I have a family, I score well on my MBA, organize IESE Meets The Valley, organized a networking event for students seeking internships and am working on my startup. Over the lasts months people have approached me asking me how I manage it all. It basically comes down to me being very fortunate and some tricks that I apply. In this post I will explain you the part where I am fortunate and in the next one some tricks I apply.
My Wife
I am fortunate to have Maaike who is absolutely amazing. I am spoiled to the bone. When I come home I have nothing to do but spend time with my daughter and then study. No cooking, housekeeping, or none of that. She does our administration and fights bureaucracy for us. Without her I would have had to spend a lot of time on paperwork and admin. On top of that, she sometimes pre-reads documents, papers and projects as she is a very detail-oriented person (and I am not).
My daughter
Family time is sacred for me. Every day I come home around 19:00 and then have 2 hours of family time. This is non-negotiable. There haven’t been many evenings these last 6 months where we haven’t had dinner together. My little one helps me relax and take my mind off things. It also brings stability to my life as our little one needs a certain daily routine. Also since we don’t have family / babysitters close we stay home more evenings than other students I know.
My MBA
The IESE MBA has you working in teams of 8, very intensively. From the beginning my team was very understanding and they all worked with me, allowing me to spend time with my family. Sometimes members will have dinner with my family for example. Or we continue after 21:00 on Skype if we need to work on projects (we usually do). So a big thank you also goes out to my IESE Team 3B for understanding and supporting me. I’ve been able to lean on them when I needed and hopefully they will say the same about me when you ask them ;-). Thanks: Alvaro, Amit, Candice, Eric, Josep, Nico and Sho.
Perhaps you are currently not as fortunate as I am. I am not telling you to marry and have a child ;-). But you could still try and build a kind of support system. You have peers, friends and family. Things that you might find hard to do they might find easy and the other way around. Also it is about making choices and accepting consequences. If you are considering the IESE MBA then you have the opportunity to build an amazing team from day 1 which will make your MBA life much more manageable.
In the next post I will share some more practical things I do to keep things under control
