Reading Journal: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 - Tina Seelig

Dr. Tina Seelig is the faculty director at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and a faculty member of the famous Stanford d.school. She received her PhD in neuroscience at Stanford and has been nationally recognized for her contribution to engineering education. At Stanford, She teaches courses on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. I’ve attended many of the seminars and month-long courses hosted by STVP and d.school. This was a insightful and engaging read that encapsulates many of the insights from those courses, plus much more.

The title of the book is: “What I wish I knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course On Making Your Place In The World”. I am turning 27 this year, more than half way through my twenties (writing that hurt a lot more than I expected…). Nevertheless, I found it delightful and nostalgic to revisit the some of the wisdoms imparted to me during during grad school, most of which I’ve long since forgotten much to my dismay. I am two and a half years into my professional career, and reading this book was a productive re-evaluation of my goals, values, and life in general.

This was an excellent edition to my ever-growing bookshelf. Better yet, it was a signed copy that my friend so graciously gifted to me a couple of years ago!

Figure: Signed Copy From Tina Seelig

My Favorite Insights From The Book

Embrace Uncertainty/Serendipity

“You are always one decision away from a completely different life”

“All the cool stuff happens when you do things that are not the automatic next step”

• The uncertainty we face when we leave school never evaporates. There are uncertainty at each turn in our lives - when we start a new job, begin a new relationship, have a child, and etc. Learn to embrace the uncertainty!

• After all, the opposite of uncertainty is certainty. Do you really want a detailed script of your entire life? Uncertainty leads to choices, opportunities, and surprises.

Strive To Do The Best Work

• In school, we are encouraged to jump through hurdles and “satisfice”. This is perfectly embodied in the question “Will this be on the exam?”. To put it another way, “what is the least amount of work I can get away with and still satisfy all the course requirements.”

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well

• It is easy to meet expectations, but amazing things happen when you exceed them

• It is not just about the current assignment. If you do less than expected, the collection of missed opportunities adds up. On the other hand, putting in more than expected often opens door to unexpected possibilities. The power of compounding doesn’t just apply to money.

You get out of life what you put in, and the results are compounded daily

• When you start your first job and are assigned different tasks, you have two options:

  • just doing the job as assigned to you - you are telling your colleagues that you have reached the peak of your ability, or that you don’t care or have enough drive
  • make an effort to go above and beyond - you demonstrate that you are ready for bigger challenges

Finding The Right Career Is Not a "Fire-and-forget" Missile

• Most people in the world have a job that uses their skills, but it’s just a job. They cannot wait to get home and focus on things they actually love or care about - their hobbies. They count the days until the weekend, the holidays, or retirement. Their job is just a means to financial security; so that they can enjoy life after the workday is over.

• Find a career in which you can’t believe people actually pay you to do your job. Strive to have your passion overlap with your skills and the market. In this way, your job enriches your life, rather than take time away from it. Find a job where your contribution, be it a service or product, is something you can be proud of at the end of the day

“The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play […] He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both”

• People are often pressured to pick a career path and have it be a fire and forget missile that zeros in on exactly what you want to do, and then pursue it relentlessly

  • Unfortunately, that’s not how things usually turn out. Most people change course many times. It is important to keep experimenting. Being too set on a prescribed path too early may lead you down the wrong direction.
  • Keep your eyes open. Planning a career is kind of like planning a trip to a foreign country. The most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.

Don't Limit Yourself and Don't Let Others Limit You

“Don’t ask for permission, but beg for forgiveness”

• There are many rules (laws, common courtesy, social faux-pas) created by large institutions like the government, schools, religious groups, and etc. These rules are designed to make the world around us more organized and predictable.
  • However, don’t blindly follow rules for the sake of following rules. Sometimes you should make your own moral and ethical decisions. Sometimes rules are merely recommendations, or are outdated, bureaucratic, or serve very little purpose, or is only there as a lowest common denominator for those who don’t have a clue
  • Creating a new product or company is unfathomably difficult and often require out-of-the-box thinking. Entrepreneurs are often seen as “rule-breakers” because they are in the business of challenging the status quo. It’s hard enough already without imposing added constraints on yourself that may or may not be necessary

• We also make lots of rules for ourselves. While some are sensible, others prematurely lock us into specific roles and lock us out of an array of infinite possibilities.

• In some cultures, the downside of failure is so high that people become allergic to any type of innovation. Young people are taught at an young age to follow prescribed paths with well-defined change of success

• There are also other cultures that are ultra-competitive, in which case people start seeing everything as zero-sum games. This is completely counter-productive because almost everything great in life is done in teams. It’s simply not the case that your win has to come at someone else’s loss.
  • The symptom for this can take the form of: “If I help you study, you will do better than me and you’ll get into medical school and I won’t”
  • “Jacket-pullers”, those who try to pull others down and prevent them form rising higher than they have. Rather than “the squeaky wheel gets the oil”, it’s “the nail that sticks up gets the hammer”
  • In Brazil for example, the traditional word for “entrepreneur” translates loosely to “thief”. Historically, social mobility is so poor that successful entrepreneurs are seen as thieves. The default assumption being that you must’ve done something illegal to break the mold

Self-Determinism And The Role of Luck

• Most people underestimate the control they have over their fate and overestimate the role luck plays. We all have incredible resources at our finger tips. Many never figure out how to best leverage them

• Luck is not like a lightning strike but more like the wind. It may blow in whichever way, sometimes lightly, other times in gusts, often in a direction you are not expecting. If your sail is up, you are always ready.

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

• If you want to achieve something, just start moving in that direction, however small that first step may be. Don’t wait for all the lights to turn green
  • Ask around in your organization, be willing to make the first move
  • Being willing to make the first move is what separate leaders from those who wait for others to anoint them

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” - William Ernest Henley

School Does a Terrible Job of Preparing Us For the Real World

The way we are taught in school could not be more different from life after college.

• Instead of always having a teacher, you are your own teacher. No one is there leading the way. You need to figure out what you need to learn. You have to take initiative

• Life is the ultimate open-book exam. You have endless resources at your disposal to tackle open-ended problems related to work, family, and friends

• Unlike a multiple-choice test, where you are either right or wrong, life presents problems that have multitudes of answers, many of which are right in some way. There is no “perfect” singular answer.

Other Great Insights

• “T-shaped people”
  • Strive to become someone with a great breadth of knowledge but also at least one discipline where one has gone to great depth
• Problems = Opportunities
  • Learn to view the world as full of opportunities. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.
• Act as if you are a foreign traveler
  • Pay attention to your environments and live in the present. Avoid the trap of putting on blinders and auto-piloting down a well-worn path
• Build bridges (network). Never ever burn any no matter how tempted you might be.
  • You are not going to like everyone and not everyone is going to like you; but there is no reason to make enemies. We live in such a small world that more likely than not you will come to regret it
• Don’t take yourself too seriously
  • Or judge others too harshly. Most things in life, especially our failures, aren’t as important as we think they are at the time.
  • Don’t be in a rush to get to your final destination. Enjoy the journey. The side trips and unexpected detours often lead to the most interest people/events
• Failure is part of the process
  • If you truly want to learn something, you have to do it yourself. You have to try your hardest, fail and fail again until you succeed. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading music sheets; you can’t learn to cook by reading recipe books

“It’s all good in the end. If it’s not good, it’s not the end”

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