30-year-old Harvard MBA says ‘I’m genuinely dumb’, reflects on her failures
Grace Lee, a 30-year-old Harvard Business School graduate from the Class of 2025, has struck a chord online after sharing a deeply personal Instagram post detailing what she calls her “museum of failures”.Grace Lee reflects upon her ‘museum of failures’ as a Harvard MBA. (Instagram/@bigsis.grace)In a candid Instagram post that quickly resonated with professionals and students alike, Lee reflected on feeling inadequate despite elite credentials, living with undiagnosed ADHD, shutting down a startup after years of effort, and struggling with health and perfectionism. The post’s on-screen caption read: “My museum of failures as a 30-year-old Harvard MBA.”Rather than framing her experiences as regrets, Lee said they shaped who she is — and helped her understand why many high-achieving people feel stuck even when their lives look successful on paper.‘I am genuinely dumb’Lee began recalling her time at JP Morgan, where she said she constantly felt behind her peers despite working harder than everyone else. According to her LinkedIn profile, she spent two years working as an analyst at JP Morgan in New York City. This was a position she held between 2017 and 2019 — a couple of years before she began her MBA at Harvard.“I am genuinely dumb,” Lee wrote in her Instagram post, adding that it took her “3x longer than everyone else to understand basic concepts”.In one presentation, she said she told her team she would “just say our names” because she did not trust herself to handle the actual content. While she compensated putting in extra hours, the feeling of barely keeping up never left.Discovering ADHD at 30A major turning point, Lee said, came when she was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 30 — something she believes went unnoticed for decades because of overcompensation.“Took me 30 years to realise I have ADHD,” she wrote. “Spent decades thinking I was just lazy and undisciplined.”(Also read:
