Career Conversations @ Theatre Institute : Part I

Drawn from Life …….

• The day you wish no one would remember might just turn out to be the best day of your life! The story of deactivating your Facebook account on your birthday.
• Just one second, one piece of good news can change the entire direction of your life. A strange moment can make you forget all your previous suffering. Allah never keeps anyone dishonored forever. You must wait humbly for the day of your dreams and believe from your heart that the day will surely come.
• Just one mistake can give you a tremendous push forward. Being able to make that kind of mistake is itself a stroke of fortune. Making mistakes early in life is the best thing.
• Having Intellectual Humility is crucial. Why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college graduates? Those who aren’t accustomed to making mistakes can’t go very far.
• Accept it—the mistake is yours. Forgive everyone except yourself. Learn to acknowledge your mistakes.
• Stop trying to be perfect. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll remain exactly as you’ve always been. There’s no such thing as perfect.
• Whether you’re an Oxford, MIT, Stanford, or Harvard graduate—nobody really cares. At the end of the day, only your impressive behavior, manners, and way of speaking remain in people’s minds. Nothing else.
• Most people love success but secretly despise successful individuals. Not everyone will like you. If you don’t accept this, those who don’t like you benefit more. You need some enemies in your life. If you don’t have any, create some. Birds of the same feather feel jealous of each other. Accept this easily. Those who chase after you have already acknowledged that you’re ahead.
• Doing something well is more important than doing it quickly. People remember how well the work was done, only that. Don’t complicate simple tasks, and don’t underestimate difficult ones.
• “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Saying someone’s face is ugly doesn’t make my own face any more beautiful.
• You can grow big in two ways. One: by becoming big yourself. Two: by making others small. The second way is easier, but risky. Why?
• It’s better to be a follower of the wise than a friend of the worthless on Facebook. Keep learning with a humble attitude. You can’t learn without humility. It’s much better to lose once fighting a lion than to win a hundred times fighting a donkey.
• The power of not making someone listen is far greater than making them listen. If you want to make someone listen, do it through your actions, not your words. Your day will come too. Until then, let people talk.
• Do three things. One: Write down what you want to do. Two: Write down how you’ll do it. Three: Keep what you wrote where you can see it. ………. When will you start doing this? Tonight when you get home!!
• Love your emotions. Your hand might be less beautiful than many others’ hands. But just as you’d be incomplete without it, you’d be incomplete without your emotions too.
• Focus on the rabbit you want to get. If needed, change the tactics, but don’t change the rabbit. If what you want seems difficult, change the method you’re following, not the goal. Half of what you think is right about your efforts is actually right. Accept this.
• Why me? There’s no point asking this question. A priest’s story. Caroline’s story. Your own story. Haven’t you ever received honor that you weren’t worthy of? What goes around, comes around.
• What’s essential to win? Intelligence? Skill? Knowledge? No, none of these. You need two things: emotion and perspective. The footballer’s story. My students’ stories. Young children’s stories.
• From today on, whenever you watch football or cricket, mentally imagine what you would do if you were in that player’s place. Practice this.
• Things are only as scary as we’re afraid of them. The childhood story of being afraid of cockroaches. The bumblebee’s story. What happens when you look down from the top of a mountain?
• When you’re to look through the window, just look through, don’t look at.
• The pessimists’ story. Pessimism is always contagious.
• Spend more time with those who speak well of you and have faith in your abilities. When someone speaks well of you, use the sense of responsibility that grows within you. Teacher Samar’s story.
• Be a 2-dollar man.
• Sometimes a goalkeeper actually reduces the chance of conceding a goal by not running around everywhere. Why does a goalkeeper run? We think, well, at least he tried. Even if he concedes a goal, no one blames him as much. Think less about what others are thinking.
• Stress management. Sachin Tendulkar’s story. Irfan Pathan’s story.
• Eat that frog! formula. Make a list of tasks. Before you sit down to study, write down what you’ll study that day. Finish the difficult and boring subjects first. This way you can finish the easy subjects much faster. Set priorities. When you finish a difficult subject, give yourself a gift. Give yourself a chance to slack off.
• The iftar party story. The get-together story. Every humiliation hides an opportunity.
• Notice something: 96% of the world’s wealth is earned by just 1% of people. Among those who take the BCS exam, only 1% of candidates become cadres. Why is this? Some of this is controlled by factors beyond our control. Don’t worry about those. Focus on what’s in your control. Use them. Plan to be among those 1%! Think less about the misfortune of the other 99%.
• Once a song gets into your head, it keeps playing and playing, no matter what kind of song it is! Maybe such a song gets stuck that you’d be embarrassed to even hum it! When our brain sends a signal, it only looks at what signal our thoughts are sending. Our brain works only with keywords. Choose them very carefully. Like attracts like. Let me give you some real examples.
• Creating your own work environment. Examples of Humayun Ahmed and Sunil Gangopadhyay.
• Stop complaining the world is not fair. Yes, it’s not fair. And, this unfair world is older than you and has charmed many people much better than you.
• It takes two hands to hold two small things. It takes two hands to hold one big thing too. If you can’t let go of small opportunities, big opportunities will slip away. Live like birds. Leave to live.
• When doing any task, follow the car headlight theory. If you think about everything before and after the whole matter, your attention is bound to be scattered. Most people find upcoming tasks difficult, so they prefer to think about things that are easy to think about and discourage them from doing the tasks ahead.
• Wives encourage whatever work they consider good, and every husband tries to do those things more. Apply this to your own life. Listen to praise with humility, give praise with generosity.

The Story of a Nobody  

• Those of you who are here, who haven’t even started your careers yet—are you truly behind? What does it actually mean to be ‘behind’? The way I began: I started working at least four and a half years later than my friends.
• Constantly changing life’s direction. Stories of indecision. There’s always time to realize that you’re running late.
• I had no Aim in Life, except on exam papers. Someone once asked me: what’s your ten-year plan for life and career? I replied: I’ve never been able to make even a ten-minute plan in my life. Still I’m happy. No regrets! How much does a person get in one lifetime anyway? I’m someone who lives in the world of each moment. What’s the point of living so career-obsessed?
• What is a career? What does a ‘good’ career (whether job or business) contain? I think it has three things: One. Social recognition. Two. Solvency. Three. Time to spend your earning in your own way.
• Better to live a short life without regrets than to live long days sighing amid great abundance. Yes, you can run the rat race the way everyone else does, like a rat trying to win the rat race. But there are two problems with this. One. This race never ends. Two. Even if you win this race, you’ll still remain a rat in the end. The problem with being a rat is that rats cannot enjoy human life. How much does a person really get from a job? We never know what will come first in our lives—tomorrow, or the next life? Therefore, we should choose our careers keeping in mind that we can live life our own way before death comes.
• Career and family—the story of filling a glass jar.
• You don’t need to take a very long time to do something very good. I believe that to do something beautiful, emotion is more necessary than hard work or intelligence. Knowing how to do many things in little time is a great art. …… No one kept their word. You fill up my senses. Kumar Sanu’s 28. Dostoevsky’s story. …….. Be lazy. This will reduce the desire to do the same work twice. Bill Gates’s principle.
• Looking back. The story of remaining a nobody. The story of the boy with the worst results; who at one point wasn’t even supposed to complete his honors, about whom no one ever dreamed. Not getting recognition from anyone is a terrifyingly painful matter. People tutor alongside their studies. And I used to study alongside tutoring. Not out of necessity, but out of passion. Later I thought, what does tutoring actually give us? ……. Usually money and contempt; sometimes respect. Days of humiliation, nights of tears. The garland of the poisoned cup and thereafter. Just surviving can mean a lot. Have you read “The Swimmer and the Water Nymph”? Better to suffer pain in life than to get nothing at all. Cry, only to smile better. Doing what no one ever thought you could do—that’s the most beautiful achievement. What does it mean to do something good? Whatever brings smiles to your parents’ and loved ones’ faces, whatever makes them hold their heads high—doing that is doing something good.
• Not living in someone else’s life, not compromising with life—the story of a happy unsuccessful accidental engineer, the story of a frustrated entrepreneur. I am very happy because I didn’t get what I wanted. Sometimes God accepts our prayers by not accepting our prayers. Thank God, He didn’t accept the prayers of my early life.
• One thing is very true. Being academically a good student doesn’t necessarily mean their career will be good. Good students often consider you an easy target. Use this weakness of theirs to your advantage. Try to have the last laugh. Let some time in between pass in tears, neglect, contempt.
• Before starting your career, ask yourself what you enjoy. Others cannot answer this. At most, they know what you should enjoy. The big problem with thinking like ten other people is that your actual capability gets trapped in a fixed pattern, and your achievement becomes nothing that can be called or seen as distinct. Whether you’ll let your life fall into mediocrity—it’s your choice.
• The two most difficult steps in doing any work are: One. Deciding exactly what you want to do, how you want to do it, why you want to do it. Two. Actually starting the work. The easiest technique for starting any work is to actually start doing the work.
• Is confidence necessary for success, or is success necessary for confidence? I can’t do it, I can’t anymore, I quit! Shah Rukh Khan’s story.
• “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” The difficulty level of most competitive exams is overrated. — Why? Those who top civil service exams are human, aren’t they? I used to think like this. ………. Don’t think that you won’t pass BCS, you won’t pass BCS. Your prayers might get accepted.
• Your passion pays!! Books, movies, music & of course Facebook!! No matter, whatever it is!! Basically, you were what you loved, you’re what you love, you’ll be what you’ll love!!
• If you are not thinking about your dream, you are not thinking at all.
• Success can never be deserved; success has to be earned. After you become successful, the way you think to yourself that this is your achievement—in exactly the same way, after you fail, others think to themselves that this is what you deserved.
• What’s the point of asking Bill Gates for rice-and-lentil business ideas? Be strategic.
• What people can’t do, or what they’re not used to, they assume you can’t do either. There are some viruses who can never praise anyone or tolerate anyone’s praise. Don’t let yourself be influenced by anything they say. Those who cannot praise your right actions have no right to criticize your wrong actions. Throw them out of your life. You don’t need everyone to get through life. Kind words are healthier than a bowl of chicken soup. The story of the strange dog.
• Being known as a good student to everyone in childhood is an awkward thing—you can never think of yourself as small again. The unfamiliarity with accepting that others think I’m a fool is very painful! Sometimes it’s your bad luck! People want to see you as they want, not as you want to see yourself. Still, live in your own life. Don’t listen to others, listen to your heart.
• Don’t be serious, be sincere. Not everyone can do everything. Accept this. Figure out which task you do best.
• Stop overthinking. If you’re going through hell, keep going. Que sera sera — Whatever was, was; whatever is, is; whatever will be, will be. What will happen will happen.
• Life didn’t come to us with a user-manual. So, it’s our right to use and to abuse it! Sometimes, failures are just too good! To fail successfully is an art.
• Deciding what you really want matters. It took me almost 2 decades to decide what I really want. When I’d decided finally, it took me only a few months to get what I really want. 
• Don’t only work hard, also work smartly.
• Success. It’s not the opposite of failure as popularly believed, it’s just living without sighs. It’s just dancing in the manner you want and making people think you dance well even if you don’t. It’s making your style others’ favourite brand even if it’s foolish. It’s sometimes making people laugh listening to your even worst jokes. It’s making others hear you even when you don’t speak. It’s taking the opportunity to tell others that meeting your previous millionth failure was essential, anyway. It’s making your failures worth-mentioning by you or by others.
• Only your results are rewarded, not your efforts. This is the way the world accepts or rejects you.

IBA Admission Exam and BCS Exam DOs & DON’Ts

The difficulty level of BCS and IBA admission exams seems somewhat overrated to me. While these are competitive exams—which is true enough—there usually aren’t that many real competitors, which is even more true. Most people prefer to scare others about these two exams. Say what you know; say what you don’t know too. Let me share two facts.

• Fifty percent of candidates in these exams go just for fun, without any real reason—almost like a get-together. (The funny thing is, some of them actually succeed! The “I came, I saw, I conquered” type! No point feeling bad about their success.)
• Only about 7% are real competitors.

This means you don’t have as many competitors as you think. BCS and IBA admission exams have no specific syllabus, so 100% preparation for these two exams is impossible for anyone. Keep in mind: thinking you’ve learned a hundred percent, forgetting sixty percent of it, and properly utilizing the remaining forty percent—that’s the art. For doing well in these two exams, knowing what not to study is far more important than knowing what to study. I’ve tried to address this in the following slides. Use these guidelines in your own way. Take what you need, throw away the rest.

The Ins and Outs of IBA Admission Exams  

• Master all the admission test questions from IBA’s BBA+MBA, BIBM’s MBM, DU’s EMBA, and private university MBA programs from previous years (if not all, then at least 10-15 years’ worth). Solve them thoroughly and gain a clear understanding of the question patterns. This is the first step in beginning your preparation.
• Just memorizing the GRE word list doesn’t guarantee admission to IBA. Remember, the easiest questions from GRE and GMAT appear in IBA. One question spawns several other questions. What does this mean?
• Let me share a secret. Generally, there’s no cut-off mark above 50% in any segment. So try to score at least 50% in all segments to reach the viva board. In the IBA admission test, you must pass each segment separately.
• In competitive exams, preparedness matters more than preparation for performing well. Maintain the attitude “I’m the best” in the exam hall. This works like magic! It gives you the supernatural ability to answer uncommon questions in the exam hall!
• Time Management. Because it does matter! Now let’s see what this means. Keep two things in mind.
• Whatever preparation you take, you must utilize it to the maximum. Taking preparation isn’t the big thing; properly utilizing that preparation is what matters.
• You must pass each segment separately. Therefore, you can’t put all your effort only on what you know well. So divide your time. In the first two-thirds of the total time, answer everything you can. In the remaining time, answer the leftover questions.
• To do well in the IBA admission test, solve lots and lots of questions. You can regularly solve GRE+GMAT questions online, understanding them properly. (Not all of them, just the ones that appear in exams.)

Now let me tell you which books to read and how much from each.

 Verbal part

• Vocabulary. For this, you can look at Barron’s GRE Wordlist, Word Smart. If you’re short on time, you can also check the market books.
• For the Analogy part, you can look at GRE Big Book (old edition). To reduce effort, you can buy and read 1-2 guides.
• For Sentence completion, you can look at GRE Big Book (old edition).
• Reading the Comprehension part from IELTS books will be beneficial.
• Read the Error Finding part from TOEFL books (like Cliff’s TOEFL). Be sure to read Barron’s TOEFL Essential Grammatical Rules. You can look at S@ifur’s Grammar book.

 Mathematics

• You can solve from these books: S@ifur’s Math, S@ifur’s Geometry, NOVA’s GRE. If you have time, you can also look at ARCO SAT.

 Analytical Analysis

• For Puzzle/Logical inference, you can look at Official GMAT. You can also keep 1-2 market books alongside.
• For Critical Reasoning, you can look at short comprehensions from GRE Big Book + Official GMAT.

We’ll talk about IBA’s viva later.

About various topics for preliminaries…..  

• Language: Previous BCS exam questions + Job solutions + 9th-10th grade grammar books + Hayat Mamud’s Language-Learning + guide books
• Literature: Previous BCS exam questions + Job solutions + Soumitra Shekhar’s Jigyasa + guide books
• Language: Previous BCS exam questions + Job solutions + English for the Competitive Exams + Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary + guide books
• Literature: Previous BCS exam questions + Job solutions + guide books
• Bangladesh Affairs + International Affairs: Previous BCS exam questions + Job solutions + newspapers + internet + guide books
• Geography, Environment and Disaster Management: New guide books
• General Science: Previous BCS exam questions + Job solutions
• Computer and Information Technology: Job solutions + previous BCS written exam short questions and notes + new guide books
• Mathematical Logic: Previous BCS exam questions + Job solutions
• Mental Ability: Previous BCS written exam questions + guide books + Dhaka University evening MBA admission test question bank
• Ethics, Values and Good Governance: Common sense + new guide books

My Experience with BCS Prelim + Written  

• From 10th to 34th BCS, buy 2-3 job solutions and solve PSC’s non-cadre exam questions (if possible, at least 250-300 sets) with understanding. Mark them and revise at least 2-3 times. Read the mind of the question setter, not the mind of the guidebook writer. Studying questions for 1 hour with understanding is much better than studying for 4 hours without understanding. Then it’s possible to cover 4 hours of study in 2 hours. Apply the POE. By studying lots of question patterns, you’ll learn how to study by eliminating unnecessary topics. This is the initial phase of starting preparation. Give adequate time for this. Shake off the notion that I must read everything others are reading. Invent your own style. After new guidebooks for new syllabus topics come out, buy at least 2-3 sets and read them. Reading is good, skimming is even better. Buy model test guidebooks and give yourself model tests. At least 3 per day. There’s no time for extensive research on new topics. New topics shouldn’t have difficult questions anyway.
• Most students first read reference books, then start solving questions. There are two problems here. One: You don’t get time to solve many questions. The more questions you solve, the better. Two: Most parts of reference books aren’t useful for BCS exams, yet reading the whole book wastes time and creates unnecessary fear about BCS. Besides, there’s no need to remember all that. ………. So walk the reverse path. I did the same.
• Stop reading random useless stuff. Understanding what you won’t read is much more important than deciding what you will read to become a BCS cadre. Whether you read reference books or not, solving lots of questions is mandatory. Those who know may not succeed; but those who succeed surely know. (Even if they don’t know, they know.) A successful fool is better than an unsuccessful scholar. Those involved with BCS become two types. One: BCS specialists. Two: BCS cadres. …… Become a cadre.
• Let me give you a tip. A good technique for reading reference material for any BCS subject is to read for marks, not for knowledge. Gaining knowledge makes you learned; gaining marks makes you a cadre. To do this, first read previous years’ questions repeatedly to understand what types of questions don’t come. It’s even better to look carefully at prelim and written questions, then read reference books by ‘excluding and excluding.’ For example, if someone wants to read Mahbubul Alam’s History of Bengali Literature or Soumitra Shekhar’s Jigyasa (just saying) for Bengali literature, first map out in your mind what types of literature questions come in prelims + what types of short questions come in written literature. Then read. The best way to do well in competitive exams isn’t to read reference books first then solve questions; rather, read reference books while solving questions. Control the natural greed to read everything. Rather than reading one unnecessary topic once, read necessary topics repeatedly.
• Stop reading books like Current Affairs, Current World, Today’s World, Economic Survey for prelims. At most 5-6 questions come from very recent affairs in prelims, which are only found in those books. Among these, at least 2 can be answered by reading newspapers. What happens if we forgive the remaining 4?! Why people take such pain for these 4 marks is beyond my understanding. Actually, reading those torturous books gives a false sense of studying. This falls under high-class deception. Let me share a fact. Some difficult questions exist that don’t stick to memory even after repeated reading. Stop trying to remember those. Because one such question can drive several easy questions out of your head. Preliminaries isn’t an exam for getting the highest marks; it’s simply an exam to pass. Think less about what others can do. What others can do might not ultimately be more useful than what you can do.
• Doing well in BCS exams largely depends on four subjects—English, Math, Science, and Bengali. Study these four subjects with extra emphasis. Those scholarly parrot-like individuals who are experts only in general knowledge usually fail BCS exams or get very ordinary results. There’s no benefit in being too scholarly in general knowledge, because that segment usually yields average marks, so you won’t get much competitive advantage over other candidates compared to what’s possible in those four subjects. Actually taking preparation is better than convincing yourself and everyone else that you’re preparing. ‘The appearance of preparation, the absence of preparation.’ This happens when preparing for competitive exams. It’s better to pass by working smartly than to fail after working hard. You need to do very well or reasonably well in each segment. Therefore, when taking preparation, you can’t put all your effort only on what you know well. My technique is to take extra care of what I know so I can gain much more advantage over others in that area. But before that, I check whether what I know best is actually something worth gaining advantage in. Suppose you’ve memorized even the name of Clinton’s wife’s friend’s pet dog, but if you write “My grandfather was a black dog……” for ‘My grandfather had a black dog’ in English, it won’t work.