Expect to be wrong, and learn to recognize when someone is talking rot.
Those are two pieces of advice that 1702 first-year students heard this week as they started their Harvard careers in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
They aren’t exactly the most cerebral of takeaways, but they are two of the most memorable excerpts from this season’s Convocation addresses that have started rippling across the country this week.
Normally it’s the end-of-year Commencement addresses that get all the attention, with business and government leaders heralding advice every spring for new graduates’ professional success in the years to come. Personally I’m more interested in what new college students, the young first-years, are told upon their arrival on campus in the fall, and how they’re advised to handle the nitty-gritty of adult academic life.
I’m interested in particular in how advice to new students can transfer to advice to new business owners. Here are four takeaways, including those two that new Harvard students just heard, that cross over.
1. Expect to Be Wrong
Harvard President Drew Faust, in what will likely be her last Convocation address before retiring next spring, said it in a nicer way than that. “We recognize there is always more to know,” she said, “so we must be open to new ideas and new perspectives, to the possibility — even the probability — of being wrong.”
This goes beyond “Fail fast.” It’s more of an ongoing (endless, actually) process of testing, reassessment, argument, challenge and debate. When a product or service can always be better, and when it undergoes iterations of improvement, initial beliefs must always be adjusted.
2. Recognize When Someone is Talking Rot
That’s a direct quote from the late Jeremy Knowles, former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who believed the most important goal of higher education is to ensure that graduates can recognize when someone is talking rot. “You learn this through challenging and being challenged,” Faust said, “through being confronted by disagreement and difference and amidst it all finding your way.”
3. The Person Sitting Next to You Has the Best Idea
Professors, labs, books and online assignments are essential to learn from but, Faust underscored, it is the diversity and unfamiliarity of a new community that is the greatest opportunity.
Recent findings on gender and diversity in the tech industry bear this out. “Too many people thinking, in the same way, leads to blind spots,” said Alicia Navarro, CEO of Skimlinks. “By having different types of people working together on a problem, you are more likely to identify innovative approaches.”
4. Engage in Debate
Be willing to engage in the debate of an intellectual community, and be willing to change our views based on reason and evidence. These are important intellectual skills, Faust said, and critical human capacities as well.
How to be wrong, as Jay Winder advises first-time startup CEOs, is about dropping your ego. “At any time, you likely have fundamental misunderstandings about many aspects of your startup,” Winder said.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.