Diana Kimball

In 2008, this essay was my answer to “What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?” I pulled it up today and marveled at how much it still means to me. My vision has shifted, but the undercurrents are still there.

July 1, 2008

I am a diary thief.  Writing history means plundering the secrets of long-ago teenagers and authors and convicts, piecing together a picture of the extraordinary everyday.  Historians treasure private thoughts—the ones scrawled in blue ballpoint, never meant for the outside world.  They feel more authentic, less studied.  As a student of history, I love to study them.  But these thoughts, those ancient diaries, are so hard to find.  Survival hinges on happenstance; fame helps, but is no guarantee.  Thievery requires patience.

Diaries today are different.  They occupy a disoriented cyberspace where private thoughts and public broadcast collide.  When I sit at my computer—struggling to piece together the story of amateur magicians at the turn of the twentieth century, or Soviet department stores in the 1950s—I am always floored by the flood of information that rushes forward when I flip to my tiny browser window. The private is already public; thievery is unnecessary.  The instant gratification is intoxicating. Here, today, I could piece together a thousand stories of what happened yesterday, across the globe—secret motivations, passionate reactions, quiet musings—all with a simple keyword search.  Historians of the future would kill for what we can access this very moment.  I know I would.

But what if I could become a historian of the future, today?  People all over the world publish volumes about themselves, every second—on blogs, and Twitter, and forums, and Facebook. I don’t want to wait to write those stories.  Moreover, I think those stories have a great deal to tell us about what people want, what they need; what they care about.  The advantage of writing the history of today is that it’s not too late to do something about it.  Whether that means developing products or entertainment or experiences that line up with the lives that people are already broadcasting, the profusion of opportunities is undeniable.  I want to be at the vanguard of a new kind of market research: one that respects the stories people tell about themselves, responding to their needs and anticipating their desires.  As a diary thief, I may be out of work.  I don’t mind.  Thievery was only ever a means to an end.  Here, at the end, I want to build something new.

In late 2007 and early 2008, I wrote three blog posts about a then-new Harvard Business School admissions initiative called 2+2. In September 2008, I learned I’d been accepted into the first 2+2 cohort; this past September, my first semester at HBS commenced.

In the four years since that first blog post, I’ve received a steady stream of emails from students seeking guidance through the application process. In response to one of them, I sat down and wrote the letter below; it rang so true to me then (and still) that I’ve sent it to almost every person who’s written since. To come full circle, I wanted to share it here, too.

_________

It’s hard to say or even know what HBS is “looking for” in 2+2 candidates, because they’ve intentionally left it so open-ended. But here are some collected thoughts on what they might be looking for based on my experience with the students they’ve admitted so far.

In some environments—both corporate and academic—sheer “drive” is favored. In essence, this means that once you set a goal you usually accomplish it at almost any cost. This may even be true of Harvard Business School, to some degree. However, this mode is incredibly distant from my own experience.

The type of caring I’ve seen at HBS is much quieter and more generous. It does not lack momentum, but it is an odd combination of earnest and assured. The key is to be calm, confident, and striving all at once, all the while being generous with your ideas and unfailingly kind to those around you.

So let’s say this describes you, and let’s say that I’m right: that this character profile starts to get at the ineffable qualities HBS “looks for.” How do you even start to go about showing this kind of quiet caring in an application?

The application consists of two parts: the facts, and the narrative. It’s true that the facts should probably resemble those of other HBS students (admirable grades, engagement in activities outside of your classes, ambition and efficacy), but the criteria for that resemblance are far less strict and far less important than you might imagine. No, the most important thing you can do for yourself is not to work tirelessly to improve the facts—your scores, your grades, your activities and accomplishments—but, instead, to rest and think about how you came to be the person you are, and what kind of person you long to become.

I have come to believe that serious introspection is the single most important thing you can do for your chances of being admitted to HBS. If you already spend a good deal of time in calm introspection, you will have a head start; but it is not too late to begin. The key here is “calm”; anxious introspection will help little, and might even hurt.

What should you think about? It seems safe to start with figuring out what you care about. The best way I’ve found to think about this, actually, is by reading a book by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called The Reasons of Love. The book, in fact, is all about the importance of what we care about. (Also worth reading: an essay of his by that very name.) A passage:

It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it marks our interests and our goals. The importance that our caring creates for us defines the framework of standards and aims in terms of which we endeavor to conduct our lives.

It is important to know of the HBS Admissions Office that they are extremely experienced judges of character. Your accomplishments speak for themselves; you speak for your character. That is part of why the interview is so important, and why HBS insists that it be in person. And that is why introspection is a valuable way to spend your time.

The more calm and curious your introspection, and the more coherent the self-image that surfaces, the better you will be able to reconstitute that image out of thin air. That kind of integrated self-awareness is the ineffable quality that HBS seeks.

This may sound all too general, but I can assure you that it is more specific than you might suspect. The admissions office knows it when they see it; admitted students recognize it in each other. For a program like 2+2—so vague about who the ideal candidate might be, so wildly and almost nonsensically varied in the backgrounds of the students it admits—this is, I believe, the common denominator that makes the program cohere.

If you are interested in this program, industrious enough to seek it out, patient enough to endure its opacity and uncertainty, you are almost certainly ambitious. You are almost certainly accomplished. More importantly, you are almost certainly ambitious and accomplished enough.

So what makes the difference? What ineffable quality sets some people apart? As far as I know, it is: caring about something honorable, outside yourself, in such a way that you are impelled to take risks and apply sincere effort. It is knowing this about yourself, and being able to coherently conceive of and narrate your life through its lens.

I’m always worried that when the time comes to type, I won’t be able to summon the right incantation. I think this fear goes all the way back to being 8 years old and sitting down in front of my dad’s computer running MS-DOS, trying desperately to remember what words would bring Mario Teaches Typing onto the screen.

Today, intent on incrementally improving my programming skills, I decided to try just recording obstacles as they cropped up and then documenting the ways I got around them. This was good because it gave me an outlet for frustration while also encouraging me to verbalize exactly what was going wrong. And by putting the problem into words, promising search terms suddenly started materializing before my eyes. “I’ve already forked the project, so how to sync?” became “github fork out of sync,” which led me to GitHub’s Fork a Repo help page…which was exactly what I needed.

So, for posterity and perhaps your curiosity, here are two of the hurdles I ran into today and how I eventually got over them.

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An excerpt from the latest longer letter, which I’d love to send to you.

For November, I quietly committed to posting one image or song and one set of words every day on my blog. There’s power in steadiness, especially when trying to get into a habit. It’s easier to do something every day than almost every day, because almost demands a daily decision point while every is about execution.

Although I’ve never participated in National Novel Writing Month, in November 2007 I decided to try posting to my then-new blog on a daily basis. What I found was momentum: because writing was a ritual and not a reaction, it happened almost without trying. Even more encouraging, the sheer volume and variety of sparks sent out in the universe started to pull people in. Looking back to my celebration post at the end of November 2007, I’m struck by the jaunty, conspiratorial tone and the air of discovery. It’s fun to look back on what then felt new: RSS feeds and later Twitter, for two. For the first time, I started receiving emails from out of the blue and RSS subscriptions from people I’d never met. That November’s momentum carried me into one of the most creative periods of my life. And so, at the start of this month, I figured it might be time to try again.

I’m glad I did: the experience was familiar and exciting in all the ways I’d hoped. The main difference was that this time, I had a base of readers to build on instead of starting from scratch. As I pulled observations and images first from the top of my head and later from deep in my scattered files, I was always surprised to see what posts resonated. My most-noted post of the month was a collage of almost every alarm I’ve ever set, edging out a post on how I use SoundCloud. Original writing does seem to do best, but sometimes pull-quotes and images travel surprisingly far.

Most of all, I enjoyed how the project shifted my perception: instead of just watching the stream float by, I was on the hunt for shards of beauty to share.