A Letter to a Cousin

Dear TT,

Congratulation my cousin TT, you were accepted by three of the finest schools you have applied. At last, you must choose one of them and that was not easy to decide since two of them are among the finest MBA Program in US, and one of them is a top school outside US.

I knew it a long time ago that you are such a smart boy. I have never stopped wondering of how you could learn English from only some adventure games and one English dictionary. I found it incomprehensible of how anyone can do that. You had your TOEFL grade 50 points ahead of mine. And that I admit rather ashamed of myself, I took it not only once but more than twice; and you my cousin TT took it only in one stroke.

Feeling missing of you, I searched your name to see what were you doing back there. I am proud of what you did back there for the society - small perhaps but positive.

I took a line from your school home page:

"To inspire MBA students’ entrepreneurial spirit and motivate them to seize opportunities, take risks, and help build exceptional companies".

Focus to the word "risk". That word reminds me of my old book collection of mine - "The Road Ahead" by Bill Gates. I am not recommending you to learn about any technology but please focus your attention to the word poker in that book. I hope you will get my point by saying poker. I am not suggesting you to gamble in a poker game. Life is a gamble in itself. So follow your school suggestion; and when you fail which I think you will once or more, congratulation and welcome to the real world.

And when that horrible word happen to you- failure, what you will learn and have learnt in your present school, will not help you of how to cope with it. I wonder if you will be given a class lesson of how to handle faults, defeats, failures, sufferings, humiliations.

It is important to learn knowledge in your present school but I believe strongly that you also must equip yourself with knowledge from sources other than in your present school.

Talking about disaster, you knew about the flood in our town but I have not told you the rest. So sad to hear and watch that some people were "loosing their mind" because of that. But the majority of them could handle that tragic thing graciously. So what are things that make them difference?

Your IQ will not help if those horrible things happened to you. Your SQ, the term that I learnt from a book written by Stephen R. Covey, will probably help you to accept the things as it is.

I have also an old collection book "THE DALAI LAMA’S BOOK OF WISDOM", HarperCollins Publishers Ltd - http://www.thorsons.com  that you may learn. It has sound principles that you can absorb for your guidance. I know that we are both from different teaching but it will do us no harm to read it.

Failures, sufferings, humiliations will give human humbleness and perhaps wisdom. I conclude my letter by quoting from my favorite author, Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Compensation". from Essays: First Series (1841). http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm.

"Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl."

Hopefully that when you graduate, and that I think you will without any doubt, you have also learnt the lessons from the above sources.

Your cousin with love,

Hermawih Hasan

PS:

I am a little bit worry about you. I knew that your wife graduated with 4.0 GPA from Zzzzzzz University – among the finest too. That I think you will have tough competition from your dearest one. You could equalize but not defeat her. That may be your first test case of how you could handle your failure. But knowing your character, I should not be concerned at all.