Month: August 2008

If I ever have to hire someone again I want to ask this question: “What have you failed at?”  I think their response and how their resume shows they rebounded would give a good indication of their healthy attitude.  Relates a lot to Marc Andreessen’s post about getting out into the real world and failing so that it no longer fazes you.  Two small ventures have failed for me so far, but I am all the more ready for the next.

“In my opinion, it’s now critically important to get into the real world and really challenge yourself — expose yourself to risk — put yourself in situations where you will succeed or fail by your own decisions and actions, and where that success or failure will be highly visible.

By failure I don’t mean getting a B or even a C, but rather: having your boss yell at you in front of your peers for screwing up a project, launching a product and seeing it tank, being unable to meet a ship date, missing a critical piece of information in a financial report, or getting fired.

Why? If you’re going to be a high achiever, you’re going to be in lots of situations where you’re going to be quickly making decisions in the presence of incomplete or incorrect information, under intense time pressure, and often under intense political pressure. You’re going to screw up — frequently — and the screwups will have serious consequences, and you’ll feel incredibly stupid every time. It can’t faze you — you have to be able to just get right back up and keep on going.

That may be the most valuable skill you can ever learn. Make sure you start learning it early.”

I did not really go anywhere with my last post.  I just threw it up on here because I thought it was an interesting insight, but I didn’t go anywhere new with it.

After looking at it again though I see how I am stuck thinking that UT is structured much as the organization on the right of the diagram.  Especially in the business school: inflexible pressure to conform, leading me to anger and frustration, to very critical judgment of the students and faculty, to almost zero creativity at the end of a semester, and a terrible if even an existant network.  Granted, any institution that tells me I need to take my time on the sailboat off my resume can go to hell, I think I might need to exercise a better attitude and reframe how I picture the college.  There is not much I can do about how the organization is structured, but I can change how I feel about it and how I picture the bullshit.

A big part of the problem is arrogance.  I let people feed it by telling me my case is different but it should still be kept in check.  Bringing a few years of real world experience with me before starting in undergraduate makes me look at everybody like children.  I have to really stretch my imagination and look at somebody like Ben Casnocha as having huge powers of self-control to keep any arrogance and condescention at bay.  I would be interested to hear whether or not he looked down on a lot of the freshmen around him when he started out at college, or whether he was able to relate to them after his accomplishments before arriving on campus.  I know I will have to practice the latter and stray from the former in order to grow much there.  Arrogance is not what lets you get around in a foreign country and I would never dare bring it with me on a trip abroad.