When writing my Wharton MBA application, I was working right until the 2:30 am deadline.
I was frantically working on my application essays in a Word document, saving the edits every few minutes. But in a last-minute panic, I mistakenly overwrote a recent version of the essay with an older version and lost a good amount of my work.
I missed the 2:30 am deadline for Round 1, which reportedly has the best odds of admission. Dejected and frustrated, I went to sleep.
The next morning, I realized another blunder — the deadline was not 2:30 am but 3:30 am. I had wrongly converted time zones (from EST to IST). I was now even more livid!
But a few days later, when I started working on the application for Round 2, I found that my previous application was full of typos. In the last-minute rush, my eyes had glazed over all the errors.
Had I somehow submitted my application in Round 1, it would have 100% been rejected. Now, in Round 2, I could submit a clean, error-free application.
What I thought was a blunder, ultimately saved my application and changed my career trajectory.
Often we look back at our past actions and blame ourselves — “If only I had done X instead of Y, how good my life would have been!”
The truth is that we don’t know. We live only one version of our life. Every other version is just a fantasy.
Whenever you are tempted to look back and beat yourself up, you can instead choose to look ahead.
Because life can be lived only in one direction — forward.
– Rajan