This week, I got to participate in a back to school activity that I haven’t done in 28 years: university orientation week. I was asked to speak to the 1,110 first year arts students at my alma mater. I thought a lot about what I wanted to tell them. [I’d love for you to share the advice you would give to a first year student in the comments below!]

Did I want to reassure them that they are employable with an arts degree? Should I share study tips and how to get good grades? Could I give them the secrets of finding a job and what I, as a hiring manager, would look for in a candidate? Although each of those topics is important and valuable, it wasn’t what I really thought they needed to hear.

Instead, I decided to ignore the curriculum, ignore resumes, ignore jobs and instead talk about what they really need to learn at university to have a successful career and a happy life. To this point in their lives, these students have had most of the attention on the so-called “3 R’s;” reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic. (Clearly spelling is not a priority if we teach kids that these are the 3 R’s!?!) Anyhoo, what they haven’t learned nearly enough about are the 3 F’s. What I want these students to learn before they get thrown to the wolves in the world work is how to figure it out, how to fight, and how to fail.

Before you dismiss these as things you learned in college, give yourself a grade on each of these critical skills.

Figure it Out

When I watch my teenage daughter and her friends, I’m amazed (shocked, horrified) at just how much we, as parents, do for them. Parents who still pack school lunches while the kids are in high school, parents who make all calls and appointments for their kid because junior is intimidated by the phone; parents who intervene with teachers when grades aren’t what they think they should be. Thanks to helicopter parents, kids are getting to college with no experience in figuring things out for themselves.

What’s worse is that we reward the kids who follow instructions well. The ones who follow the rubric and color inside the lines are the ones who succeed. Four short years later, we’re sending those young adults into a world where instruction-followers have a flat trajectory whereas those who find new answers (and even more importantly new questions) are the ones who will excel.

The first thing I encouraged the students to do is to practice figuring it out. I want them to struggle with things. They need to wrestle with ambiguity and learn to use their instincts. It’s time to get curious about how things really work and to tap into what they’re passionate about. They’re going to learn (sometimes the hard way) that self-reliance is super important.

Fight

If we are practically still cutting kids’ meat for them when they go off to college, it’s not much of a surprise that we haven’t taught them how to engage productively in conflict. The vast majority of parents I run into are desperately trying to protect their kids from conflict and discomfort. Frightened by the few but terrifying cases of real bullying, we intervene the moment there is friction. Having a distaste for the use of power, we deflect the bullets and ask for leniency when our kids don’t keep up with their responsibilities. Some parents even stand in for their kids when conflict is unavoidable.

I know the students were surprised when I told them they needed to learn how to fight. Most adults are the same. We could all get better at self-advocacy. We need to stand up for ourselves and fight for what we deserve, whether that be credit for our work, new opportunities, or just a fair shake. We also need to fight for our diverse ideas. The problems the world faces aren’t going to be solved with yesterday’s answers, but the people with yesterday’s answers are the ones with the power. That means learning to fight (constructively and positively) is one of the most important things anyone needs to learn.

Fail

As you can see, I was upping the ante with each of my three F’s. Figure it out seems reasonable; fighting is a little less obvious, but fail…WHAT!?! If there’s one thing that these students’ parents have been maniacally protecting them from, it’s failure. And not just failure, they have been protected from being held back, protected from getting C’s, and in some cases, protected from even having a score in their soccer games lest someone feel less successful than someone else. Yikes.

I can tell you that failure is an integral part of life. Kids who haven’t learned how to fall, get back up, and get going again, have been denied not only an essential life skill, but robbed of a true form of self-esteem. Confidence comes from knowing that you’re resilient, knowing you can fall down and get back up. If you fail for the first time at 30, you fall from a greater and more perilous height.

I don’t want the students to fail in ways that threaten their safety, but I do want them to fail. I want them to flunk a mid-term, experience heartbreak, not get into a course they really wanted. I want them to stretch and try things that scare them; both for the opportunity to surprise themselves with success and the experience of being disappointed by failure. The ones who learn that failure isn’t fatal will have a much easier go of it in the real world.

What Would You Say?

I have to admit that standing in front of hundreds of 17 and 18 year-old students made me feel old. But I’m glad to say that I didn’t feel irrelevant. They were extremely receptive and willing to hear me out when I told them that their parents might not have prepared them for the ride they just got on. After all, many of us grown ups are still learning these lessons. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. What did I miss? What would you tell a group of first year students?