Reality: Objective vs. Subjective
I have been fully feeling the impact of a piece of wisdom that I have been learning lately. I even had the pleasure of hearing someone say the words directly to me today. Our MBA (Master's of Business Administration) class had a Meet & Greet session with our potential future mentors, and as I stumbled awkwardly through the social chaos, I came across a man who seemed to have a lot of wisdom to pass on. Honestly, I felt like a total idiot in front of such a smart, successful man, but he didn’t seem to mind my inexperience; he seemed happy to have found an eager audience in me. His background was marketing, and just recently I came across a career that seemed to be perfect for me: market research. Naturally, I inquired about this career path, and the following response somehow seemed pregnant with truth. “There is a very thin line between what companies want to hear and the actual facts,” he said. I gathered that market researchers have to walk that thin line constantly because if they tell the company something that they don’t want to hear, they can be fired. He said that a market researcher has to present the findings in such a way that the facts speak for themselves, leaving the company to come to its “own decision.” Also, it is a good idea to suggest alternatives in case the first “suggestion” does not work out. At first, this information was disheartening, for my initial response was to think that market research probably was not such a good career choice after all. After pondering what he had told me for awhile, some crucial connections followed. In essence, there is a very thin line between what people want to hear/believe and reality. Through changing a few words around, what he told me seemed to at least partially apply to every social interaction I have ever had. We all have some image of ourselves and if someone tells us something that conflicts with that image, we dislike it. This is probably natural. The key, then, is to give a person the truth in such a subtle way that it seems as if the person has come to the conclusion himself. If this is not done in a skillful manner, the results can be disastrous, as I’ve seen in my own life all too clearly. In one sentence, this man had unknowingly summed up the reason I had been running from reality for almost a decade. Reality simply did not match up with what I wanted to believe. Lately, my fear of reality has been subsiding as I am realizing the value in embracing it. Facts are becoming my best friends.
Needless to say, I found myself wanting the man who inspired this writing to be my mentor. Market research or not.