When was the last time you took a good look at yourself, and asked yourself: who is this person? Am I proud of being this person?

In a digitally enhanced world where social media and networks overwhelm our attention on a daily basis, I wonder and question how often people engage in introspection. After all, you have one life to live, and if you’re not focused on improving yourself, challenging yourself, and instead, focusing on other people’s lives, especially those who may not even be important or valuable to you, what do you achieve?

I think this is one of the biggest reasons I got into bodybuilding. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to quit my job, abandon my career, and start competing. Bodybuilding is a general term that means exactly what it looks like: building your body. You lift weights regularly to break down muscle tissues just to have them rebuilt, bigger, stronger, and more enduring. You feed those muscles with natural, satiating food, and rest adequately. But most importantly, every bodybuilder knows that you can’t rely on others. You can’t rely on the fact that he or she will be there for you, or that he or she will push you to new heights. You are your only source of action, motivation, progress, and results. And no matter how long it takes, or how hard it feels, or how much it hurts, the only thing that can ever possibly stop you from continuing are your mental barriers. No amount of tweeting, facebook posting, or in general socializing will ever help you reach your goals. It’s all you, and it will always stay that way.

Do yourself a favor, look right into your own eyes in the mirror and ask yourself: what about myself am I proud of, and why? You’d be surprised by the warrior you can find within.

Day 1: Chest, triceps, shoulders

     - Bench press - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Incline dumbbell fly - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Standing lateral raise - 3 sets x 10 reps
     - Tricep pulldown - 3 dropsets (10 reps, 20 reps, 30 reps)
     - Arnold shoulder press - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Dips - 3 sets till failure 

Day 2: Lower body
     - Leg press - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Dumbbell bench lunge - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Leg extension -  3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Hyperextension - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Dumbbell hack squat - 3 sets x 8-12reps 

Day 3: Cardio (25 minutes high intensity on treadmill)

Day 4: Back, biceps
     - Wide-grip lat pulldown - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Bent-over dumbbell row - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - One-arm dumbbell row - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Barbell curl - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Dumbbell curl - 3 sets x 8-12 reps
     - Pull-ups - 3 sets till failure

Day 5: Cardio (25 minutes high intensity on treadmill)

Day 6: Rest!

Day 7: Start over from Day 1

I was debating whether I should study for my final exam tomorrow morning, and then weighed the pros and cons of cramming in an additional 20 minutes. It’s not going to make a difference and I’m much more excited about this right now, so here goes.

It’s hard to believe that it was only a brief 3 weeks ago when, for 6 years, whenever people asked me what I usually eat, I say with an awkward semi-looking-for-sympathy smile, “I don’t know how to cook. Haha, yeah I know it’s sad.” Except, I didn’t actually think it was sad. I thought I was all suave, living the life of a 21st century urbanite in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was sad. Little did I know, my volleyball trained high school fitness had long departed from my physique, muscles, and health. I remember looking at people who watched their nutrition with disgust, not even too long ago, thinking “Jeez, I would hate to be them. Life is short, why the hell would I eat broccoli when I could have a cheeseburger?” Little did I know, they were probably thinking they would hate to be me, throwing away my health in such a short life.

After I made up my mind to transform myself, I had to force myself to go grocery shopping for the first time in my life. Real grocery shopping. No chips, no juice, no sausages, no cookies, hell freaking no. My meals evolved from a primal eggs and canned salmon to eventually including all kinds of complex carbs such as carrots, broccoli, wheat bagel, beans, and a plethora (okay maybe not a plethora, but to me it was) of lean protein from chicken, ground beef, raw salmon, to almonds, cashews, and of course, whey protein. I was amazed by the simplicity of food preparation. All I really needed for the past 6 freaking years was electricity, a pot/pan, spatula, and some organic food from the store downstairs. Talk about an eye-opening stone that hit both health and finance in one shot.

So to conclude, for anyone who is still on the “I can’t cook” boat, also translated as “I’m too lazy to bother”, there’s some motivation. It’s not difficult. It’s a LOT healthier even if you’re not looking to lean up or gain mass. And my goodness, you’ll have a lot more to spend on nice clothes and other leisure at the end of the month.

Week 5: Clean diet, 7-8 hours of rest, and 5 times a week.

It’s not that I’m looking to sculpt a beach body, or that a close friend of mine has recently started on a regime. I don’t know why I decided to do this, but it feels pretty damn good. In a period when gluttony and blissful ignorance dominate humanity, it’s difficult to see what our bodies are actually made of. Nobody ever “processed” the muscle in your arm. Neither was artificial flavour ever a necessary ingredient in growth and development from infant to adult. Yet, I’ll bet you more than 80% of food that is consumed outside have both those qualities. And so, it’s no surprise that cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity are at all time highs throughout North America.

I don’t know where this habit will take me, or how long it will go on for, but there’s one myth that I have to dispel for the reader: it is not hard to maintain a healthy clean diet. I get comments such as “that’s so intense” and “commitment right there” and I have to resist the temptation to laugh. If our ancestors have been eating natural foods for centuries, how impressive is it really to be following a more traditional dietary path? Anti-social is also a bad excuse. “I want to be able to go out with friends, so it’s inevitable for me to eat some junk food and have a few beers.” True and false. True that you should continue socializing and not become a hermit, but untrue that you have to eat junk food and drink beer. In fact, you never had to consume any of those things. They have always been options your entire life, but you’ve just been making the wrong food choices.

Anyway, I don’t want to appear as a nutrition Nazi, but this is just my two cents. Take it with a grain of salt.

I would be myself.

Even if it means I’d be poor.

Even if it means I’d be alone.

Even if it means I’d be stranded on an island.

Even if it means I’d face racism.

Even if it means I’d risk my life.

Even if it means I have nothing in common with those around me.

Even if it means I agree with nobody besides me.

Even if it means I have to be honest.

Even if it means I’m weak.

Even if it means I’d be living in a 2-storey house instead of a 3-storey one.

Even if it means I am mocked.

Even if it means I’d fall a million times to scar my body from head to toe.

Even if it means I’d be last in the race.

And even if it means it does not make sense in the face of society, academia, culture, religion, friendship, power, money, and fame.

I’d still be me.

I wish he wouldn’t walk over here. I can feel my heart palpitating every time he approaches. I should look at my notes, then he’ll surely go away. Pretend…pretend to be deep in thought, focused, in the moment…

“So, Jeff, that’s your name right? What do you think about it? Why would the firm not want to take a capital structure path to the optimal leverage ratio that is not stepwise or a gradual decline?”

Oh crap…why call on me now… What language did he just speak in?! Was he even talking about the case?

“Uh, yeah…so…”

Come on man, think of something, capital structure…leverage ratio…gradual…

“Gradual issuances are expensive. Therefore, firms would prefer timed offerings.”

The f**k did I just say? Just go away…give me back my peace…

“Good,that’s right. So firms in general prefer fewer equity offerings and therefore the path they take will have timed or seemingly sudden changes to capital structure.”

LOL! Win!

Dear self,

It’s one of those Mondays, when you haven’t done your readings. You haven’t been keeping up with your school work. And worst of all, you don’t really care, because hey, you’re in 4th year, you have an offer lined up, and quite frankly, nothing you learn in the next month will bring you much value compared to the launch your career will experience in a few months. So how in the world do you motivate yourself to run that last mile? Do you try and force yourself to like what you study, even if to no avail? No, begin planning for tomorrow. There’s no point changing anything in the next month or two anymore. You need to finish your degree, period. You can always think about a Masters, Ph.D, or the notorious MBA while you bitterly swallow the material you’re learning like a dry, unbuttered bagel. You can join or create a start-up. Pick up a new sport. The list goes on. Just don’t sit there and let Monday rule your life. You go and rule its life, and show ‘em who’s boss.

Sincerely,
Your ambition

Recently, upon trying to grasp the dynamics and assumptions of an R&D race, I was able to draw some fantastic parallels between academia and real-life. The mathematics actually descended as a refreshing perspective, as with most intuitive things like persevering in a job-hunt, one can’t usually get to put a number on the effort invested. As such, mundane terms like ”networking” and “skill development” sound like a bunch of bull to many people, especially ones numb to an influx of them.

What Harvard Professors Vijay Krishna and Adam Bradenburger have proposed is a model for understanding the dynamics of an R&D race. The model is based on a few assumptions I won’t mention here, but they are rigorous enough that you can trust them to be somewhat accurate. Now, noted, I have seemingly crossed a bridge-less chasm from the topic of job-seeking to an R&D race, and the two don’t appear to overlap, but allow me to elaborate in the next paragraph, and I hope you would be convinced that all that hard work you’ve put in to attending conferences, networking cocktails, and job applications have a definite monetary value to them in the expected value context.

Let’s assume a couple of things first. Highly unlikely, but assume you have 1 other competitor. You’re both going for a consulting gig. You both want this job really bad. So, you apply a level of intensity a in the job-seeking process, while she applies intensity b. The more intense you are, the more time and money you invest into networking coffees, mock case practices, conferences, and case competitions. For simplicity, let’s assume the investment level is a^2 and b^2 for you and her respectively. Neither of you know who would get the job first, but you safely bet that your chance of getting it first is a/(a+b) which is just your share of the effort in getting a job. By symmetry, her’s is b/(a+b). If we assume this is the only end-all be-all job out there and if you don’t get it, you are unemployed this summer, so losing the job to her would result in you getting $0. The job pays $20,000 for the summer, so that’s the value of winning the “race”. Expected value is therefore the expression below:

What’s even more exciting (or downright sad) about this formula is that you can maximize EV by taking the first derivative of the equation, setting it equal to zero, and then isolating a to find your optimal intensity level as a reaction function to her level of intensity.

For her, it would be the same, expect she would simply swap a’s with b’s (again by symmetry). This implies that how hard you should work is dependent on how hard she works, which makes sense as you both try to impress the potential employer.

So, without exhausting the attention span of the reader (you), I’m going to stop here. But next time you think about whether you should meet your mentor to look at your resume one last time before you submit that job application, remember that what goes around, comes around.

Three years ago, I was oblivious to the fundamental dynamics of Consumer Packaged Goods marketing. My impression and knowledge of the industry was dressed by quite elaborate decors. Words like brand management, go-to-market strategy, and creative campaigns dizzied my then fragile brain, drowning it in a deadly, powerful, but decadent potion. Before I tell the story further, I want to establish two truths: 1) I still think highly of the marketing function, it is in essence one of the biggest contributions to modern business as we know it, and 2) marketers out there, regardless of client of agency, are extremely capable and motivated individuals.

It was from personal development and introspection, along with a deeper, more fundamental view of the organization did I realize the inherent drivers of the marketing we’ve come to define today. What exactly, you may ask, is marketing? Well, let’s take a walk together down the value chain. We can go upstream, but it won’t make as much sense in this context, so I’m going to go downstream. Assume 1 firm that makes (and I’m tired of widgets) walnuts. Prepackaged, processed, delicious healthy walnuts. They have plants devoted to producing the highest quality, most well-known walnuts in the country. The raw material is processed, packaged, and then shipped from the plant to distribution centres across the country. From there, buyers order inventory, and hundreds of thousands of packs of walnuts are shipped to hundreds of stores across the country. The buyer then stocks it on the shelves, and finally, the sale is made. Who? Wait, let’s backtrack a tiny bit. Let’s rewind back to one specific shelf. Jackie is a mother of two boys, who just happen to love the heck out of walnuts. It’s their fries and their chips. Walnuts. Being the omniscient mother she is, she remembers to pick up a new pack every week to satisfy her boys’ seemingly demonic, incessant cravings. And Jackie is the final purchaser of the walnuts.

It’s worth re-reading that last sentence about five more times. Billions of mothers around the world just like Jackie shop for groceries that their families consume, but guess what, they are the purchasers, not their children, not their husband (at least usually), and definitely not their parents. So fundamentally, CPG firms around the world are combating to update their latest technology, sales strategy, and marketing campaigns to essentially serve 1 group of people: mothers.

To the economist, mother is the input with the highest share of inputs, and marketing and sales strategy is the output. To the statistician, mother and marketing strategy have a perfect correlation of 1. To the financier, marketing strategy has a beta against mother of 1. To the poet, mother parallels marketing strategy.

While I respect the intricacies of business targeted at mothers, and while I for sure respect mothers, I personally do not predict that I would derive passion and reward from serving one group of people, at least in the long term. Next time you wonder why someone who used to be dedicated to marketing switched, you might just consider mom.

“I hate school.” “I hate lectures.” “I can’t wait to get a job.” “Midterms are gross.” “I hate this f*cking assignment.”

It’s not unusual to hear sentiments as above when you’re an undergraduate, yet, especially at the MBA level, people seem to be happier. They might still be stressed, but they’re motivated to do work. “Yeah man, we’ve got this huge project, but it’s quite interesting.” Sure, on some levels, MBA material triumphs undergrad on the interesting scale, but all in all, they still have to face 20% projects and 40% final exams. Don’t confuse MBA students’ confidence and genuine cheerfulness with arrogance. There may be a bit of that in there, but it’s certainly not the entire composition, and it’s definitely not without justification. But let’s save the MBA discussion for another day and focus on the question I’m trying to answer with my hypothesis, the former being “Why is it that undergrads in general claim they do not like school?” and the latter being “Because they haven’t worked before and don’t know what work is like.”

Analysis of the Question: Why do undergrads claim that they do not like school?

Let’s dig a little deeper. Sure, there are several components that render the academic pursuit somewhat dull or tedious, especially if one doesn’t take interest in the subject matter of their studies. Chunky 600-page textbooks with 10-pt font and literally 1 300x300 picture every two pages definitely don’t help make the learning experience palatable, and all-determining evaluation methods like pieces of paper with questions over a span of 2-3 hours that essentially produce what people use to brag and compare status, secure and lose jobs, and honour or dishonour family members, i.e. GPA’s, certainly don’t mitigate the stress students in the 21st century face either. But, let me challenge the student for a moment here. Let me posit that for the rest of your life, stress in its purest elements will not go away. It may manifest a variety of forms including financial, career, family, relationship, and even social, but it simply will not depart from your well-being, and this is permanent. With this assumption, how are you supposed to live a fulfilling life? By the way, that’s not an entirely absurd assumption, as you only need to look around at the everyday people in your society to find evidence. I can’t be certain the student doesn’t know this, so I proceed next to my hypothesis that he or she does not know much else other than schooling.

Presentation of Hypothesis: They have not worked before, and therefore is comparing school to a hypothetical, assumed state.

It is absolutely awe-inspiring to me when a student tells me “I want to get a job, I’m so sick of school.” That’s equivalent to a professional swimmer without any experience skiing whatsoever telling me he or she would rather ski. Or a freshly minted doctor telling me he or she would rather do the job of a lawyer. Or a Chinese man who’s never been beyond the local gas station in his village he would rather be in Paris. Assuming none of these imaginary characters ever had any experiences with any of those desires, it simply does not make any sense to compare. There is no premise for comparison. You prefer an apple to an orange only if you’ve tried both. You are inclined to doing accounting as opposed to finance only when you’ve tested the waters by taking introductory courses in both disciplines. Hence, taking a full U-turn back to focus on our hypothesis, I believe that the average student doesn’t appreciate school because he or she has not worked before, yet is assuming without justification that work will be better than school. This post is beginning to drag, so I’m going conclude quite frankly with 3 parting thoughts for anyone who is suffering from this dilemma:

1) Work is not nearly as intellectually stimulating or flexible as the academic material you are learning right now. In the corporate world, often times, something is right because it’s been right or someone experienced says so.

2) Work is highly political, whether you like it or not. By the way, if you’re involved, and you think you’re dealing with politics, you don’t have the slightest exposure to true political struggles. When money enters the relationship equation, it seriously distorts it.

3) Work on average across all industries is deterministic in the short run, not voluntary. You don’t like your group members? Great, just find another group in 2 weeks after this assignment is completed. Don’t enjoy a course? Don’t take a similar one thereafter. Don’t like your boss? Too bad. Don’t like the projects or industries you’re working with? “It’s for your own learning and development.”

So I’ve basically disappeared for the past 3 months. Where to, you ask? A state of mind. A mentality. A rigorous mental regimen. The goal? To break into management consulting. There is something unique about this industry from a recruitment standpoint that most people are aware of, but not prepared for. Let me explain what I mean.

When year after year, the average apply-to-offer ratio sits at 100:1, it tells you something is fundamentally flawed about the preparation system. It shines light on the depth of insight into the recruitment process, and it looks very shallow from where UofT currently stands. Let me clarify something: the final round candidates I met at the 3 firms I interviewed with in the past 2 weeks are smart, but they are not geniuses, and certainly not more capable than a lot of UofT students I have met and personally know. Then why is it that Queen’s and Ivey students consistently outperform UofT students in the consulting recruitment process? Simple: it’s not what you know, it’s about the habits.

Let me use an analogy that came to mind randomly one day as I was trying to explain to a friend who asked me this question (of why our school doesn’t produce management consultants). We were at Hero Burger, so I figured it was most relevant at the time. I said to him:

“Areeb, imagine right now that there’s a war outside. Right there, outside the window. Flashes, smoke, and fire. If you were damn hungry, you’d still be able to eat that burger in your hands without much trouble. Now imagine an infant sitting beside you who has just started to learn how to eat without being fed. He has to consciously think about how to hold the burger, carefully position it towards his mouth, open his mouth wide enough, and aim the burger at just the right angle in order to take a chunk out of that thing. You on the other hand do it effortlessly. Why? Because eating is a habit to you, but not quite yet to that boy. Case interview techniques and skills are habits Ivey students have developed over time, whereas the UofT student is still learning to grasp them. Put another way, if a job that required the best, fastest eater of burgers was on the table right now, between you and the boy, who do you think would get the job?”

I won’t go into the details of case interview prep, but I will say that it’s not so much intellectually challenging as it is a test of commitment to 3 things:

1) Constant evaluation and re-evaluation of your performance between cases.

2) Practice after practice after practice.

3) Reaching out to aspiring, new, current, and ex- consultants for clarity of the process.

You want something, you learn how to get it, and you give it your 100% effort. No less, no more. Forget speculation. Forget competition. Stick to your principles, and charge ahead with no regrets. That’s all there is to it.