What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World

by Tina Seelig

the teams that made the most money didn’t use the five dollars at all. They realized that focusing on the money actually framed the problem way too tightly. They understood that five dollars is nearly nothing and decided to reinterpret the problem more broadly: What can you do to make money if you start with nothing?

They understood that five dollars is nearly nothing and decided to reinterpret the problem more broadly: What can you do to make money if you start with nothing?

opportunities are abundant. At any place and time you can look around and identify problems that need solving.

The lesson is that most problems are opportunities, and the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.

an entrepreneur is someone who is always on the lookout for problems that can be turned into opportunities and finds creative ways to leverage limited resources to reach their goals.

in school, students are usually evaluated as individuals and graded on a curve. In short, when they win, someone else loses.

Outside school, people usually work in a team with a shared goal, and when they win, so does everyone else.

The key to success is the ability to extract the lessons out of every experience and to move on with that new knowledge.

In reality, a Do Band was just a rubber band. However, sometimes something as simple as a rubber band is all that’s needed to mobilize people to actually do something,

The first step to solving big problems is to identify them. In the world of product design, this is called “need finding,” and it’s a skill that can be learned.

Albert Einstein: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

How could a diaper become a symbol of success as opposed to failure? Michael came up with the idea for Pull-Ups, a cross between a diaper and underwear. Switching from diapers to Pull-Ups served as a big milestone for both children and parents. A child can put on a Pull-Up without help and can feel proud of this accomplishment. This insight led to a billion-dollar increase in annual revenue for Kimberly-Clark

Guy Kawasaki, who says it is better to “make meaning than to make money.”8 If your goal is to make meaning by trying to solve a big problem in innovative ways, you are more likely to make money than if you start with the goal of making money, in which case you will probably not make money or meaning.

In that moment he realized that by doing the scariest thing he could imagine doing, and realizing that he wouldn’t die, there were few things in the world to truly fear.

This exercise is a great way to open your mind to solutions to problems because it demonstrates that most ideas, even if they look silly or stupid on the surface, often have a seed of potential.

One of the most important rules is to expand upon the ideas of others. With this approach, at the end of a good brainstorming session, multiple people feel they have created or contributed to the best ideas to come out of the session. And since everyone in the room had a chance to participate and witnessed the emergence and evolution of all the ideas, there is usually shared support for the ideas that go forward toward implementation.

It is important to remember that idea generation involves “exploration” of the landscape of possibilities.

Once this phase is complete, it is appropriate to move on to the “exploitation” phase, in which you evaluate the ideas and select some to explore further. At that time you can view the ideas with a more critical eye.

“My instructor told me the three things I should never do. All else is up to me.” This story captures the idea that it is better to know the few things that are really against the rules than to focus on the many things you think you should do.

Over time, I’ve become increasingly aware that the world is divided into people who wait for others to give them permission to do the things they want to do and people who grant themselves permission.

sometimes people jettison ideas because they don’t fully appreciate their value or because they don’t have time to fully explore them. Often these discarded ideas hold a lot of promise.

He still continues that habit, sending unsolicited emails to people he admires. In almost every instance they respond, and in many cases the correspondence results in long-term relationships and interesting opportunities. He never asks the folks he writes to for anything. His initial contact is all about thanking them for something they’ve done, acknowledging something they’ve accomplished, asking a simple question, or offering to help them in some way. He doesn’t wait for an invitation to contact these people but takes it upon himself to make the first move.

If you study each situation with an eye for improvement, you will find countless opportunities. It is then up to you to decide if you will put yourself in a position to take on that challenge.

those of us with a fixed mindset about what we’re good at are much less likely to be successful in the long run than those with a growth mindset.

Essentially, by understanding where you are now and setting goals for yourself, you set the stage for achieving them.

As the years go by, many former students continue to keep their failure résumé up to date, in parallel with their traditional résumé of successes.

It’s a quick way to demonstrate that failure is an important part of your learning process, especially when you’re stretching your abilities, doing things for the first time, or taking risks.

In fact, if you aren’t failing sometimes, then you aren’t taking enough risks.

view failure as an asset is the hallmark of an entrepreneurial environment.

Even though it is always difficult to abandon a project, it is much easier to do so in the early stages of a venture, before there is an enormous escalation of committed time and energy. This happens in all parts of our lives, including jobs, stock investments, and any type of relationship.

Although most people know that sunk costs shouldn’t be considered in making a decision, the “too-much-invested-to-quit syndrome” is a powerful driver of human behavior.

Quitting is actually incredibly empowering. It’s a reminder that you control the situation and can leave whenever you like.

Sometimes quitting is the bravest alternative, because it requires you to face the fact that things are not working.

you are likely to bump into the same people again and again in life, often in unexpected ways. This alone is reason enough to make sure that when you quit, you do so with careful thought about the consequences for those around you.

Don’t sit around waiting for a yes that will never come. It’s better to get to no sooner rather than later so you can put your energy into opportunities with a higher likelihood of success.

“It’s all good in the end. If it’s not good, it’s not the end.” We are always in the middle of the story, and there is usually a way to recover.

I mean you should reward smart failures, not dumb failures. If you want a creative organization, inaction is the worst kind of failure. . . . Creativity results from action, rather than inaction, more than anything else.

This story highlights the fact that learning from others can significantly reduce your failure rate. You don’t have to figure everything out yourself.

you should gather all the data you can from your environment and then tap into the wisdom of those who have gone before you in order to make the best possible choice.

If you do take a risk and happen to fail, remember that you personally are not a failure. The failure is external. This perspective will allow you to get up and try again and again.

Passion is just a starting point. You also need to know your talents and how the world values them.

The worst-case scenario is finding yourself in a position where you have no passion for your work and no skills in the field and there’s no market for what you’re doing.

The goal should be a career in which you can’t believe people actually pay you to do your job.

It is important to understand, though, that most of us aren’t born with specific passions, but they grow from our experiences.

Engaging in new activities is critically important because it opens the door to developing—not finding—a wide variety of passions.

I’ve taken many detours that might look to others like a waste of time. But this wasn’t the case at all. Not only did the twists in my path give me a fresh perspective on my goals, they also gave me time to experiment with options that helped confirm what I wanted to do.

Planning a career should be like traveling in a foreign country. Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and a place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.

the things you’re likely to remember from the journey are those that weren’t on your original schedule. They will be the unexpected things that jumped into your path, surprising you along the way.

The best chance to find a compatible match is to meet lots of people. The dating process is usually filled with false starts and disappointments, but you will never be successful unless you embrace the process of discovery and accept the uncertainty.

At the core, uncertainty leads to choices. It leads to opportunities. It leads to surprises!