Be A Smart Aleck! Get rid of limiting beliefs around?that.

Consulting is the greatest job on earth. If you make it all the way, it will be a $30 million career. I keep reiterating this, to make your mind aware that there’s a big prize waiting at the end of the road. This is the only way you’re going to motivate your mind to actually take action. If you do not tell your mind that there is something of value to be had, it’s not going to give you the energy, the tenacity, the curiosity required. Your mind is just not going to give you the motivation to do anything. So, there is a pot of gold there.

The second part of getting the cis, you can do it. Concerning, you can do it, how do we set goals in life? A goal should always be set in a way that it only looks possible if there’s divine intervention. Let me rephrase this, with a certain element of divine intervention. You should not set yourself goals where you already know how you’re going to get there. You should always set yourself a goal where you say, “This is what I want to have, but there’s a lot of things I do not yet know. For example, how am I going to fund my Master’s program?” If you set yourself a goal where you already know how to do it, you are wasting your mind, because the way the mind is built is such that what we perceive as the conscious mind is only a small part of our brain.

The much bigger part is a neural network that is not directly accessible to us — but we can interact with it. Most people haven’t understood this relationship of ourselves with the mind. So, there’s an inaccessible part — but we have an interface, and that interface is questions and goals. If you set yourself a goal and you give it a reason why — the pot of gold — your mind will, without you knowing, start calculations and start to figure out ways to reach that pot of gold. It will open up the filters of perception to possible solutions. It will give you the motivation — in just that one moment when you met that one person — to bring up the topic of your funding, or your choice of Master’s program, or it will even make you — I don’t know what you guys were looking for when you found this book — it will make you walk into this bookstore and find my book.

But you only do this if your mental filters are open to it, and you have set a goal for your mind to actually start its calculations to find the solution. The mind — the inaccessible part of our mind — is a solution-seeking machine. And whatever question you pose, it will come up with an answer. Sometimes it takes longer. That’s those days when you’re under the shower and all of a sudden it hits you because your mind has been calculating in the background. There’s easier stuff: “How do I get to the train station?” Bing, here’s the answer. That’s very fast. “How do I get into McKinsey?” — not that fast an answer. But if you set yourself the goal, it will start figuring out solutions and propose stuff to you and make you do stuff and give you motivation. So much about the mind.

Let’s keep on talking about the case interview because the last few chapters are all about the case interview. We’re going through a published case interview from McKinsey on the McKinsey careers interviewing site, Diconsa. We’re going into question two, and it’s all about should Mexico; in this case, using a supermarket chain instead of bank branches to dispense social benefits, because for rural people it’s a lot of effort to go to the bank branches.

The second question gives you all this information. Currently, each family spends fifty pesos per month on transportation. If they were able to access their social benefits at these stores, this cost will be reduced by 30%. And 20% of Mexico’s population is rural. If all families receive state benefits, the question is how much in total per year would be saved across all Mexican rural families receiving state benefits. So, a couple of observations on this. First of all, you are lacking a few pieces of data to do the calculation. You have to first set up your calculation and then say, “Well, there’s a few data points missing here.” So, you ask the interviewer, and he’s either going to give you the information, or he will tell you he wants you to estimate the numbers.

In this case, the number of the population of Mexico is missing. The interviewer would probably give it to you if you asked. But he could also say, “What do you guess? How many people does Mexico have?” You might know it, or you should be able to come up with a ballpark figure. Coming up with a ballpark figure works in a way that you always start with, “What do I know? I know the Americans are 250 million. I know the Brazilians are what, 200 million? I don’t know, 150, 200 million. Mexico is quite big, but it’s not that big.” So, you would say something like, “I would put it in the range… I actually don’t know, I put it in the range of 50 to 100 million people.” Then the interviewer would probably tell you, “Well, work on 100 million.” But have you noticed what the key element was? The key element was to start it by saying, “What do I know? How does it fit into the picture?” and then come up with a range. It’s a reasonable range.

But back to the case. The calculation they want you to do is then quite simple: multiplying, dividing, and percentages. You can relax in this, and you can set your mind to thinking, “This is an easy calculation, and I’m not supposed to do the calculation and come up with the right result. I’m supposed to show the way.” I actually screwed up my interview completely the second time. McKinsey hired me because I’m one of the few people in the world who were hired twice by McKinsey. The first time I quit to travel the world. Then I came back and said, “I’m back!” And they said, “Cool, you’re back. But you still have to do the interviews.” So, I had another round of interviews where I completely screwed up a calculation. It was wrong. But I could explain how the calculations should be done — I just didn’t have a calculator. And it was fine.

They ask you to do this calculation. “Okay, there are 100 million people and four people in each family. So that’s twenty-five million families and 20% of them are rural, which is five million families.” That wasn’t rocket science, but it’s just this type of calculation you’re supposed to be able to do in your head. “ 50% of these families are receiving benefits, that’s 2.5 million, and each family spends 600 pesos a year on transport (50 pesos a month, remember?). So, in total 2.5 million families times 600 pesos.” This is a moment where I would need to be thinking, 2.5 million times 600. The way I do it is typically I take the 600 apart a little bit. 2.5 million times 10–25 million — times 100–250 million — times six is what? It’s 1.5 billion pesos.

I’m not good at math, but I know how to take things apart in my head. So, you got 1.5 billion, and 30% of 1.5 billion is… one of the key things, please make sure, 30% is not one-third. 33% or 0.333 is one-third. It happens to me all the time that I take 30% and I think, “Oh, it’s a third.” No, it’s 30%, so please make sure you don’t make that mistake. So, it’s 450 million pesos. That’s it. That’s all that’s asked for. It’s not rocket science.

I have all these people I coach and at this point, they say, “Okay, let me take notes, please.” Then they start doing these calculations. Don’t do this in the interview. Show the way, just calculate out aloud. It’s not about the answer, it’s about your ability to pull together these numbers. By all means take notes so that along the way — if you’re wrong somewhere — you can go back and say, “Wait, at what step did I go wrong?” And always, when you come up with a number, ask yourself, “Wait — reality check — does that make sense? 2.5 million families on social benefits out of 100 million population? Oh okay, could be.” But it’s probably not twenty-five million. Just check if you’re in the right ballpark.

Now McKinsey says something interesting here. In there it says, “A very good response might note that these potential savings could be redirected to enhance the benefits system further.” There it is again: come up with something smart and intelligent. You are asked to act as if you are a senior director and visionary and smart. Too many people go into these interviews and they have the limiting belief that they shouldn’t be a smart ass. Wrong. It is smart-ass time. McKinsey sells being smart asses. You’re supposed to be a smart ass from Day One. So, don’t think that you’re going to make a good impression by not trying to impose yourself on the other one. You are supposed to be that super-smart person, so act like a super-smart person and come up with all these things even if they are a blinding flash of the obvious. The more blinding flashes of the obvious, the better.

To my mind, if I look at this case, what I would do is I would add a completely different answer. I’d say something like, “But I think it’s nonsense still dispensing that money. If they want to do something like this, they should rather promote mobile payments and investigate the route of doing this in a fully digital way — maybe look at the M-PESA network in Kenya and how they do it.” And then you have a great conversation about this. When they ask you a certain question, make sure you answer the question. But also, where you have a different opinion you can say, “Well, I think it’s nonsense in general and we should be investigating another route.” That’s great! This is what you’re supposed to do.

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Here are the simple steps:

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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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