The poem that helped me leave Google for Harvard Business School

Google is a special company by every measure — in its scale, its people and its impact. The decision to move on wasn’t easy to make. However, the time has come to say see you later to the free food and amazing colleagues.

I was introduced to the concept of engineering serendipity last year and it has stuck with me ever since. In essence, I believe that we can shape a path which increases the probability of having meaningful collisions. The best way I could think to engineer serendipity for myself was by pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School — and so for the next two years, I’ll be an MBA candidate and Sainsbury’s Management Fellow at Harvard Business School.

Below I’m sharing the ‘essay’ I submitted when applying for the program. When I decided to apply for the MBA, I was filled with self-doubt. I was comparing myself to other candidates and thought I wouldn’t fit the bill. I don’t have the typical consulting/banking experience and, admittedly, I scored well below HBS’ average GMAT score.

However, I came to terms with the above and decided to give it my best shot. I decided that I’d make vulnerability my difference and so I put myself on paper. With this mindset, the written piece flowed very naturally and came together in one sitting at a café.

This piece may be a tough read — making it difficult to share publicly like this. However, I hope that through sharing this I’m able to “help others express themselves, heal and grow in the way that I did”.

N.B. at time of writing, I was still working @ YouTube.

shattered glass

weighed down my duvet

a shield from the

friday mass.

Duvet peeled off from head to toe

carried the remnants of a window

and 6 lives

alas.

It was the morning of Friday, December 27th 2013. It was my annual trip to Lebanon to visit family, but this morning was particularly memorable. As I lay in bed gripping the corner of my bed, with the duvet protecting my head from the blasting AC, a deafening sound ripped through central Beirut that morning as a car bomb…

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