The Price of Choosing the “Right” Life

Michelle Yu (MBA ‘26) on why success can still feel like failure

When I was admitted to HBS through the 2+2 program, my parents were thrilled, but not for the reasons people might assume.

It wasn’t because Harvard is an Ivy League, as I had just completed my undergraduate studies at Columbia. Nor was it because of the Harvard name specifically, given that members of my extended family had attended the university before. What excited them most was something far more utilitarian: the fact that the degree was an MBA. To my parents, who both hold MBAs themselves, those three letters signified one thing above all else: that my future earning potential had changed dramatically.

At the time, I had just begun a career in the film and television industry—a path that, to many, prioritized passion over practicality. Entertainment as a field is unpredictable in nature and rarely offers the kind of financial security my parents had built for our family and hoped I would one day achieve for my own. An MBA, in contrast, represented an entirely different trajectory—one defined by structured recruiting pipelines, predictable salaries, and the prospect of steady upward mobility. In their eyes, the degree fundamentally reconfigured the scale of my future possibilities. My “potential,” as they understood it, had suddenly expanded.

The idea of potential has been on my mind recently. Over the past few months, I’ve heard the word surface repeatedly in conversations with classmates—an unusual preoccupation to encounter so frequently at a place where, on paper, students have already cleared some of the most competitive filters in the world. And yet, the anxiety around unfulfilled potential persists, if anything more acutely than before. Why?

What Does It Mean to Fulfill One’s Potential?

For some, the answer is financial. An MBA significantly alters one’s expected earnings trajectory, with certain career paths—investment banking, private equity, asset management—offering particularly high ceilings. Within this framework, fulfilling one’s potential is synonymous with maximizing compensation by choosing the role that pays the most, offers the fastest promotions, or unlocks the most lucrative opportunities down the road.

But even this seemingly straightforward definition fractures under scrutiny. If potential is measured by earnings, expectations inevitably diverge depending on one’s starting point. Someone raised in a modest household may view economic security or the surpassing of his or her parents’ income as the realization of earnings potential. For someone from a wealthy family, the benchmark may be considerably higher, with founding companies, occupying positions of power, or reaching levels of financial success associated with the economic elite regarded as baseline expectations. The same phrase, in other words, can encode radically different aspirations.

For others, potential is defined in terms of impact. At HBS, conversations often revolve around launching startups that transform industries, leading organizations that tackle global challenges, or enacting policies that affect millions of lives—ambitions united by a desire to change the world. Framed this way, however, the threshold becomes nearly unattainable, as very few individuals markedly alter the course of history. Most people build careers that are meaningful within their spheres of influence without becoming household names, but in environments where such rhetoric is pervasive, those contributions can begin to feel insufficient.

A third way to think about potential turns inward. From this perspective, fulfilling one’s potential means engaging in work that genuinely reflects one’s interests and temperament—pursuits that feel intellectually absorbing and that organize one’s life around the kinds of questions one feels compelled to explore. Under this interpretation, potential is realized not through prestige or compensation but through coherence among one’s talents, curiosities, and occupation.

For much of my life, this was the definition I assumed would guide me. In high school, I was known as a “creative” who spent most of her time entering competitions; attending programs; and assembling a portfolio in film, music, and writing. This distinguished me from many of my friends, who were oriented toward careers in medicine, law, or finance. It was perhaps unsurprising, then, that my decision to go to business school years later was met largely with confusion. In one instance, a former teacher asked whether my “filmmaking and artistic days [were] in the past now,” adding that I would “always be an artist.” It was a remark that left me with the impression that I was renouncing something I was meant to become in favor of a path that was more pragmatic but less honest. 

There was, of course, a sound rationale to such a reversal. Careers in creative fields are notoriously difficult to establish and maintain, with outcomes shaped as much by timing and chance as by ability. A more structured career offered, at least in theory, a degree of stability in place of uncertainty. Still, in its wake lingered a subtle sense of self-betrayal—one I suspect may deepen over time.

Why Does HBS Care So Much About Potential?

The prevalence of these concerns, first and foremost, reflects the structure of the environments through which students move as they advance into increasingly selective institutions and industries. As such environments grow more concentrated with high performers, perceptions of success recalibrate against ever more exacting reference points. A job offer that would be considered exceptional in most contexts can feel merely average when several classmates are pursuing similar opportunities. Compensation that places someone comfortably within the top percentile of national income can appear modest within certain professional circles.

This dynamic is reinforced by the organizational design of the careers themselves, where the number of available positions contracts at each successive level. There are far fewer managing directors than analysts, fewer partners than associates, fewer CEOs than vice presidents—every rung of the professional ladder accommodating a smaller group of people. At the same time, both internal and external expectations continue to escalate, making individuals increasingly reluctant to accept roles that fall below desired levels of compensation, prestige, or influence.

The result is a persistent and often irreconcilable tension. The higher one ascends, the more constrained the range of seemingly acceptable outcomes becomes. When such outcomes become conflated with fulfilling one’s potential, satisfaction grows correspondingly elusive.

It is not coincidental, then, that questions of potential arise most frequently in environments rich with opportunity. Many people spend their lives focused on more immediate concerns—earning enough to support a family, maintaining stable employment, navigating circumstances that leave little room for abstract reflection. For those surrounded by a wide array of options, the challenge is of a different kind: choosing among alternatives that each promise some form of success. While such abundance can be liberating, it can also foster the notion that every decision carries outsized significance and that venturing down anything other than the most impressive path risks forfeiting something of value. At a place like HBS, this pressure is amplified by the assumption that admission to such a prestigious university imposes an obligation to achieve at the highest possible level.

Underlying this tension is the absence of any neutral definition of potential. Every answer has its trade-offs. A career that maximizes income may limit time available for family or creative pursuits. A path oriented toward impact may demand sacrifices that few are willing to make indefinitely. Even work that feels personally meaningful can carry opportunity costs that only become visible in retrospect. The language of “fulfilling one’s potential” suggests a singular trajectory—one that can either be attained or missed. In practice, however, each decision necessarily forecloses other versions of the life one might have lived. What appears as a failure to realize potential may simply be the unavoidable consequence of having chosen at all.

If the very act of choosing inevitably excludes other possibilities, then the idea that there is a single “right” life to be optimized reveals itself as an illusion. The idea of potential suggests that, with enough foresight and discipline, one might arrive at the best possible combination of choices. But life does not present itself as a problem to be solved. It unfolds through decisions made with incomplete information, under shifting conditions, and in alignment with values that evolve over time. To optimize for a life is to misread what a life is in the first place—and to mistake a prevailing narrative for a universal truth.

Michelle Yu (MBA '26) is originally from Cresskill, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum. Outside of work, she is a 2x marathon runner, American Songwriting Awards winner, and filmmaker whose work has screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and AMC's Empire Theaters in Times Square.