Anne M. Bremner, ’80, is a Seattle trial attorney with Stafford Frey Cooper and a frequent legal analyst on television. At the risk of sounding clichéd, the most educational mistake I’ve made was getting married and then unmarried in what seemed like an anomalous flicker of madcap impulsiveness. I’d crafted a career and reputation based on intelligent and judicious choices. Plunked into the middle of that was an inexorably impetuous decision which caused me to veer off of the carefully laid tracks I’d been following. What I learned: that a situation can be “hopeless but not serious.” That flawed choices aren’t indelibly etched on the landscape of our lives, that life still marches onward even if not in lockstep with our perfectly laid plans. Having survived that mistake, actually having recovered quite nicely, I’m less worried about future mistakes, less set on the rigid set of tracks I’d been following, less judgmental towards myself and others.
I hope the mistake I’ll learn most from hasn’t been made yet. I’m looking forward to making it.
Alan Ames, ’56, is a cardiologist in Portland, Ore. Asking, “When is your baby due?”
Guy Kawasaki, ’76, a former Apple Computer executive who helped create the Macintosh computer, is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. I turned down the opportunity to interview for the CEO position at Yahoo! It’s not clear that I would have gotten the job or done a good job, but by my calculation, this decision cost me $2 billion. Two billion dollars here, $2 billion there . . . pretty soon you don’t have to work. Years later, I’ve come to grips with what this decision taught me. First, I’m a happy Guy; I don’t think $2 billion would make me much happier. Second, I spent a lot of time with my kids as they were growing up. I would not have been able to do this as the CEO of Yahoo! Third, I learned that the common wisdom of investing in proven teams with proven technology in proven markets is bull shiitake. As a bonus, I get to tell this very funny story—it’s great speech material.
Joel Stein, ’93, is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and
a contributor to Time magazine. My mullet. I held on to it until my junior year, 1991, and I think it’s safe to assume it cost me with the ladies. Holding on to your past self-definition limits your world. Identity is overrated. I bet Tom Wolfe would do anything to get the hell out of that white suit.
Nancy Palmer Jones, ’74, formerly a book editor and an actor, is senior minister of the First Unitarian Church of San José. The question implies a happy ending, but I’m still wrestling with this long-ago event: There is my mother, handing the phone to me and mouthing “it’s a boy." There am I, 8 years old, hearing the voice of my new and longed-for friend, miraculously asking me to go roller-skating; there is, already, the sense of dread as I turn to ask my mom and then the horrible walk back to the phone after her pained “no”; and from then till now, the loss and the wrongness of it.
I am white; my friend was the only African-American student not just in my class or my elementary school but in our entire school district in that San Antonio suburb in 1960.
Is “mistake” even the right word? And whose mistake was it? Was it mine for not summoning up the certainty of my 8-year-old soul to convince my mother, a good-hearted person, of the right choice? Was it my mother’s for remaining trapped in the racism of her time and place? Was it our culture’s—mistake upon mistake now tearing apart the three people in this exchange? And how do I reinscribe the mistake, even in the telling of the story?
That phone call was the beginning of my awakening to the world and of my wrestling with it, usually with gestures as clumsy as those of a slumberer just aroused. More than 40 years later, that mistake led me to a group of folks (these Unitarian Universalists) who welcome wrestlers, and together we are striving still—to wake up and, in bold and loving ways, to embody and create change.
Roger V. von Oech, PhD ’75, is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head. An abridged version of his answer appeared in the print magazine. 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.
I have found this to be especially true in my writing. Whenever I’ve been “locked,” it’s usually been the result of my being in love with a particular idea (a quote, a format, a metaphor or an example). Only when I allow myself to get rid of that idea do things begin to flow. Thus, one of my favorite creative-thinking techniques is asking: “What idea am I in love with in this situation? What positive things happen when I kiss it good-bye?”
The following is supplemental material that did not appear in the print edition of Stanford.
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.”
I am much happier and at peace from the inside out by living this every day and no longer waste any time or energy on things that I cannot make a positive impact on in my life.
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.
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.
