Last weekend I played in the Tuck MBA World Cup Soccer Tournament along with 13 teams from around the world. It was a weekend-long tournament and I played in five games. I took a hit in the quarter-final that landed me in ER on Monday night.

The doctor was direct and stern: “You have a concussion. Until the headache goes, you can’t push it. No homework. No thinking if it hurts your head.” There is still a kid in me wanting that permission slip from the doctor saying that I can’t do any homework, and that kid was momentarily overjoyed. Then I realised that what she was saying was that I had to put my life on hold and recover. I hadn’t been able to do any real work since I got hit; reading left me drained and I retained little of what I read. But stop thinking, that was, well, unthinkable.

It made me appreciate how much thinking I was doing and how many opportunities there are at school to do work that I want to do. The very next day I had a full schedule:
1) Finalise my class schedule for next fall
2) Conduct interviews for a consulting project
3) Read a case for my technology strategy class
4) Attend panel discussion over lunch about summer consulting internships
5) Two-hour brainstorming meeting for my Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector class where we are thinking through how to build collaborate technology sharing for nonprofits in New Hampshire and Vermont
6) Meeting for my first year project about the details of a distribution and marketing plan for my board game
7) Net Impact meeting: I’m on the leadership team for next year, and will continue to develop the career portion of an organisation for socially responsible business people
8) Host a focus group for my board-game startup
9) Do research for a local nonprofit organisation with a team of Tuckies to devise a social marketing campaign using new social networking tools to reach teens
10) Dinner at a friend’s house.

A typical day is not an example of “no thinking”: I read, research, interview people and synthesise information all day long.

A second-year student recently told me that his years at Tuck had changed the way that he thought. I feel the same; I have more skills to approach and tackle problems. I’ve spent a year doing a lot of thinking. When the doctor said that I wasn’t allowed to think for a while, the irony of ending my school year this way seemed laughable.

I decided on an MBA because I wanted to step back from work and learn. I knew that with two years of studying I’d be better equipped for when I return to the business world. But this week of lying on the couch, trying not to think, has made me appreciate how much of my time I spend thinking. I actually can’t wait to get back to it.

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