I was racing a 2:30 am deadline to submit my Wharton MBA application in Round 1.
Post midnight, in the frantic rush, as I was giving the final touches to my application, the Microsoft Word document crashed. When I tried recovering the changes, I messed up and lost all the last-minute edits.
It was already 2 am and there was no way to make the Round 1 of the application.
I missed the deadline.
All the hard work had come to nothing. Dejected and heartbroken, I went to sleep.
The next day morning, when I took a fresh look at my unsubmitted application, I was horrified: It was strewn with glaring typos and grammatical errors.
The night before, I was clearly too brain-dead to notice these mistakes. In fact, had I somehow submitted the application, it would have been rejected — 100%.
I then applied in Round 2, this time ensuring that the application had no typos.
Finally, on the decision day, when I got the admission offer email, I thought about the Round 1 deadline night. What had seemed a disaster, ultimately turned out to be a blessing.
In life, we are often too quick to judge. The truth is, we don’t know what will be good or bad for us.
Don’t worry about luck — you don’t control it. But here is what we do control — doing the best work we can.
Keep doing that and one day, luck will come around.
– Rajan
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