It has become traditional, for better or worse, for Daily columnists to offer incoming freshmen a small piece of advice in each year’s Orientation Issue. Here’s mine, for what it’s worth: the second-biggest mistake you could make during NSO would be to believe too much of what they’re going to tell you about yourself. And the biggest would be to believe too little of it.

A generally very wise former columnist for this paper once wrote that if NSO is about one thing, it’s about hearing speeches, most of them self-congratulatory. He was wrong. It is about very much more than that. Years from now, you’ll remember your first week on the Farm in bits and pieces, fragmented flashes of memory that come and go in no particular order: the hesitant look breaking into a quick grin on your roommate’s face as she sees you for the first time; your dorm flag fluttering, etched against the dark sky above the main quad; strolling under golden sandstone arches with soon-to-be-lifelong friends. It is about these things, and as you’ll soon find out, a good deal more.

But NSO is also about hearing speeches. And you will hear a lot of them — mostly from a bewildering array of Very Important People you may never see again, and mostly about how special, talented and different you all are.

The soaring oratory will be laced with numbers, and the numbers, like you, get better every year. You’ll hear about a new all-time-lowest acceptance rate, a new all-time highest SAT average and maybe even an all-time-most-impressive Number-of-Orphans-Saved-Per-Incoming-Freshman Quotient. You might hear about this year’s number of Stanford Olympians, or research articles published in major scientific journals, or something off-the-wall but still pretty intimidating, like the person who placed in the top 10 at the Dance Dance Revolution World Championships my freshman year. And bound up with this litany of achievements and triumphs will be an overarching message of superiority, victory and success: you’re the best of the best, and this is your reward.

Imbibe this encomium of yourselves too deeply, and you begin to become the people who are probably part of the reason you eschewed New Haven, Princeton and Cambridge in favor of Palo Alto.

At Stanford, arrogance flows from constantly thinking about who we used to be and trying not to forget it. You’re here, and that probably means you used to be the best at something, or many things, or even everything, depending on where you came from. You’ll hear a lot about that this week. Leave that achievement-defined sense of self behind, if you can, without forgetting it; say goodbye but not forever; let it go but always remember — like an old friend from home that you still call on the phone when the going gets tough.

Only one person can be top of the class at Stanford, and the odds are a thousand to one it won’t be you. Deny that reality, and you lose the chance to learn a humility you never used to need; fear it, and you lose the opportunity to sharpen your mind against some of the world’s finest; embrace it, and thrive like you can nowhere else on Earth.

One of the brightest people at this school once told me that sometime during his or her four years here, every single Stanford student will experience something they choose to define as failure. The columnist I quoted earlier put it more bluntly: “Failure is not just an option; it’s inevitable.” My first failure of many came early, spectacularly and quite literally, in my first Econ 1A midterm fall quarter of freshman year. Some people meet failure in IHUM; for others, it pops up uninvited in Chem 33; for some, the angel of failure visits outside the classroom, in a relationship, a sport or a hobby.

So when failure arrives — and it will — use the words you’ll hear this week to ease the sting of defeat. Remember that anywhere else, you’d stand out; that anywhere else, you’d have the top score or the fastest time, the most eloquent speech or the keenest wit. Remember how you felt this week, with the world open before your feet and words of encouragement and praise ringing in your ears. Remember that the speech-givers were right.

And when victory comes — and it will — temper your triumph by forgetting all of that.

Miles will be writing primarily about ethics, politics, economics and international affairs this volume, and he’d love to hear from you. Feel free to shoot him an email anytime at milesu1 at stanford.edu.