Avoid This Key Mistake…

Good morning — at least in my time zone — to a beautiful day. There’s some snow outside, which is exciting, and the season is starting. Consulting is the greatest career on earth. If you go all the way, it’s going to be a $30 million career. You get wealthy beyond your imagination, and you’ll have all the money you’ll ever need to buy all the skiing tickets, skiing trips, skiing gear, skis, ski instructors — if you’re a ski bum like me, that’s an exciting prospect.

For most other sports this goes as well. So, don’t miss out on your chance to actually make it. Don’t let your own “self” stop you from trying to get in there. Sometime in the near future I’ll tell my story about how I got inside the McKinsey group. It’s a crazy story — unbelievable — the coincidence that an average guy like me made it, and even more exciting that an average guy like me then worked in this field for ten years.

In this chapter, we’re still working on the topic of the case interview. But instead of going further along in the case, I have to tell you something really important about how you have to practice case interviews. Most of you are getting it wrong because I know how you’re doing it. Most of you are saying, okay, I’ve got to do as many practice cases as possible so that I become better at cracking the case. And then you take another one and another one. You also go to these platforms where you’ve got case interview partners. Or you’re trying to crack harder cases. But this takes you down the wrong lane. These cases are not meant to be hard.

What you’re doing wrong is, you’re practicing the wrong thing. You’re practicing cracking the case; you’re not practicing acting out a perfect case interview. What I want you to do is to practice doing cases where you know the answer already, where you’ve studied them intensively in every single detail. You know the good answer, and you know the very good answer.

Then you sit down with somebody else and you work out what a perfect performance of yours looks like in a case where you know the answer, so that you already know the structure, you know how you act, you know what perfect looks like — because the case interview is acting. It’s not about solving a difficult problem. The case interview is not science, and it’s not meant to be hard, and it’s also not meant to be a university exam where your actual knowledge is tested.

Your ability to act like a consultant and act in terms of acting on stage is being tested. Will you be able to act in a way that I can sell you tomorrow to a client for $5,000 a day? Do you have the manner? Do you have the self-confidence to enter a client’s team room tomorrow? I think one of the key reasons why I got a job was because back in the days, the world was my oyster. I had just graduated from university at home, I was doing my Master’s program in the United States. We were partying all the time. We thought we were going to rule the world. Nothing was a problem.

I went into the interview and I was just there. I had an attitude of, “Of course I know the answer to everything!” So, I just put up a great show and in some of the case interviews it worked, and in some it didn’t, but it didn’t matter. The show was good enough. What you’re getting wrong is that you’re working on trying to crack a difficult case, but the difficult thing you should be working on is your acting skills.

So, I want you to take a case where you know the answer and go about repeating it again and again and again until your act is perfect until you know every single move. Do you know what makes a great actor? They have practiced their moves a thousand times in front of the mirror — that specific smile, those Pirates of the Caribbean drunken moves of Johnny Depp. He has practiced this a thousand times and that’s why we think it’s great. I want you to practice a thousand times how to be a great case-solver.

Here’s a little piece of my story. I had good grades on the most difficult exams, the legal exams. They are huge exams, and all the other students were studying law all the time. I sat down and took a sample exam, and I looked at the template answers, and I sat down and copied the answer in my own handwriting, just to get the feel of what it’s like to write the right thing. How long does it take to write these answers? How many pages is this answer on paper? What are the words they’re using?

Then I sat down and tried to write down the answers from memory, and then compare my answer with the template answer. What did I miss out on in the answers? What didn’t I understand in the answer? I was modeling. Modeling is a very important concept. I was modeling how to answer this correctly. What is it that my mind currently doesn’t see when I’m answering this question?

I found all these things that I missed — oh, I’m not writing down this and that, and these are all things that give you points in the exam. In the same way, by modeling the case interview you are learning about what you understand, what you are doing and not doing in the case interview that gives you the points.

Instead, what you’re trying to do now is with your incomplete knowledge, you’re trying to do more of your incomplete stuff. You all have flaws in the way you act in the case interview. So, what you’re doing with your case interview practice, you’re just practicing more of the flawed stuff, but you’re never sitting down and modeling exactly what it should be like when it’s done perfectly.

So, by copying down the right answers, when I was in the exam, I just knew in my gut already what the answer would feel like, what it would look like, how long it would be. When the exam came, it was just a new variety of what I’d seen before, but 99% of the thinking work had already been done before, and I would just need to look at the variety. That’s the point where you need to get to.

You don’t need to practice a hundred case interviews. You just have to — one time — have understood perfectly how to do it and how to act and how to do this and how to feel comfortable. In your mind, in your gut, you have to feel what it feels like to succeed at this. What it feels like to be suave, what it feels like to show business acumen. You have to practice acting — showing business acumen.

So that you feel like, “I can do this! I’ve practiced this a hundred times.” The hard part is not cracking a case, because the cases are easy. I’ll show you that the case is easy because we are going to go through more questions on the cases, and you’ll see that the logic behind it is typically very easy. They are made to be easy and solvable because they should be solved in half an hour. I mean how hard can they be, and the firm doesn’t want to look… illogical. They don’t want people walking out of the case interview and saying, “What a terrible case interview. I mean it was just totally unsolvable and they had flaws in the numbers, and there was just…”

They don’t want to do that. They want to have perfectly rational, easy, solvable cases. What they’re looking for is: can you do the acting, because that’s what you’re going to do the next day. The next day — the next logical day, not literally the next day — you will be a consultant. Can you act like a consultant? That’s the question.

So, in the Facebook group, we will do practice case interviews where you already know the answer. Later on, we’re going to do a couple of them where you don’t know the answers, but you’ll see a huge difference once you are comfortable with doing the ones where you know the answers, because then you’ve got the structure in your head, and you’ll see a difference. It makes all the difference.

Don’t know where to get started on your path into McKinsey, BCG, Bain?

Here are the simple steps:

Step 1: SURROUND YOURSELF WITH A GROUP OF LIKEMINDED PEOPLE THAT HELP EACH OTHER ON THE WAY

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Step 2: (if you are not yet invited to the interview) GET THE FREE TRAINING ON HOW TO WRITE A RESUME THAT GETS YOU INVITED TO THE INTERVIEW

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Step 4: UNCOVER THE SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATES AND LEARN HOW TO ACT CONVINCINGLY IN THE CASE INTERVIEW

Do you want to be like so many of my students who come back successfully and tell me: “Moritz, actually it was totally easy. I just applied what you told me”. How does that work? Well, differently than 99% of other sources make you believe. You don’t need more business knowledge. You need confidence in your actions, clarity on what they expect, and the scripts that always work (no matter the question). This, I teach here: https://moritzgruber.net/mint

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