On the top floor of my building, lived my friend and junior from IPS and IIT – Sunil Asnani.
In the evenings, we would often hang out on the rooftop, talking about his plan to quit the IPS and do an MBA from a US business school.
The plan sounded crazy — nobody we knew had done that. Also, when you live in a small town like Trivandrum, it all sounds like a far-fetched pipe-dream.
Yet, Sunil made it to Wharton.
When that happened, for me, the pipe-dream suddenly became doable. Next year, I also followed suit to Wharton. A year later, Sunil joined McKinsey in New York. Then, I also did the same.
Essentially, Sunil did the hard part of figuring out things and creating the path, and I just walked on it.
But what if I hadn’t met Sunil?
I might have imagined that all these things were very hard, maybe even undoable.
When you assume that something is impossible, sometimes it is just that you haven’t met the guy who has already done that.
Whenever your mind says, “I can’t do this,” — challenge it. It is probably just an assumption.
You can do a lot more than you think you can. The biggest obstacle, it turns out, is always inside your head.
– Rajan
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