Are we authentic?
“What matters most to you, and why?”
Despite being the second-easiest punchline at the GSB, the question does tell you something about this place.
It’s not “what else should we know about you?” or “tell us your greatest failure and what you learned?” It’s not asking for a highlight reel of our accomplishments, or an exercise in performative humility.
The GSB wanted to know who we really, truthfully are. Two years later, can we really, truthfully say?
If there’s a single idea, an all-encompassing Word at the pulsating core of the GSB experience, it’s Authenticity.
You know how sometimes you hit that one note when you’re singing in the shower, and the whole bathroom seems to ring? That’s a “resonant frequency” — the one pitch that perfectly matches the acoustics of the space you’re in, that bounces off the walls and builds on its own vibration to come through almost impossibly strong and clear. In MBA speak, it’s a “positive feedback loop.”
To be Authentic is to find your own resonant frequency. To live out your singular truth in a way that’s in perfect harmony with your body and soul. For your existence to be amplified by its own honest, vibrant expression. To be clear of all delusion, of all dissonance; to be pure.
Authenticity is GSB’s nirvana.
I remember being explained the difference between business schools:
“At HBS you come in as a lumpy, shapeless ball of clay and you come out pressed and stamped into the HBS mold: polished, sharp, confident.
At GSB you come in as a lumpy, shapeless ball of clay, and you come out a more thoughtful, introspective, empathetic, and even more gloriously lumpy shapeless ball of clay.”
Except that GSB isn’t even really a “business school.” To call it that is almost an insult to GSB, and probably also almost an insult to business schools.
GSB isn’t about T-accounts, or value capture, or leverage ratios, or red squares and yellow triangles.
GSB is “people school.” It’s “who am I?” and “what am I doing with my life?” school. It is “what makes me happy?” and “how do others perceive me?” school. I was told before coming that “if you want to learn accounting just buy a textbook — it’ll save you a whole bunch of money.” You can’t find the answers to these questions in a textbook.
The occasional half-hearted cold-call notwithstanding, the GSB doesn’t demand answers to “what are the effects on the balance sheet if the business moves to straight-line depreciation?” GSB demands answers to that first, noble question of what matters to us most, and why.
And so we go through two years trying desperately to discover and provide answers — largely indirectly — through our actions and interactions, in conversations with each other, in debates within ourselves.
And here’s the tragedy:
For much of the time, we’re lying.
Perhaps “lying” is too strong.
We lie in the same way an actor lies — playing a role prescribed to them, channeling a part of their lived experience to most convincingly develop a character with which the audience can connect. Carefully directed, reciting their lines, hitting their marks.
The GSB itself provides the perfect theater for our play. Town Square is our stage; our Roman Forum, a canvas, with long, unbroken sightlines to see and be seen, with not nearly enough furniture to be practical. Surrounded by props; a library with hardly any books, markers on every whiteboard organized by color and almost always out of ink, classrooms with microphones and cameras and computers and projectors that never work quite right. A small army of a running crew managing the set changes — in matching discrete uniforms, rearranging tables and chairs, setting up catering, emptying trash cans, skilled in the delicate art of staying out of the way.
Within this theater we generate, early on, a collectively-imagined platonic ideal of what a GSB character should be, and then accentuate the parts of ourselves that fall inside that mold, and fret the parts that fall outside.
The GSB ubermensch wants to skip over the baseball stats and get to the important stuff, like your relationship with your family and also what precisely you’re pivoting into. The GSB ubermensch travels to exotic locations with large groups of smiling friends, both carefully selected in no small part for their Instagram potential, and meets with local businesses and government officials and is surprised by how entrepreneurial the people are. The GSB ubermensch takes dedicated time each day for their gratitude journal, and mindfulness practice, and to craft the perfect caption. The GSB ubermensch is embarrassed about either coming from or going into consulting, finance, or Big Tech but proud of their work on their nonprofit board. The GSB ubermensch is running a few minutes late to their third coffee chat of the day because they’re back-to-back but they’re sure you’d understand. The GSB ubermensch embraces the pious sincerity of Talk, with its standing ovations and huglines and “QUESTIONS!” and increasingly varying crowd sizes. The GSB ubermensch always wants to know how it makes you feel.
We all sense the inexorable pull to embody this character.
But how many hours of journaling before introspection becomes self-involvement? How many AMA’s until volunteered vulnerability becomes a social requirement?
Have we become more self aware, or better performers of self awareness? More in touch with our values, or more practiced at appearing to hold strong opinions? More “influential,” or more manipulative?
Is GSB neither “business school” nor “people school,” but “acting school?” Where we learn to “role play,” to “Act with Power.” Are we actually just skilled performers, most convincingly able to recite the lines that let us climb the ladder to success?
And is Authenticity our actual end-goal? Or is it instead to put on the ideal show? To hone the perfect counterfeit of the conscientious leader, until, in the depths of our method acting, our authentic self and the character we are creating become indistinguishable?
But despite the easy cynicism, I maintain a sort of foolish hope and solidarity.
Even if we are all, at times, guilty of putting on a show, I believe that beneath the glamour and performance we are all deeply connected by two shared truths:
We have an intense desire to be better versions of ourselves.
And we are all fucking terrified.
Terrified that we will not find work that gives us purpose. Terrified that we will not end up with a partner who completes us. Terrified of not being a good child, or sibling, or spouse, or parent. Terrified we will not match the success of our classmates. Terrified of not living a meaningful, distinguished life. Terrified that we might not even know what “purpose” or “love” or “good” or “success” or “meaning” really looks like.
Our at-times inauthentic projections represent an honest effort to address this terror. We try out different roles to find one that matches our resonant frequencies. We practice new skills, new ways of being, to arm us for battles with our inner demons. We model characteristics which we hope, through a sort of spiritual osmosis, become part of our true selves. We are not lying — we’re rehearsing.
Now as the curtain begins to close on our time at the GSB, as we prepare to leave this stage, to end this strange eventful history, we are cast into the mere oblivion of an uncertain world at an uncertain time.
Many of us still do not know our authentic selves. We do not know what matters to us most. At this moment, at our most credentialed, at our highest potential energy, many of us are as lost as we have ever been. We are caught in the spotlight without knowing our line, without knowing our motivation.
There is no script for the next act of our lives. But we hold the pen. And in the startling blankness of the pages ahead lies more opportunity to develop our true character, that we have gotten to know better in this place.
GSB has asked us the hard questions. And if we have learned anything here, it is that we don’t actually need all the answers. We don’t need the perfect story. We don’t need to make the ideal choice. We can be defined by — we can celebrate — our wanderings, our imperfections, our missteps; our need for acceptance, our hot takes; our crippling fears, our reckless hopes; our occasional laziness, our fleeting complacency; our simmering urge to leap off the wheel. It is in these gaps and glimmers that we find our true character.
The greatest gift the GSB has given us is not the ability to be perfectly authentic, but the permission to be wildly incomplete. To be lumpy, shapeless, terrified balls of clay, still not fully formed, but content in the glorious honesty of our lumpiness. And to re-enter the world surrounded and forever supported by our equally-lumpy, equally-glorious friends.
