Coming from a small town in central India, I have always felt it is necessary to start small, work hard and keep on going until you have hit the bull’s eye. When an inexperienced 28-year-old Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla joined the ABG no one thought it would be where it is today even after surviving the 1991 liberalization no one except Mr. Birla himself.
From getting things in hand at home to managing my basic needs I have always learned things myself, slowly but surely, but I have made progress in life. One instance that I think was challenging for me was my constant attempts to get into a good B-School. I remember being in a Job that I wasn’t interested but took just to support my family and to have an experience of corporate before joining a B-school. I started preparing for CAT 2017 from July end, diving into the plethora of practice post working hours. After this continuous exercise of 4 months, I wrote CAT and other exams hoping I would be getting calls from B-schools but unfortunately that didn’t happen, and I missed the cutoffs by an inch. I was devastated started doubting myself and literary stopped talking to everyone. It was one of the hardest times when I was sitting at my desk at a job I don’t like, I just wanted to shout from the core but cannot as that is not what is expected from a professional, I kept thinking of what has happened which made me more depressed. I picked up few bad habits and had gone into somewhat of a Kabir Singh mode, I hated myself for the path I had chosen and wanted to get out of this zone for that I did one thing that worked for me a solo trip to a Tirupati (April 2018) which was an enriching experience. After coming back from the solo trip, I started ruminating over the decisions that I have taken and what I can do differently this time to achieve my goal. The first thing I did was to quit my job, no I wasn’t high while taking this decision, but the reason behind this was to not have an option to fall back on because I believe if you have a fallback option it is much more likely that your main plan would fail. After quitting my job, I went back to my hometown, wrote many mocks, wrote the actual CAT 2018 in November, got calls from various intuitions and finally converted the one from the list I had in my mind.
This is one instance which I believed was a hard phase which taught me perseverance and the most important thing “This too shall pass”, the phrase that kept me going all throughout.
#ABGLPWooMe #TAPMI