years in order to have one year named after them as consul: some lose their lives during the early part of the struggle, and never reach the height to which they aspired: some after having submitted to a thousand indignities in order to reach the crowning dignity, have the miserable reflection that the only result of their labours will be the inscription on their tombstone.’
A consul was the highest elected office in Rome and held the office for one year.
Roman years were named after the consuls who held office in them.
The practicing of spending twenty or thirty years working toward that one year is what Seneca criticizes.
Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande is an American surgeon and writer. He published a book called Being Mortal in 2014 about how doctors treat people who are dying, and the mismatch between the treatment and the dying person.
If the Borrowed Clock theme till now was expressed through career progression and the chase of status, it could also be presented with the realization of humans’ mortality.
Here, Gawande’s aphoristic line should guide you in creating a great opening for MBA essays.
Look at what he writes,
“Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins”
Starting with such universal truths in your own words as the opening line is the secret behind creating a memorable ‘Borrowed Clock’ themed essay.
David Hume and Oliver Sacks
If you personally faced the misfortune of dealing with a life-threatening illness or an event, look at how David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, in April 1776, wrote in ‘My Own Life ‘ after learning that he was dying.
Hume does the opposite of what Seneca does.
Hume makes no claim about people in general.
He reports his own body and his reconciliation with his end.
‘In spring, 1775, I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment's abatement of my spirits; insomuch, that were I to name a period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.’
Hume puts the incurable illness and the undiminished good spirits in the same line to show his strange resilience. He doesn’t build up the illness nor does he talk about the inevitable end he will experience.
By using ‘in somuch that were I to name a period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period’, he is sharing how he has come to embrace the moment.
Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist and writer, in February 2015, wrote in ‘My Own Life,’ weeks after learning that an eye cancer from nine years earlier had spread to his liver,
“At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.
…
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying.
..
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”
Sacks opens with a routine about his swimming and then shifts to his mortality – the bad news.
Then, he switches to a gratitude line and then a resolution on how he will live the rest of his life.
You can talk about any diagnosis with this 3-part structure.
A routine -> Bad News -> New Goals
Why it carries this name
The promotion that an investment banking applicant expects to gain from an analyst to an associate is the bank’s hierarchy determining when you are worthy of more responsibility. The tenure is the borrowed clock.
An officer evaluation report in the United States Army is the artifact that determines the rank and potential of an officer. Everything he files after the deadline only matters in the next promotion cycle. The deadline is the borrowed clock.
When a board of examiners evaluates your performance on a set of papers on one particular day, that single 4-hour window is the borrowed clock that determines your status for life.
An applicant using the borrowed clock in their essay can interpret all their identities through this theme and then share a goal or a mission or a purpose that is true to their real identity.
The purpose of this theme is not to gain sympathy. Applicants mistakenly associate ‘The Borrowed Clock’ as a shortcut for gaining sympathy.
It actually moves the ownership of negative events to your own hands. It is the ultimate agency narrative.
When to use it, and when not to
When it works
A number somebody else assigned you at twenty-two will outlive every other number you earn afterward.
The Institute publishes the top fifty names, and mine was number 49. Last week I introduced myself as Top 50, seven years after the exam.
The essay is about the inability of the applicant to get out of the identity of the ‘exam’ taker even after impressive achievements.
The exam ranking is the borrowed clock.
The applicant interprets the borrowed clock to show how his thinking has evolved from chasing ranks to ‘What Matters’ most to him now.
Why it fails
- Do not use the theme in scenarios when you cannot name who set the deadline.
- Do not spend more than 5 sentences on the life-threatening event.
- Do not thank the event with lines like, "I am grateful for what the diagnosis taught me"
- Do not end on a private realization.
- Do not stack two hardships – one around a societal deadline and another around mortality.
- Do not describe the event with literal lines like, “After my third all-nighter that quarter, I collapsed at my desk. The doctor said my blood pressure was dangerously high. In that moment I understood that I was killing myself for a bonus.”
- Do not borrow grief like, “When my grandfather passed away, I realized how precious our time together had been. I resolved to live every day with the same purpose he had shown me.”
- Do not artificially connect a life-threatening event to career change, like, "The accident showed me that finance was not my calling. I am now applying to Darden to move into impact investing, where I can align my work with my values.”
Where the Concept applies in the Essay
- Opening
- Middle
- Transition
- Closing
Position in the essay: Opening, Middle
