Motivation Essay 1

Give a candid description of yourself (who are you as a person), stressing the personal characteristics you feel to be your strengths and weaknesses and the main factors which have influenced your personal development, giving examples when necessary. (Maximum 500 words)

This has been an INSEAD staple for a few years now. The only real change here is in word count. Now, the one thing they haven’t done here, which they should have, is to distinguish between a passive description and an active one. A passive description just tells you about something, and it ends there. “The ink stain is permanent.” “This coffee is very hot.” Thanks, but we don’t want ‘passive.’ We want that other thing — the description that teaches us something. Makes us develop an ATTITUDE about the subject.

“The ink stain is permanent, and it’s a good thing—I don’t ever want to forget the day the woman I fell in love with haplessly broke the cartridge over my white shirt. Crazy as it may sound, this blemish is a living monument of her innocence.”

Oh, so… the ink stain being permanent here was a GOOD thing! Hah! Without that context, we had no idea. Context, folks. Your job here is to describe yourself… with context. Give us a reason to learn something about you. Adjectives by themselves are meaningless.

How can you figure out WHICH characteristics give you your color? Have contributed to your personal development? Make you… you? (And not just “you” but… interesting, compelling, worth meeting, etc.)? That’s the hard part, isn’t it. Here are some tips to help:

• Has there been a moment in your life where you experienced a fundamental SHIFT in thinking? And we’re not talking about switching from Coke to Pepsi, but rather, an EPIC shift in worldview?
• Was there ever a moment where you acted in a way that was truly SURPRISING to others? And even to yourself? Where you went against the grain?
• Was there ever a moment that challenged you to your core? Requiring considerable strength or courage to overcome?

Defining moments that taught you something about what you were made of… really made of. Strengths and weaknesses are fair game here. Acknowledging weakness can be a sign of GREAT strength, and can be extraordinarily appealing. The guy who can introspect like that probably cares about improving. That’s the guy I want on my team, not the guy who is comfortable with finding himself to be flawless, beyond reproach, etc. Don’t shy away from this, if you have a neat weakness to talk about. Humility (especially in Europe) can go a long way.

Outlines for this essay can take many shapes and forms. But consider hitting these pieces in whatever you end up with:

• Provide examples of the traits. In fact, walk us through an action that DEMONSTRATES the trait over merely telling us about it.
• But then, make sure you give a reason we should care—this is the “context” we alluded to above. So what, the ink stain is permanent. Give us the VALUE.

Motivation Essay 2

Consider a situation where you failed to achieve your objective(s). How did you handle failure? What did you learn about yourself and/or your interactions with others from this situation? (Maximum 400 words)

Why would a business school ask this question? Think about this for a second. Elite MBA programs are looking to invest in the most potent future business leaders. What is there to gain from learning about a time an applicant has failed? Lots. But what precisely?

• Are you more interested in winning? Or are you more interested in being the person responsible for the win?
• How good are you at solving problems? Analyzing complex scenarios and divining sharp insights?
• How do you perform when things don’t go your way? Do you pout, or do you scrape yourself off the mat and get back into the arena and figure out what went wrong so that you gain from the experience and improve?

A good failure story takes us back to the scenario, at a time where you understood the solution to be *different* from the one you ultimately learned was necessary. It helps to understand your prior perspective, in order for the ‘lessons learned’ to really pack punch. But it isn’t just about what you learned (which is part of it), but rather, how you went about learning those lessons. What was your process for doing the autopsy? How did you determine where things went wrong, and how did that ‘update your algorithm’? Listening to your internal dialogue here is critical. Don’t get ahead of yourself and talk about this experience from the ‘you now’ perspective, i.e., the version that has digested the lesson. What we want to get a sense of is the manner in which you gained that lesson. We want to see it working in real time. Why? This gives us a sense of how potent your ‘problem solving’ powers are, which gives us the strongest clue about how you’ll fare in future tough situations. This is what they’re trying to get a sense of.

Here’s a way to structure it:

1. Give us the problem / objective, and your initial plan for solving it, justifying your rationale given your mindset *then.* (Yes, this will feel weird, we’re asking you to remember what it felt like to be confident about the wrong solution, and to sell it here.) (75 words)
2. Now tell us what went wrong. Be matter of fact, just convey it. (50 words)
3. Now let’s get into the actions you took to audit the failure. Give us those details and show us how you processed your findings. What were you seeing? How did it disagree with prior assumptions? How did you know which questions to ask? Did it feel bad to have been a part of a failure? Let’s talk about that component as well: how did you will yourself to shake that off and figure out what went wrong, and get over that negative feeling? This is all part of the *meat* of this essay. Bring us deep into this entire journey from thinking one way initially, to asking the right questions and pushing yourself to dig, to then developing a new understanding. The lessons are secondarily important; the manner in which you sought (and divined) those answers is primary. (125-175 words)
4. Let’s get into the lessons and how this opened things up for you, and what it felt like to be wrong, but how much better it felt to have a better sense after the fact, thanks to your openness to understanding the situation. How did this experience affect the way you approach newer problems, not necessarily tied to the specifics of the lessons of this exact anecdote, but more broadly? This is where we want to get a sense that your prior potential in the business world was X, but now it’s X+. What’s the “+” and how might it materialize in a future situation? (100-125 words)

Is there anything else that was not covered in your application that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee? (maximum 300 words)

Check out our analysis of the Optional Essay here.

INSEAD MBA Video Interview Information

Shortly after completing your INSEAD MBA online application, you will receive an e-mail notification from Kira Talent with a unique link to complete 4 video interviews. The video interviews are a unique opportunity for you to share your passions, your motivations and who you truly are. The MBA Admissions Committee is interested in obtaining an authentic view of you as a person, to see how you think on your feet and how you convey your ideas. The video interviews do not replace the face-to-face interviews with Alumni. Your application will be considered as complete and ready to be reviewed only once we have received your answers to the video interviews. Please complete your video interviews at your earliest convenience and no later than 48 hours after the deadline to which you are applying.

For something like this, where you’re going in a bit blind… the goal is to be “Stump-Proof.” What does that mean? It means, you need to show up on D-Day, and be prepared to be asked ANY four questions, and not get stumped, get all cotton-mouthed, and sweaty, and flub your way through those 60-second clips. Easy enough right?!

Hardly. Being “stump-proof” is hard. Some folks are born with it. For the rest of us, it takes some work. And luckily, there is work we CAN do to chip away at this challenge. Check out our Video Essay Analysis here––same principles apply!