Why I want to earn my MBA

Freedom awaited me.  It was a beautiful summer day in 1996, and I had just finished sharing with my last Commanding Officer my plans for success when my Navy enlistment ended.  They included ideas such as earning my bachelor’s degree, becoming an officer in the Air Force, and improving my standard of living.  With a most sincere and knowing look, he offered me his best wisdom, “You should probably just reenlist and stay until retirement; it’s likely you really aren’t going to do all those things you say you will”. 

Fortunately, he was wrong; I have gone on to accomplish all of these things and more.  Unfortunately, I do not believe I have actually ‘achieved’ success as I originally thought I would either.  I have come to believe that success and failure are just as much paths on which we travel, as they are destinations we reach.  However, as Morpheus states in The Matrix (1999), “…there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path”.  I have known for years the benefits of earning my MBA, but have only now decided to follow the path to do it. 

Having my MBA will afford me better options for a hopeful future, and better choices and opportunities in life.  I do not have illusions of grandeur that earning my MBA will somehow be the crowning victory in my life or be a panacea for all the trouble life throws at me.  I expect it will more likely resemble many of the other moments in the past where I could pause to reflect back on my most recent achievement, what I had learned, and the lives that I affected along the way.  It will mean having less to overcome when adversity strikes as it has for so many of my friends and family who lost jobs (and more) in the recent recession.  

More importantly, I expect to find that earning my MBA will better prepare me for the next opportunity for which I would be otherwise been unprepared.  To me, that seems like freedom.  And who doesn’t want to be free?

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