After encouraging graduates to embrace failure — sharing how he and Ben Affleck used to call failed auditions 'being okay thanks'd' — Damon flipped the script. He told the MIT graduates that the real danger for them wasn't rejection; it was the opposite. The real threat was believing all the praise about how brilliant they are. He then quoted 'the great philosopher Benjamin Affleck': 'Judge me by how good my good ideas are, not how bad my bad ideas are.' Damon urged the graduates to suit up in their armor and get ready to sound like total fools, because not having an answer isn't embarrassing — it's opportunity. Coming from a Harvard dropout 'fake graduating' for the second time, the advice carried a disarming honesty.