I was watching “The Man Who Would Be King,” where two earnest small-time charlatans planned to take over a distant kingdom and rule it in 19th-century India. The audacity of the goal made me laugh. But there was sincerity and preparation for achieving the goal that turned around my belief that maybe the two ordinary blokes could achieve this.
By the middle of the movie, I was guessing different paths by which they would be king.
And it took just one sequence – a journey through the Khyber Pass and a tough winter.
When all seemed lost, they laughingly were ready to accept death. That single scene showed me that these ordinary charlatans were no ordinary people. They were willing to put in 100% to achieve the goal.
Before you write MBA Goals Essays, consider these 5 factors:
2) Bold and Audacious – With Strategy and Tiny Success
1) Define the Problem
I have read about the goals of transforming communities, changing FinTech, or solving climate change.
When multi-billion-dollar industries are reconciling with realistic ESG and climate change targets, the ambitious problem you plan to solve must be tempered with our world's reality.
Distance from the Goal
In 2012, if you were applying, audacious goals around climate change would seem inspiring.
The farther the goal, the more time we have as a society to understand the reality.
The closer we reach a deadline; the reality shakes us back to achievable milestones.
2030 is that deadline.
Look at the market trends and expert perspectives on the problem for the current year.
If they are ambitious, carve a set of milestones to reach that goal.
Be aware of the investments in industries by reading Private Equity, Venture Capital and Investment Banking trends. They are often a leading indicator of achievable and ambitious goals.
2) Bold and Audacious – With Strategy and Tiny Success
The bold and audacious post-MBA goals work only in one case.
Success in Similiar Problem
You had some success with a similar problem. It need not be the scale you are citing for your post-MBA goal. But past actions are the best indicator of whether you can reach similar milestones to achieve the big audacious goals. The admissions team closely watches this data point.
Figuring out your Personal Brand Before Drafting Goals Essay
One of my clients, in her first version of the Essay, was eager to position herself as an entrepreneur by citing all the tweaks she did as a young kid, but when I pointed out that she has no startup venture or product under her name – even of smaller scale, she understood the fallacy of setting up the narrative with wrong examples before citing post-MBA goal.
Her brand was that of an optimizer and not an entrepreneur. Once we figured out her personal brand, it was about citing tiny successes and then building a strategy to tweak and solve a big societal problem.
3) Small and Personal
The themes for the post-MBA goals essay need not be all around changing the world.
I read essays more closely when the applicant introduced a personal motivation into the narrative – from losing a farm to parents not being able to complete education due to forced migration from war/famine to building an organization that values democracy after the horrors of violence in a dictatorial country.
Such personal motivations capture the attention of the reader.
Our inseparable need to connect with another person, their thinking and mindset, forces us to empathize.
The more personal the goal, the better will be the believability of achieving it.
4) Not too Small
The ‘small’ is not ‘small’ from a general audience perspective but ‘small’ compared to the VC community's million/billion-dollar fund-raising.
Everything is relative.
MBAs are competing with entrepreneurs and superstar Technologists, Finance and Consulting professionals.
The goals are all relative.
Rarely are simple career transition goals accepted at face value without some personal narrative to add an extra layer of authenticity to the goal.
The goals cannot be small. They should be ambitious.
5) Value for Schools
The more personal the motivation, the more likely you will pursue it.
The more persistent you are, the more likely you will hit a milestone.
The more frequently you are hitting the milestone, the more likely you will succeed.
The more successful you are, the more the schools can promote that you are the Alum that they trusted, and only because you attended 2 years in the MBA program could you achieve all that you plan to achieve.
Schools are desperate to build their alum pool with entrepreneurial candidates.
They don’t want just career-oriented candidates.
They want ambitious game-changers.
Understand these five factors before framing your post-MBA goals Essay.
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