With graduation season in full swing, I find myself remembering my time as a student. Lively classroom debates. Late-night study sessions. And a buzzer beater that made me lose my voice.

Beyond these moments of nostalgia, reflecting on this foundational time could teach us a thing or two about professional growth and leadership, according to Kellogg’s Brett Gordon.

In a recent commencement speech, Gordon pondered the most valuable skills he learned during his time as a graduate student. This week, we’ll look at three of those lessons that he realized have been crucial in advancing his career.

3 lessons

First, as students, we develop many tools that can help us solve the kind of complex, ill-defined problems that we face throughout our careers. But Gordon, a professor of marketing, believes that it’s even more valuable to learn how to ask the right questions.

When he first started working at Amazon as an academic scholar, Gordon noticed that many of the senior business roles leading large organizations were filled by PhDs. This surprised him, as he did not typically associate people with PhDs with those kinds of roles. So he asked a senior economist why this was the case. The economist’s response? PhDs, like many students, excel at defining problems by asking the right questions.

“It’s important everywhere—in academics, in industry, and otherwise—to ask the right questions and choose what to work on, more so than actually knowing how to figure it out,” Gordon says in his keynote address for the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. “The skill is really crucial, and it will take you everywhere.”

Second, a common misconception is that the accumulation of technical skills is what drives career success. In reality, Gordon believes that what helps us succeed are the often-intangible skills that we aren’t necessarily taught in class, like being creative, demonstrating humility, or communicating our ideas. Among these, he says, “maybe the most important skill is resilience, because inevitably, you will have setbacks.”

Gordon experienced this firsthand early on in his career in academia. He was finalizing a model for his marketing research paper when he noticed that it kept producing nonsensical output. He spent days trying to figure it out. But nothing worked, crushing his hopes for publication. Finally, after spending a full week on the issue, he realized he had typed a “1” somewhere in the code when he had meant to type a lowercase “l.”

“Once I fixed it, everything worked,” he says. “But that was a complete week of my life on that problem. So what can you do? You laugh it off and you keep on going. Persisting and moving forward is very important.”

Third, Gordon finds that growth often follows discomfort. He recalls his first experience moderating a panel about branding. It featured VPs, senior directors, and other high-level executives, which intimidated him since he did not know much about branding at the time, or how to moderate.

“It was very intimidating, and I didn’t know what to do,” Gordon says.

But he bore down, consulted with a colleague, and took on the task before him. He figured it out. As a result, he learned that he could indeed moderate a panel, and he grew from the experience.

“You don’t grow by making it easy for yourself,” Gordon says. “You need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations to help you move forward. It’s only when you’re uncomfortable that you experience that growth.”

Hear more from Gordon in his keynote address.

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor
Kellogg Insight