The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

2

“Is everyone nuts?”

I was sad when I graduated, because all my friends were scattering in different directions. After a big road trip, it was suddenly all over and then:

Mark and his wife moved to Houston, and he got a job with a high-end consulting company. About a quarter of Harvard Business School grads go work for consulting firms, and the hours are notoriously tough. Unless they land a local assignment, most consultants fly out Monday mornings and fly home Thursday nights, every single week, every single month, forever.

Chris went to Washington, DC, to be assistant principal at a big charter school. We kept in touch, but he was always at work when I called. We talked about our road trip and I’d ask him, “Are you getting any sleep these days?” He’d say, “Well, I get to work every morning around 7:00 a.m. and get home around 9:00 p.m. I usually go in for a few hours on the weekend, too. So yeah, enough sleep, but not much else.”

Ryan went into private equity in New York. Another quarter of Harvard Business School grads get high-end finance jobs in investment banking, private equity, or hedge funds. They help big companies buy each other, invest in illiquid assets, create complicated investments. But Ryan told me he started work around 10:00 a.m. and worked till 11:00 p.m., seven days a week.

Sonia went to work in Silicon Valley at a big tech company. The tech giants hired nearly another quarter of the graduates from our class and had great reputations for gourmet meals, dry-cleaning, and Ping-Pong tables at the office. When I reached out to Sonia a year after graduation she told me she loved her job and was working about eighty hours a week.

It seemed crazy to me, but all my friends were working eighty to one hundred hours a week.

And a week only has 168 hours in it!

Where was their third bucket?

I remember thinking, Is everyone nuts?

I thought back to Harvard and remembered going out for dinner with a group of McKinsey consultants during a recruiting event. They flew to Boston and wined and dined us at a ritzy joint. We drank expensive wines, ate delicious food, and talked about world issues into the wee hours. My brain was overheating because of the stimulating conversation. These guys were warm, friendly, and killer smart. It was a great night.

But the thing I remember most is that when we were finally finishing up around two in the morning, all the McKinsey consultants were . . . going back to work! They were jumping on conference calls with teams in Shanghai, opening laptops to do emails, or getting together to finalize presentations for the next day. At two in the morning!

Consultants and finance folks make up most of Harvard Business School grads and they work approximately eighty to one hundred hours a week.

So, are they really making $120,000 a year?