Stanford Magazine recently published a one page snippet of collected thoughts asking (Stanford alumns and faculty).
What mistake taught you the most?
There are some really great gems in here that didn’t make the print addition and can only be found here. I pulled out the few that I thought were most relevant to the innovator’s struggles (at least they resonated with me).
Side note: there was even an answer from Guy Kawasaki, who has a lot of great things to say for startups and runs a great blog. Unfortunately, Guy’s answer was not up to his usual mojo and was pretty disappointed to see that his biggest mistake was NOT interviewing for the CEO job of Yahoo! In my book, you can’t learn lessons from not doing something and Guy’s mistakes sounded a whole lot like a bunch of justifications for not even trying.
Enough on that… Below are some excerpts. I saved the best for last!
Donn A. Dimichele, ?74, is a senior attorney with the California Court of Appeal in Riverside. Not realizing that everyone you meet in life knows more than you do about at least one subject.
Roger V. von Oech, PhD ?75, is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head. I made the mistake of falling in love with Palatino Semibold. Let me explain. When I started my company Creative Think in the late ?70s, I asked a lot of different people what special ?business success? tips they could pass along to me. The best advice came from my printer, who said, ?Don?t fall in love with typefaces.? He reasoned that if you fall in love with a particular font, you?ll want to use it everywhere even in places where it?s inappropriate. I made the mistake of not listening to him. After awhile I fell in love with Palatino Semibold and used this typeface whenever I could?even in places where it clearly didn?t belong. Soon my design lost its freshness and looked hackneyed.
I think you can generalize this advice to: ?Don’t fall in love with ideas.? Because once you fall in love with a particular idea, your thinking gets locked in on that one approach and you fail to see the merits of alternatives. This is true whether the idea is a marketing strategy, a method for running focus groups, or a programming language. Indeed, every ?right? idea eventually becomes the ?wrong? idea.
more after the jumpity jump…
Paige Arnof-Fenn, ?87, is founder and CEO of the marketing firm Mavens & Moguls. I used to let difficult people and situations really get to me until I learned that stress is really bad for you and your health. Just like Mickey Rivers from the Yankees said: ?I don?t get upset over things I can?t control, because if I can?t control them there?s no use getting upset. And I don?t get upset over the things I can control, because if I can control them there?s no use in getting upset.?
Patricia Ryan Madson, is a senior lecturer in drama, emerita. When I was a young faculty member at Denison University in Ohio during the 1960s, I made the mistake of trying to please the academic elite. My dream was to get tenure, and I calculated that the road to achieving this was paved with offers to ?do things that would look good on my résumé.? So, whenever a university committee needed a volunteer I said yes; I sat on a dozen committees, panels and task forces. I spent inordinate amounts of time gossiping school politics and allying myself with the influential faculty. I made choices about how to spend my precious summer vacation based entirely on how it would appear to the tenure committee. When the sixth-year review rolled around, I was certain I had done all the right things to earn my place. Confident that I had aced my interview with the faculty peer group who asked me probing questions, I waited for the good news.
?Sorry. Your teaching lacks sufficient intellectual depth,? the carefully worded letter from the president of the university stated. Tenure denied.
I reflected on what seemed a very unhappy outcome. After I sat with the shock of the rejection, I recognized that they were right. In my effort to ?impress the man,? I had failed to listen to my own voice, to the values and impulses that were uniquely mine. I had focused on being a university politician rather than on being a valued professor. I had failed to cultivate my wonder, curiosity and values that had attracted me to teaching in the first place.
This was a great lesson, and as I left Denison I vowed not to make that mistake again. To my delight, I discovered that the more I tuned into my own voice as the moral arbiter, the more I was respected and valued in the academy. A three-decade career teaching at Stanford has been one gratifying result from this turnaround.
I?m a great believer in making mistakes (or rather, allowing mistakes). My book, Improv Wisdom: Don?t Prepare, Just Show Up (Random House, 2005), contains life maxims drawn from the improv classroom. Maxim No. 10 is ?Make Mistakes, Please.? I want my cautious, result-oriented students to quit worrying about the right answer in favor of finding out what bubbles to the surface of their heart/mind when they aren?t trying to please the professor.
