An Interesting HR Question

I recently had a chat with a friend of mine who is currently on the lookout for a job. When I asked her about her interview experiences, she shared one thought-provoking question.

“Name one thing that you have done in life that you would like to change if you are given an opportunity.”

She then extended the same question to me, and to my surprise, I knew my answer in a heartbeat. It was as if I had known it all along and it was waiting to be said out loud. I told her this.

“For as long as I can remember, I have loved listening to music. I was so inspired by it that I bought a guitar for myself when I was 16. I even aspired to write my own songs someday. However, I was never really able to give it much of my time because most of it went into academic and professional pursuits. For someone who has had a guitar for 8 years, I for sure don’t play like one. I regret not being able to give it more time as it would have brought me a lot of joy.”

A few days passed since then. I was in one of my first MBA lectures, our professor said something while introducing her course that reminded me again of my little conversation. It was this.

“Much of your MBA journey is going to be about teaching you how to make the best trade-offs.”

I thought about what the professor had said in the context of my answer to my friend’s question. I realized that I had essentially made a trade-off. I had focused on academics and professional work and chosen to give them more time as compared to learning the guitar. And it had paid off, I fared well in college and landed a decent job at an MNC but as a consequence, naturally, my guitar skills had to wait.

Upon further contemplation, I now feel that the concept of trade-offs applies at a much more fundamental level. Let me share with you two examples.

·    Every day, every moment we decide how to spend our time. While doing so we make a trade-off knowingly or unknowingly between “what we could be doing” and “what we end up doing”. I feel people who make better trade-offs aligned with their goals eventually end up being more successful in whatever it is that they choose to do.

·    They say “We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends.” I see this again as a trade-off we often make unknowingly. We decide to give people our time. Since we have only a finite amount of it every day, we end up having a few people around us with whom we regularly interact. The people we choose have an important role to play in our life. They often influence our lifestyle choices, our outlook on things, and in a way, they define who we are.

So, I believe it would be fair to say that people are to a large extent defined by the trade-offs they make. The kind of trade-offs that someone makes in different areas of life, again and again, form a pattern and we identify it as their “nature”.

I’d love to end this with a picture of my guitar, which inspired me to write about this.