Welcome to Words with Wynn! If this is your first time perusing my content and you’d like more of my weekly musings, subscribe below:
A bookend to my previous piece, Weird, is that you can not always spy the ‘crazy ones’ at first glance. Recently, I have come to more thoroughly appreciate the wild complexity and subtle nuance intrinsic to each individual I meet. I’ve marked that as my greatest learning from MBA: the staying power of first impressions, correct or misguided.
My time at McCombs was a rare pressure cooker wherein I met ~200 new people and then continued to interact with them daily, both socially and academically, for about two years. This provided ample time to really get to know each other, and provided a constant stream of surprises as I became aware of how incredibly misguided many of my first impressions were.
A couple examples of my smooth brained assessments:
Connor
First, we’ll start with my study group. In most business school programs, they assign you to a study team for your first couple semesters as a tactic to blend backgrounds and build cohesion across the class. Within my wonderful study team, I’d like to spotlight my buddy Connor.
At first glance, Connor is the consummate Southern gentleman. Boot-wearing and boisterous, my first impressions of him during the zoom-era of Covid were as a classic good ol’ Southern boy. The man attended Georgia (go Dawgs) for undergrad, and went on to live in Houston thereafter. With his confluence of beard, background, and Southern drawl, perhaps I can be forgiven for painting a pretty specific picture in my minds’ eye for whom I thought Connor most likely was. It, foolishly, seemed like fairly easy pattern matching for my stupid brain to place him in the ‘conservative, country, good ol’ boy’ box and move right along. Not that I labeled him negatively, per se, so much as my brian opted for expedience and painted with broad strokes to take what little data I had and generate a mental model for this individual: not really my type of guy- alittle too many guns, alittle too few books.
Boy howdy, was I wrong. After a couple years of group projects, team dinners, and a Grateful Dead concert, I would still reiterate my assessment of Connor as the consummate Southern gentleman, but in the most endearing and broadest sense of the phrase. Anything but a gun totin’ conservative fanatic, I quickly came to appreciate him as one of the most socially conscious, equality championing members of the male contingent in our class. Connor’s Southern in the way that Dolly Parton is, sweet as syrup and fiery as whiskey. He knows what he believes, and he’s ready to stand up for it. But he won’t belittle you for your differences and brings the energy of a rowdy good time.
Roger
Another particular example I come back to was the result of my experience backpacking through the Baja Peninsula (classic MBA bullshit):
Prior to our collective odyssey, I had known many of the individuals pictured on a casual basis. Maybe a Zoom collaboration for a group project or a conversation at a happy hour, but very little more substantive than that. Yes, we’d run in similar social circles, but I would have said the majority of our interactions were surface-level at best.
For most of my teammates, I had a fairly solidified idea of how I’d bucketed them in my mind- sports nut, combative, reserved, etc. with only a couple first-time acquaintances. Our trek, backpacking our way to the Mexican coast, was a tremendous trial for unearthing my misguided impressions.
A prime example would be my relationship with my tentmate Roger. Before the trip, we had worked on a couple projects to little fanfare. He was a decent enough guy, and I probably would have previously described him with high-level ‘resume’ type details for his character. Something like “Seems nice enough. A bit of a jock-y type of guy. Swam in college and did something like sales before MBA. We don’t really have much in common.” After a few tent implosions, scorched campfire cuisine, and prickly cactus encounters, I had so much richer an understanding of who he was and where he was coming from, the resume details being the least interesting things about him. We unearthed a mutual love for literature and similarly introspective consideration for our career paths. And we enjoyed at least one night under a frigid Mexican moon, the culmination of our tent-pitching ineptitude and fierce gales off the neighboring mountain.
I found myself having this experience repeated again and again as we plodded away the miles. My various teammates were far more complex and interesting than any of my initial assumptions. Now, I recognize that the depth of our relationships were driven by the duration of our time spent together and the environment in which we put ourselves- spending countless hours climbing hills and navigating valleys with little more to do than socialize. Nonetheless, this served as a first-hand experience of the strength of biases established at the drop of a hat, and served as a warning for less forgiving environments (trading or investing, anyone?).
As an aside, there’s another post to be written about the Wynn Lemmons ‘10,000 Hour Rule of Friendships’ that I’m workshopping. Something about the sheer volume of time required to establish deeply connected friendships, why undergrad/grad school environments are so conducive to these (resulting in so many ‘friendships for life’, groomsmen, etc.), and why it becomes so structurally untenable to accomplish as we get older. But that’s for another time.
This is all to say that first impressions take moments to establish and months to unravel. My experiences made me acutely aware of just how (depressingly) long it took to overcome my own biases, once established. If not for the repeated exposure that an MBA program forces, I may have completely missed the mark on many of the wonderful individuals I met during my time in Austin.
It’s easy to extrapolate the importance of these ideas for our own lives, both personally and professionally. On a personal level, it serves as a reminder of just how diligently we must work to overcome our own biases once established as well as approach each relationship with an open minded curiosity. Professionally, it’s a painful reminder of the care with which we must conduct ourselves as well as the diligence with which we must assess others. Particular to investing in startups, interviewing candidates, and understanding colleagues this becomes doubly important as so many major decisions are made on the basis of little more than a couple Zoom calls…
“’Tis not, perhaps, without reason, that we attribute facility of belief and easiness of persuasion, to simplicity and ignoring; for I fancy I have heard belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul, which by how much softer and of less resistance it is, is the more easy to be impressed upon… By how much the soul is more empty and without counterpoise, with so much greater facility it yields under the weight of the first persuasion. And this is the reason that… [so many] are most apt to be led by the ears. But then, on the other hand, ’tis a foolish presumption to slight and condemn all things for false that do not appear to us probable; which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours.” - Michel de Montaigne, “That It is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity"
Put simply, we’re pattern matching machines and, without due care, we can be easily led astray.
Work hard, think deeply.
- W