Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Bravo Harvard Business School: welcome to the ‘It’s okay to change your hairstyle once every decade or so!’ train! It’s been a while, but at last, we have a new essay prompt from the folks at HBS. If you’re applying for the second time, maybe this means something. If you’re a first-timer, you probably don’t (and shouldn’t) care. Let’s not waste time. There’s not to be gained by analyzing the change here. It changed. Rah. Let’s answer the question as effectively as possible shall we?

Three questions overall: one focused on ‘business,’ the next ‘leadership,’ and the third ‘growth.’ Sure, you can think of these as three discrete short answer essays, or, a better way, is to consider these three pieces of a whole that should ‘go together.’ How do these concepts relate? What does HBS hope to glean here? The answer is: who among you is the most likely to succeed in the coolest way (that confers a benefit to HBS)? And they’re looking to find clues based on tells inside three facets. The trick is to signal the right stuff in each of these three opportunities to raise HBS’s confidence level that you (1) have what it takes, (2) to succeed, (3) impressively, and (4) under the most challenging circumstances life (‘the business world’) has to throw your way.

Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

For starters, let’s consider the word limit of 300. That tells you something. It’s three efficient paragraphs, or two meaty ones. That’s not exactly a lot of space to spin a yarn, so we need to get to the heart of it quickly, and effectively. Keeping in mind the context of the ‘business’ facet to the diamond of what makes you you, this question is a two-parter:

Part 1 - “What shaped you?”
Part 2 - “What shaping will you do?”

What shaped you?

(Won’t say it again, but just remember to couch everything here in the context of ‘business’: goals, skills, ideas, etc.) In order to address the elements that shaped you, you first need to understand what your shape even IS. What defines you today? How might you essentialize it? What skill sets make you you? What values differentiate you from someone with a similar skill set? What passions and interests of yours are unique compared to others who were subject to the same general ‘influences’? These are the endpoints. The ‘you’ today piece. Most applicants will fumble out of the gates by jumping straight to the “Ooh, I know my influences, I know the things that have shaped me, and they are these!” And at the end of it, we’ll have a delicious sense of what the ‘molding’ elements were, but have no real idea of what the pot looks like, so who cares.

Step 1: Begin by developing a clear sense of what defines you in a way that is distinctly different with others who are in the same pool with regard to your career interests and general profile stats.

Step 2: Answer the question: Why did you turn out THIS way, where the others in your pool turned out differently? (The answer here should lead you straight to ‘the experiences that have influenced your career choices and aspirations.’)

Once you’ve grappled with both those questions, now you can assemble it for your Part 1, but pause that for a second. Let’s peek ahead to the second half of the question, before we start actually writing.

What shaping will you do? (Almost…)

Using the parallel of how other people and experiences played a part in ‘shaping’ you, i.e., a thing (influencing element) having an impact on another thing (you), what is it you hope to achieve in the same way in your future business career?

Aha, see, this is why it’s critical to peek ahead. Before we identify what this is, we need to go back and address a missing “Step 3.” Let’s ride.

Step 3: Why does any of this matter to someone other than you?

Remember when you identified how you were different from your peer group? To be different (i.e., ‘differentiated’) is great! But we’ve only just completed the in-air somersaults - we still need to land this thing. Why was that important? To have turned out the way you did (differently) is better … why? Could be lots of things:

Example 1: Whereas you had just been effective at X, your ‘shaping elements’ allowed you to understand what ‘long-term’ success meant, and thus you became 10x more effective at X.

Example 2: Whereas you had an affinity for Y, your ‘shaping elements’ helped you develop one crucial feature called ‘resilience’ which meant that you would be able to succeed under high-pressure conditions, whereas you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Etc. etc. There’s a reason why the influences matter in a way we (the readers) can easily understand, and clock as noteworthy.

Okay, back to Part 2…

What shaping will you do? (Ready.)

So now that we have our three pieces, now we can look ahead to what delta it is you’re hoping to create, wherever you go, whatever you do. One of the best ways of teasing this out is to define what it is you’re hoping to do rather simply at first - just explain the what. Now imagine ten other incredibly competent individuals who might share that exact same goal, and possess the skills to be extremely effective. Seriously, imagine it, lean in. Imagine ten others do the thing you want to do, and they achieve an ‘Impact Score’ of 90-95 each. You, on the other hand, will pursue the same thing, but achieve an Impact Score of 100. What’s in that extra 5-10 points? You bring *what* to the table that create *what* kind of additional, important, impressive, desirable impact? This is easier said than done.

You need to dig deeper than you think to get to the nub of it.

Step 1: Define what success might look like for others.

Step 2: Now define what *your* version of success looks like.

Whatever separates your version from the ‘others’ version should give you clues to the piece regarding “the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve.” We’re only partially interested in what that impact is. We’re really interested in what that reveals about you and your potential for not just this pursuit, but any future pursuit. This is why we advise imagining the peer version, and then viewing your version side-by-side to isolate the piece of it that YOU are directly responsible for.

Once you have done all the legwork, and have all your piece, now you’re ready to assemble:

Part 1