Too Good to be Contrarian?

Self-awareness and authenticity are two key principles in my life. I strongly believe these are qualities that separate being good from being great in your chosen field. There's also a third  principle I stand by: being a little contrarian – not for the sake of being different, but willing to believe something before everyone else agrees it's true. 

I don't think that's a personal quirk so much as a requirement: making it big, not just doing well, means questioning the things everyone else has simply agreed to accept. I appreciate deviating, even slightly, from whatever the accepted answer is supposed to be. It shows you've actually thought about something instead of just accepting it. 

At my high school graduation back in 2017, when people asked what I wanted to do with my career, I told them the truth: I didn't know yet. At the time, that felt like the embodiment of all three principles at once. Self-aware, because I knew what I didn't know. Authentic, because I wasn't going to manufacture an answer just because one was expected of me. And slightly contrarian, because in the small city in Austria where I grew up there were supposed to be clear options. You go to university, and then you become a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer. Not knowing wasn't really on the list. 

Almost ten years and one HBS year later, I wonder what such a statement means nowadays. 

Being contrarian does not fit the ideal MBA profile 

"I'm still figuring it out" isn't a contrarian statement at HBS at all. It seems, rather, that everyone’s perception of an ideal path to success is a challenging act of being a seriously good generalist across multiple disciplines, without final commitment. I personally believe that is the result of being handed too many options and quietly refusing to discard a single one. 

And rationally, this makes sense: being very good at many things is how we got here. The ideal MBA applicant is not narrowly exceptional but broadly accomplished: demanding jobs, promotions, and extracurriculars show proof of excellence everywhere and commitment nowhere. Let’s call the result "superior mediocrity": becoming good enough at enough things to succeed almost anywhere, but never staying with one thing long enough to become extraordinary. The same systems (i.e., classical professional services) that rewarded our breadth also trained us to execute brilliantly inside structures somebody else built to meet a given definition of success. We may well be some of the most sophisticated conformists around, leaving contrarian thinking strangely unpracticed just when we might need it most. 

Interestingly enough, the smart move for life after HBS looks identical to the one that got us in: hedge across function, industry, geography, because who actually knows what the next five years reward? AI is moving fast enough that staying a generalist across several dimensions can genuinely look like the safer position. Maybe that's exactly the problem: the individually rational choice is not necessarily the collectively ambitious one. HBS's own mission is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world, and a thousand smart people hedging their bets fulfills that ambition. 

Is entrepreneurship still contrarian? 

Becoming a founder is supposedly the contrarian thing to do in your professional future: you do not hedge your bets, but bet on yourself and a particular idea. 

However, given that I just made the case for HBS students being rather risk-averse generalists, it seems confusing that the "founder lifestyle" is becoming mainstream. 17% of last year's graduating class started a company directly after graduation, which is 155 founders in just one graduation cycle. Entrepreneurship is no longer the road less traveled for the MBA graduate. 

I believe the statistic above doesn't tell the true story. Entrepreneurship can be looked at from two different angles, and we sometimes seem to confuse them on campus: choosing the identity of an entrepreneur is not the same as choosing to dedicate yourself to a mission you can't stop thinking about. Type 1 is a deliberate career choice with the goal of having a profitable business and ultimately a personal role description to attain post-graduation (let’s call such people identity founders). Type 2 is the consequence of a mission you already had, where founding a company is just the means to an end (let’s such people mission founders). 

Both entrepreneurial paths can be legitimate paths to (financial) success. But they're not the same kind of entrepreneurial adventure, and I think we owe ourselves the honesty of knowing which one we're actually on. Type 1 doesn't ask you to disagree with what the market currently believes is true, since it rewards good execution, not an original belief. Type 2 rarely exists without a contrarian belief: a moonshot is, almost by definition, seeing what others don’t and believing what most people currently think is wrong. The exact muscle which many of us rarely exercised before coming to HBS. 

The track to becoming an identity founder, we are taught methodically at HBS: define a niche, execute against the problem, iterate your solution, repeat. We're good enough at following frameworks and executing diligently that we rarely spend real time defining the mission or vision underneath it. And again, this path makes rational sense: it caps the downside. The danger is that a good framework answers how to build so convincingly that we stop asking why. Such incremental entrepreneurship (i.e., mostly solving problems, in a better, faster or cheaper way) leads to founders executing a playbook well rather than building something truly innovative based on a contrarian belief. As Peter Thiel put it: "The next Bill Gates won't build an operating system ... the next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network." Copying past successes was never what made any of them succeed in the first place. 

Most of the truly impressive companies we studied and admired during RC were launched by founders who ignored any playbook entirely: obsessed with an idea long before it had a name, chasing the moonshot rather than a stable, well-compensated exit. It's the version of entrepreneurship we study, admire, and say we want to become. 

Maybe what we're wanting to copy is the outcome: a successful founder with deep, contrarian views, without the input that produced it: obsession, narrowness, a willingness to be bad at everything else for a while. 

So where does a truly contrarian belief come from? 

I most certainly do not have a final answer, but here's my best attempt: it's a bit of a chicken and-egg problem, and I think the order matters. You need real conviction (a contrarian belief) to build something revolutionary. But to have that belief in the first place, you need to have dedicated yourself to something for long enough to understand it more deeply than consensus does. Learn. Then the belief. Then build. 

HBS and its associated qualities tend to favor the opposite: social, adaptable, competent in every room you're placed in. Classes and teachers show you how to read a market, raise capital, design an organization, scale it, sell it: an extraordinary toolkit. Harvard does not give you the answer to the question that makes any of that worth doing: what do you care enough about to spend a decade on? And perhaps it shouldn't. HBS can amplify conviction, but it cannot manufacture it. 

In this context, it's worth noting that the single most competitive elective for EC year is Crafting Your Life. 864 students wanted in on 80 seats. Read that again: people with objectively perfect CVs are lining up for a class whose actual subject is themselves. No framework at Harvard hands you a mission, and people here are seemingly craving one: whether that's, like me, a professional mission, or something else. 

Not Choosing Is a Choice 

Almost ten years ago, not knowing what I wanted felt contrarian because it refused someone else's script. Maybe the more honest version of that instinct now isn't staying open, but picking a belief nobody else has and building toward it anyway. 

Ultimately, not choosing a personal mission is a choice too, and it comes with a cost I truly fear:  landing on a plateau of superior mediocrity and staying there. High enough that nothing forces me to change course, but also high enough that nothing pushes me toward the one thing I'd need to get obsessively good at to become extraordinary. 

I suspect part of what makes not choosing so tempting is that the alternative requires accepting the possibility of visible failure. It’s one thing to believe in taking risks in the abstract; it’s another to imagine showing up to a five-year HBS reunion still working on the thing that hasn’t worked, while everyone else’s careers look up-and-to-the-right. Optionality protects against that possibility. It lets us keep accumulating choices that remain impressive from the outside, even when we’re not sure they’re taking us where we actually want to go.

If the founders we (or at least I) spend all year admiring are the ones who dared to hold a belief the world thought was wrong, then the safer, hedge-everything version of ourselves was never actually the one we wanted to become. We might as well choose the contrarian path, not because it's likely to work, but because it's the only one that was ever admirable in the first place: creation for the sake of creation.

Nora Panholzer (MBA ‘27) is from Vienna, Austria. She studied Law (LLM) and Business (BSc) at Vienna University of Economics and Business. Prior to HBS, Nora worked as Consultant at McKinsey and Company.