For the GSB's Class of 2019, particularly the 108 members who I was privileged to have as students in The Art of Self-Coaching, but hopefully relevant to anyone who's obtained a competitive graduate degree in pursuit of your professional goals.
Having worked with over 1,000 MBA students during my career at Stanford's Graduate School of Business [1], I've had countless conversations about reunions, and I've concluded that the fifth is the hardest. Why? Because during business school you were artificially compressed into the uniform identity of "student," and this often yields a set of unrealistic expectations about subsequent life paths. And a few years after graduation differences in professional accomplishments become more visible, resulting in a heightened sense of social comparison. [2] The bad news is that this can be a significant source of stress and anxiety at a fifth reunion--but there's good news, too, over the long run.
The shared identity of "student" can become all-encompassing, particularly at a place like the GSB where you not only invested countless hours in group projects and interactive coursework, but also likely spent a great deal of social time together. As a result you may well have perceived yourself as a member of an egalitarian cohort. The GSB enhanced this perception by the school's de-emphasis of intra-class competition for grades. As a faculty member I generally appreciated this aspect of their policies. The primary guideline was that the average grade for all students in a section could not exceed a certain quantitative standard, which prevented grade inflation.
Further, although the members of the top ten percent of your class were designated as Arjay Miller Scholars, and some selective firms made it a priority to hire "Arjays," most prospective employers weren't particularly interested in business school grades, only the fact that you attended a program like the GSB. All of this made it less likely that you and your classmates viewed each other as rivals, which fostered a sense of openness and collegiality in the classroom. But a downside was a degree of obfuscation about the real differences in students' relative capabilities and performance.
Once you left graduate school and returned to the working world these artificial constraints were removed, and as early-career MBAs you began to experience an increasingly divergent range of professional outcomes. Almost all of you enjoy an extremely high standard of living relative to the population at large, but that's not how social comparison works, particularly among ambitious and competitive people. Humans measure ourselves against a comparison set consisting of people we view as similar to us, and how we stack up against others who aren't members of that group isn't all that salient.
I'm certainly not suggesting that our professional accomplishments should determine our sense of self-worth, nor is there a sharply defined and well-understood relationship between, for example, material wealth and well-being. [3] But our predisposition to rely on markers of career success as a source of social status is an impulse with deep roots in evolutionary psychology that can't simply be wished away because we find it problematic. As I've written before,
While our social orientation is critical in enabling our success as a species, it also poses a substantial challenge for each of us as individuals. We must navigate in-group competition, which becomes even fiercer in larger groups. We're hyper-aware of our relative social status and our shifting position within group hierarchies. And in order to accomplish these tasks effectively we're constantly scanning our interpersonal environment for potential threats and opportunities, which necessarily involves comparing ourselves to others--as UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky writes in The Myths of Happiness, "Most of the time, it's impossible not to compare ourselves with others... Social comparisons arise naturally, automatically, and effortlessly." [4]
Changes in relative status as a function of professional accomplishments take some time to emerge, so these distinctions were probably less evident at your first reunion, when you and your classmates may have largely related to each other merely as former students. But in the years since graduation the effects of different professional paths have likely become much more pronounced. Some of this divergence is a function of your individual talent and effort, and some is a function of your industry and your organization. And much is a function of random chance, which is something we hate to admit to ourselves. [5]
I've talked with many GSB alumni who observed this shift in the social dynamic at their fifth reunion and found it challenging. Some felt awkward about the success they had achieved, while many felt the opposite, that they were failing to measure up to expectations somehow. What makes it worse, of course, is the pervasive sense that none of this can be discussed or even acknowledged. Here the GSB's idealistic vision of an egalitarian cohort finds itself severely tested by the realities of intra-elite competition.
As I noted above, there's bad news and good news. First, some more bad news: Intra-elite competition never ends. The status games available to you are infinite, should you have the good fortune--and the desire--to continue playing. When you were accepted into the GSB, you undoubtedly felt that you had "made it," and you enjoyed the status and exclusivity that differentiated you from your then-peers, some of whom may well have been bitterly disappointed by their rejection. And for a while membership in your GSB class was all that was needed to maintain that status. Five years after graduation, that's no longer sufficient, and the inevitability of social comparison and the corresponding need for status distinctions will be keenly felt--although hard to describe with much precision--at your fifth reunion.
But here's the good news: Somewhere between the fifth and tenth reunion, something changes for most people. The status games won't end--they're truly infinite, and some people will feel compelled to keep score as long as they live. And most of us continue to play in one way or another, if only because the prizes are so tempting--but even as we do, we realize how much more there is to life beyond these status games, and that they truly are games, no different from those played by children.
The causes of this shift in perspective vary widely. Some people achieve a lifelong dream, like financial freedom or fame in their field, and find that the sense of fulfillment is far more fleeting than they expected. Some people find professional accomplishments less meaningful in contrast with their experience as parents or caregivers. Some people suffer great setbacks or health problems that lead them to feel a renewed sense of gratitude for existence. Whatever the cause, the alumni I've talked to who felt uneasy or distressed at their fifth reunion uniformly felt much lighter at their tenth. They felt less competitive with their classmates and more connected--not necessarily with everyone, but with the people who mattered most to them.
I'll close with some recent remarks inspired by my work with clients, who must also decide whether and how to play the various status games available to them, and what really matters to them in this life, even as they pursue tremendously ambitious professional goals:
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that you give up your ambitions or settle for achievements that feel insubstantial. Winning offers many benefits over losing, and I want you (and my clients) to win, by any definition you choose. But in the process you're going to have to face a fundamental reality: The more you win, the higher you climb, the tougher the competition. If your definition of "winning" rests upon your ability to obtain "more" than the people around you in order to feel "ahead," you will eventually, inevitably lose.
I'm also not suggesting that you should opt out of conventional competitions and live like a monk--my clients haven't done so, nor have I. And yet it's important to recognize that the yardsticks most readily available to assess your accomplishments--net worth, job title, social prominence, where you live--serve many valid purposes, but they do not, and cannot, measure your sense of meaning and purpose, the depth of your relationships, the feeling of a life well-lived. [6]
Footnotes
[1] Thank You, Stanford, and Goodbye!
[2] For more on social comparison, see the following:
- The Trap of Competition
- Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"
- The Art of Self-Coaching, Class 8: SUCCESS
[3] For more on well-being and happiness, see the following:
- Myths in the Science of Happiness (Ed Diener, Chapter 24 in The Science of Subjective Well-Being, Michael Eid and Randy Larson, editors, 2008)
- Understanding "The Pie Chart" in The How of Happiness
- The Art of Self-Coaching, Class 5: HAPPINESS
[6] Learning How to Fall Behind
Photo by Gerry Dulay