Greetings! I had no idea how much time had elapsed since my last post – 14 hour days followed by trips to the gym and cooking dinner have made the past 3 weeks fly by at breakneck pace. I’m writing this on an airplane back from New Jersey having gone to my friend’s wedding this past weekend. Even 3000 miles away, the work continues. My next ongoing project – patent writing and research – is going to require the use of all of my formal training at Babson. Diligence, exhaustive research and asking questions to people who know more about the topic than I do are sure to be challenges that my Babson experience has taught me.
At Babson, the focus of the education encourages students to approach from different angles and to look for new and different ways to solve traditional problems. For patent research this is particularly true, and in exploring patents it is easy to get caught up in ‘how far down the rabbit hole goes’. Todd, a patent lawyer I met on the plane from Dallas to Newark (who worked on chassis and landing equipment for the F35 before heading back to law school) gave me some great advice – start with the most general you can and don’t worry about the specifics until later. For people not terribly familiar with patents, they have several different elements – independent and dependent claims. Each independent claim is very general and is supported by several specific (or dependent) claims. His advice, while specifically about patent research, is also the way to approach all areas of business and life in general. Too often we get caught up in specificities without taking a step back and asking ourselves if we truly believe in the general premise. Learning perpetual vigilance in everything that you do is critical to being both successful and sensible in all aspects of your life.
For instance, just this past week at my weekly meeting with my boss, I questioned how appropriate our approach to recruiting was. Posting to one college at a time was free, he had told me, but to post to the entire network at once was expensive. I never asked just how expensive it was. It turns out that to post at over 3800 schools cost only $415, while it takes about 5 minutes to post an individual ad. In brining my grievance to Vivek, he responded by saying, “I was wondering when you were going to ask me about that”. I was enraged! How could he let me spend 1-2 hours every day posting to these job boards without telling me about how easy and cheap it actually was? I left the meeting feeling upset and a bit mislead. After my discussion with Todd, however, I realized that just as in patent research, taking a step back and evaluating the big picture is always in your best interest and can lead only to better use of your time.
While I was sad to have spent all that time posting ads, it was not time wasted. Why? Because in going forward, I will never again accept menial tasks at face value, looking at them from a broader perspective and asking myself, “Is this the best way I can do this? What can I do to save time? And is it worth it?”. Time is our only true and non-renewable resource – you can sleep to get your energy back or eat to refuel your stomach – but time, once spent, is gone. And saving it to do the most important things in life (whatever those may be) is essential to both your productivity and more importantly your happiness.
My education at Babson has been excellent, but the knowledge received from my experience thus far at Rapleaf is invaluable.
Things do not change, we change
-Henry David
Cheers,
Max
