Tournament Effect..

We often wonder that we were too good in school and then somehow not able to sustain the same level of enthusiasm and energy during the later part of our career. We pile on a bundle of dreams thinking that life will always be like this. I will get the same people to compete with for all my life. After entering a college with student population much bigger than the combined strength of your school you still think that this is almost the same set of people. Competition will be the same. Slowly the feeling sinks in that life has changed and pace of the change requires you to revise your goals. Now you don't want to be the topper and you will feel satiated even if you manage to get the second rank. What happened? Has your competencies changed? The answer is No. Why? well keep reading.

You are in college where you are the okay with academics but excel in extracurricular and especially good with quant and verbal ability (yeah! you know what I am talking about). You read one article in the daily editorial and feel confident that someday you can make it to the CEO level and MBA is the route to it. You feel confident about the pedagogy followed in MBA. Case discussions, presentations, group discussions and group exercises, you relate all this to your college life and you think you have enough substance in you to make it big in MBA. You target the CEO position of a company of your dreams. Well, you enter a MBA course. For the first few days you find the going easy but then you start feeling that something is not right. We call this "WHAT YOU THOUGHT IS NOT WHAT YOU GET" effect. You slow down to analyze yourself and revise your goals. Now you target the CTO,CFO, COO or any other higher level position ( just below the CEO). Well slowly and gradually, after two or three revisions of your goals, during the start of your placement season you will feel happy if you bag an entry level position on Day 1. Well, it seems logical that you should be realistic but then have your competencies really changed? Again a "NO".

What is this which makes us feel smaller and insignificant over a period of time? Well, the answer is "TOURNAMENT EFFECT". The explanation of this effect is that we are so absorbed with ourselves that we never realize that the stage is getting bigger and bigger. And people around you are becoming smarter and smarter. You are sharing your stage with some of the handpicked people who were perhaps the best in their own comfort zone.

For MBA students this effect has really a meaning. To excel in life you need not always look inside you, you have to be an excellent reader of the environment also. You can not take it for granted that if you were good at something in the past it's an advantage. Well it's rather a disadvantage as it will act as a mindblock for you. Continuous improvement of your skill sets is the key. After all, you are not in your comfort zone. Well, the moral of the story is respecting your self for what you are respecting others for what they are and if you have to revise your goals/targets then please don't feel bad. You can always blame this “TOURNAMENT EFFECT".