Orit Gadiesh – Today’s capsule of inspiration
Orit Gadiesh, Chairman Bain & Co. *Infinite Bows to your resilience*.
HBS was my introduction to the United States. I would read cases with my dictionary. I still remember the first case. It was eleven pages including the exhibits and it took me six hours to read. I was pretty desperate because literally every second word I had to look up in the dictionary. And the dictionary didn’t give any business meaning to most of the words. For example, the dictionary described the word “contribution” as being something about giving to nonprofit organizations. So reading the cases was extremely time consuming and hard. And then I would take my dictionary to the classes or to exams. Exams were the worst. It would take me three times as long to read an exam. I’d always sit in the first row and if it was a really long exam, I’d write at the end, “This took me three hours and twenty-five minutes to write, but here’s what I would have done had I had time to actually run the calculator.”
In class, I forced myself to speak even though that was difficult too because of the language. If I couldn’t find a word, I’d use six words to express the idea. I just had to force myself to do things like that and that’s how I learned English. I also had never seen television, but I’d heard about advertisements. We didn’t have TV advertisements in Israel; there were none. So I went to a classmate’s dorm room and I would turn on the TV to see what the ads looked like. I also had never been to a large supermarket. So I went to a supermarket to see what it looked like and how products were set up and so on and so forth. One time, we had a final exam on cereal, something that I had never tasted. I still don’t like it, but at the time, I didn’t know what it was and I couldn’t imagine there were sixteen varieties and why would you want more? I also had no idea who Johnny Carson was. So I was learning quickly about the United States and its culture, and I was learning the language. I had no problem when there was a case in Turkey or almost anywhere international. But I had a problem when Johnny Carson or cereal was part of the case.
It’s unbelievable to see from where todays leading lights have started from. Noone’s born a phenomenon. Though that’s a common fact, it hits you very very hard when you read something like this. It not only serves as your daily capsule of inspiration but reinvents you again, adding that extra dollop of vigor, which will definitely surface when it matters, I guess. It will.
