Night Owl's Revenge

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Things I’d Like to do Differently: Freedom to Fail

This week I’m on a “mental vacation”, recovering from my accounting course. lol. I spent some time today, however, reflecting on my 2010 GMAT experience and came up with a list of things that I’d like to do differently this year. I’ll post them over the next few days.

Last spring I took a Manhattan GMAT class and the instructor would get positively giddy whenever someone made a mistake. He loved errors and encouraged us to embrace them! Of course, this didn’t sit well with a room full of overachieving twenty-somethings. I rejected his suggestion. How could anyone get excited about making stupid mistakes? I thought the entire point of studying was learning how to get the “correct” answer as quickly as possible. With this attitude, it wasn’t long before I developed a major case of test anxiety. I didn’t view drills and practice tests as learning opportunities and they quickly became torture sessions.

My destructive thought pattern:

“I should know how to solve this problem > 2 minutes…> this is taking too long > If I get it wrong my score will drop > wrong! > I’ll never get into a good school!”

Repeat with the next question.

Looking at this in print is tough. I can see now that I was doomed before I even began.

Three weeks ago I was at home thinking about my GMAT experience and evaluating what went wrong. Just as I was starting to feel sorry for myself, an old Nike commercial (posted above) aired. The advertisement is simple - Michael Jordan lists all of his past mistakes and notes that making them is why he succeeds. I had an “aha” moment. Last year, my fear of failure held me back from learning from my mistakes! I was so obsessed with getting things “right” that I didn’t see the vast opportunities that getting things wrong could bring. How could I have misunderstood something so simple and applicable in everyday life?

Since identifying test anxiety as one of my weaknesses I’ve gone through the BTG website and read a few posts/blogs on getting as comfortable as possible with this high stress test. I came across an excellent three-part series on test anxiety written by HBS alum Betsy Massar (link to part I). She references the same Nike commercial in part II of her series and emphasizes the importance of making mistakes, positive thoughts, and taking the time needed to re-train your brain for the GMAT. 

With all of this in mind, I’m going to take the advice of my old MGMAT instructor and Ms. Massar. This year, I’m going to give myself the freedom to fail during GMAT prep. Asking myself what went wrong, and what I could have done differently will get me a lot farther then obsessing over problem difficulty levels and the number of questions I answered correctly.    


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