I still make a fair few bad choices, but I can confidently say that my decision making is much better than it was 30-40 years ago. I made a lot of shockingly bad decisions between the ages of around 16 and my early 30s, I hope I’ve learned from some of them.

One of the very worst decisions I made was to go back to university in my late 20s. I was in a well-paid but completely unfulfilling technical job, and became very depressed.  As a result of this, I decided to leave my job and do a 1 year MBA (Master of Business Administration). MBAs were all the rage in the late 80s, the media had quite a few stories about people doubling their money after doing one, and/or making radical job changes.

I liked the look of an MBA course at one of Britain’s oldest established universities, which was always in the top 10 of UK university league tables. I’d visited it, had a great day there and was very impressed by the staff I met, and their sales pitch, promising me great things. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, an awful lot did: to start with, a lot of the course was very academic, in the pejorative sense of the word – there was a lot of management theory, most of which had little practical application; the standards were low, and a lot of the students were there for an undemanding year out of work. And halfway through the course, “The Economist” magazine produced its first MBA guide, which completely panned the course I was on. Then the economy went into recession, and MBAs went out of fashion, with jokes about “More Bloody Advice” and “Mediocre But Arrogant” being widespread.

When I left, most of my job applications were rejected without interview and I ended up taking a job not unlike the one I’d left a year earlier, only on less money.

The course cost me a lot of money in fees and lost earnings, but the worst damage it did was to give me unrealistic expectations. My attempts at applying any of the theory I’d learned were, without exception, complete flops. I became very despondent; it took at least 2 years before I got any mojo back at work.

What made doing this course such a bad decision? I think the key factors were:

1. My biggest motivation for doing the course was negative - it was about getting away from a job I loathed. (Sadly, I made a lot of choices for negative reasons in my teens and 20s – getting away from a job, or a course I found difficult, or a house share where I didn’t get on with someone. )

2. The course I chose was a bad compromise – two other courses I looked at were clearly better, but I was swayed by the attractive location of the university I chose, and its superior sports facilities (which I made little use of.)

3. I didn’t get many hard facts before I made my decision – I should have insisted on hard information about what students did after they’d finished their courses in recent years, and the qualification level of the students who enrolled on the course; the place I chose was very vague about both, while at least one of the two alternatives I looked at gave me a lot of information about what students went onto do, without me even asking.

4. My objectives were very muddled. I was looking for some sort of “transformational year”- whatever that is - with only the vaguest idea what I would do afterwards.

These weren’t things that were obvious to me at the time, but they are glaringly obvious now. Have I learnt from them? Yes; I’m certainly much less prone to bad compromises and muddled objectives, and I’m a stickler for hard data where possible, even if I still make too many choices for negative reasons. But as Meatloaf didn’t quite say, three out of four ain’t bad.

Oldie But Goldie

A Moodscope member