The Grad School Diaries: The Boston Paradox

A long, long time ago it was still possible to name a rock band with an actual word, not something out of a text message, and several bands actually chose place names for their identifier, notably including Chicago, Kansas and Boston. Boston was my favorite of these; one of my favorite bands of that or any other time period, in fact, and their second album, “Don’t Look Back” includes one of my all-time favorite compositions, “Used to Bad News…”

Probably the best-known song on that album, though, has to be a power-ballad called “A Man I’ll Never Be” – sort of a meditation by/on a guy (or perhaps on being a guy) whose spouse/significant other believes that he is something much more than he really is. The implication in the lyrics is that he has never lied to her; he is simply what he is – but not what she believes that he is: “You look up at me, and somewhere in your mind, you see, a man I’ll never be…” It’s about trying (and, by implication, failing) to live up to another person’s image of you, regardless of how much you care about that person and how badly you want to live up to her good opinion of you. It’s the sort of thing that can resonate within you at times when, for example, you’ve just come in 12th of the 15 people in your class, received the lowest grade that isn’t actually failing, and your wife still thinks you’re the smartest thing around…

In stories and epics and poetry and such, we’re taught that men are supposed to draw strength from such commitments; that the determination not to let down that one person who means the whole world to us is supposed to bring us the power of ten, or some such thing. What I get is a vague feeling of not quite being able to live up to what I am supposed to be; or as the song lyrics go, “If only I could find I way… I’d be the man that you believe I am…” Like the viewpoint character in the song, I’ve never pretended to be anything I’m not; I’ve never even accepted that all of the spectacular things people have kept telling me I have the potential for were real. I’m just not the image that she sees; it’s literally a man I’ll never be…

Or is it?

Part of the point of this exercise is metamorphosis; it’s not just redemption of my somewhat wonky intellect for the failures of my youth. That is, it’s not just my last, best effort to go back and NOT make a hash of my life the way I did 20-odd years ago, any more than it is an attempt to turn back the clock and give the love of my life the twenty years she SHOULD have had in the first place, if that story had turned out the way it was supposed to. Becoming a Ph.D. isn’t just a matter of learning a huge pile of information and being able to cough it up on command during your comprehensive exams in Year Three; it’s about learning a new way of thinking, gaining a new perspective on your discipline and on the world you study; of becoming something beyond what you were before. What I had not considered until now was that perhaps it has to be both; maybe it isn’t possible to transform as a scholar unless you are also changing as a person. Maybe it can’t be one without also being the other…

I’m trying to transform from something of a failure; a lazy intellect who never amounted to much and just wandered through life telling stories, into one of the best scholars in the world, at least within my rather specialized discipline. In all of this world, there are only a handful of B-schools better than this one, and more than half of those have no Strategy program as such. If I pull this off, even as the very worst scholar ever granted a doctorate by this institution, I will have changed. It’s still unclear how different I’m going to end up being; I suspect I will always be all of the other things I have learned to be in my travels: storyteller, manager, fighter, and teacher. But it occurred to me today that of all of the (extremely modest) talents that have gotten me this far, none has ever been more important than that ability to adapt: to grow, to change, to become more than I was. And if this is my greatest challenge, with the greatest price to pay for failure, maybe it is also the chance to finally be all of those things that everyone believes I can be…

Stay tuned, folks; this is starting to get interesting…