What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20

by Tina Seelig

  Many of the ideas presented here are the polar opposite of the lessons we are taught in the traditional education system. In fact, the rules that apply in school are often completely different from those in the outside world. This disparity causes incredible stress when we leave school and attempt to find our own way. Gracefully bridging that gap to tackle real-world challenges can be extremely difficult, but it’s doable with the right tools and mindset.

  For example, in school, students are usually evaluated as individuals and graded on a curve. In short, when they win, someone else loses. Not only is this stressful, but it isn’t how most organizations work. Outside school, people usually work in a team with a shared goal, and when they win, so does everyone else. In fact, in the business world there are usually small teams embedded inside larger teams, and at every level the goal is to make everyone successful.

  The typical classroom has a teacher who views his or her job as pouring information into the students’ brains. The door to the room is closed, and the chairs are bolted to the floor, facing the teacher. Students take careful notes, knowing they will be tested on the material later. For homework, they are asked to read assigned material from a textbook and quietly absorb it on their own. This couldn’t be any more different from life after college, where people are their own teachers, charged with figuring out what they need to know, where to find the information, and how to absorb it. In fact, real life is the ultimate open-book exam. The doors are thrown wide open, allowing everyone to draw on endless resources around them as they tackle open-ended problems related to work, family, friends, and the world at large. Carlos Vignolo, a masterful professor at the University of Chile, told me that he provocatively suggests that students take classes from the worst teachers in their school because this will prepare them for life, in which they won’t always have talented educators leading the way.

  Additionally, in large classes, students are typically evaluated by multiple-choice tests, with one right answer for every question, and the bubbles must be carefully filled in with number-two pencils to make for easy grading. In sharp contrast, in most situations outside school there are a multitude of answers to every question, many of which are correct in some way.

  Sadly, this happens around the world. I recently received a disturbing email from a young person from South Korea. Her teacher had marked her wrong on a multiple-choice test, and she wanted to contest the answer. So, she reached out to me for support.

  What was the problem? Her teacher had assigned a passage from this very book. The reading was about seeing the potential in the craziest ideas. Students had to read the passage and answer a multiple-choice question to demonstrate they understood the paragraph. However, the question was written in such a way that even I couldn’t answer it. It seemed to be designed to confuse the students, and it clearly didn’t test whether they understood the meaning of the passage. I wrote back to the student with my thoughts on the test question, explaining that it was a trick question. It beautifully illustrated the concept that “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”8

  The world is filled with choices, and many things that matter deeply, such as love, ethics, and creativity, can’t easily be counted. There isn’t one right answer that leads to a clear reward. Although family, friends, and teachers will happily give us pointed advice about what to do, it is essentially our responsibility to pick our own direction. And we don’t have to be right the first time. Life usually presents many opportunities to experiment and recombine our skills and passions in new and surprising ways.

  Even more important, it should be acceptable to fail. In fact, failure is an important part of life’s learning process. Just as evolution is a series of trial-and-error experiments, life is full of false starts and inevitable stumbling. Not one of us walked the first time we tried, or rode a bicycle on our first attempt. Why should we expect students and adults to complete complicated tasks on the first try? The key to success is the ability to extract the lessons out of every experience and to move on with that new knowledge.

  The following chapters are designed to challenge you to see yourself and the world in a fresh light. The ideas are straightforward, but not necessarily intuitive. As an educator focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship, I have seen firsthand that these ideas are relevant to individuals working in all dynamic environments, where situations change rapidly, requiring those involved to know how to identify opportunities, balance priorities, and learn from failure. Additionally, the concepts are valuable to anyone who wants to squeeze the most juice out of life.

  Essentially, I want to provide you with a new way to view the obstacles you encounter every day while charting your course into the future. In addition, I hope you will give yourself permission to question conventional wisdom and revisit the rules around you. There will always be uncertainty at each turn, but when you are armed with the confidence that comes from seeing how others have coped with similar ambiguities, the stress in your life will morph into excitement, and the challenges you face will become opportunities.

  Chapter 2

  The Upside-Down Circus

  Why don’t most of us view problems as opportunities in our everyday lives? Why did the teams described in the prior chapter have to wait for a class assignment to stretch the limits of their imaginations? Essentially, we aren’t taught to embrace problems. We’re taught that problems are to be avoided, or something to complain about. In fact, while speaking at a conference for business executives, I presented video clips from the Innovation Tournament as part of my talk. Later that afternoon the CEO of a large company approached me and lamented that he wished he could go back to school, where he would be given open-ended problems and be challenged to be creative. I looked at him with confusion. I was pretty confident that every day he faced real-life challenges that would benefit from creative thinking. Unfortunately, he didn’t see that the concepts easily related to his life and business. He viewed my assignments as something that could happen only in a controlled, academic environment. Of course, that isn’t and shouldn’t be the case.

  We can and should challenge ourselves every single day. That is, we can choose to view the world through the lens of possibilities. The more we take on problems, the more confident and proficient we become at solving them. And the better able we are to see them as opportunities.

  Here is a very personal example. Recently, I woke up super early to complete final preparations for a lecture I was scheduled to give that morning. It was dark at 5:30 a.m., and I could hardly see a thing. Trying to be as quiet as possible, I slid out of bed and made my way to the bedroom door . . . Bang! I smashed my toe.

  The pain running through my body was just as palpable as my frustration. I had planned to do final prep work on my talk, and now I would be spending the time icing my toe. I hobbled downstairs to the kitchen and found a bag of frozen peas. While I tended to my toe, which was already turning a lovely shade of purple, my husband walked in. He turned to me and said, “Remember, every problem is an opportunity.” Those words, which I frequently use, were not funny in this situation. Clearly, this was not an opportunity!

  However, after a few minutes I started thinking, Okay, how do I turn a smashed toe into an opportunity? An idea came to me and took shape as I showered. I was going to find a way to weave this into my talk. So, here is what I said:

  I don’t usually give lectures wearing my sneakers. But this morning I smashed my toe quite badly. Not only did this accident give me an excuse to wear more comfortable shoes, but it also encouraged me to think about the opportunity hidden in plain sight, namely the many examples of thriving companies that grew out of painful disappointments. This is what entrepreneurs do! They see the possibilities where others see problems. Slack, the wildly successful messaging platform, grew out of a failing gaming company. Even though the game wasn’t catching on, the integrated messaging tool it used was a hit. This was also the case with Instagram, which grew
out of a failing web application. The founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, threw out their initial product, Burbn, which was supposed to help friends connect, and poured all of their efforts into the photo-sharing feature inside the application. My smashed toe is a poignant reminder that we need to look at the potential presented by potholes.

  Then I launched into my prepared talk about the importance of having an attitude that allows you to see and seize opportunities. It was amazing how much energy my opening story generated in the room, and in me. It created a hook I returned to throughout the lecture and helped build a rapport with the audience. The takeaway message is that your attitude is the biggest determinant of what you can accomplish—and you alone control your attitude. True innovators see their way to solutions even in very difficult circumstances.

  A wonderful example is Jeff Hawkins, who began his career at Palm Computing, rethinking how people could organize their complicated lives, and is now focused on revolutionizing our understanding of how the brain works. In the early days of personal computers, Jeff was drawn to the problem of creating handheld devices that were easily accessible to the general public. This was a grand goal that required a deep understanding of technology and potential users. Along the way, he faced an endless array of challenges, and he admits that being an entrepreneur means constantly facing big problems and finding creative ways to tame them.

  Jeff’s challenges began at the very beginning. When Palm released its first product, the Zoomer, it failed miserably. Instead of walking away in defeat, Jeff and his team called every customer who had purchased the product, as well as many who had purchased its rival, the Apple Newton (which was also a failure), and asked what they had hoped the product would do. Customers said they had hoped and expected the products to help them organize their complicated schedules. That’s when Jeff realized the Zoomer was competing much more with paper calendars than with other computer products. This surprising feedback, which contradicted his original assumptions, provided useful input for the design of the next-generation product, the fabulously successful PalmPilot.

  The path to success was far from easy, and there were many times when Jeff and his team could have given up. But they knew that challenges are a natural part of the creative process, and they were ready when problems cropped up.

  In fact, Jeff gets worried when things go too smoothly, knowing that a problem must be lurking just around the corner. When he was running his second company, Handspring, everything was going swimmingly for the release of the original Visor, a new personal digital assistant. But Jeff kept warning his team that something would happen. And it did.

  Within the first few days of the release of their first product they had shipped about 100,000 units. This was a remarkable feat! But the entire billing and shipping system broke down in the process. Some customers didn’t receive the products, and others received three or four times as many units as they ordered. It was a disaster, especially for a new business that was trying to build its reputation. So how did they handle it? The entire team, including Jeff, buckled down and called each and every customer. They asked each person what they had ordered, if they had received it, and whether they had been billed correctly. If anything wasn’t perfect, the company corrected it on the spot. Jeff had known something would go wrong; he just wasn’t sure what it would be. His experience has taught him that problems are inevitable, and the key to success is not dodging every bullet but recovering quickly.

  Jeff’s current company, Numenta, is addressing an enormous challenge head-on. He has spent years teaching himself neuroscience in an attempt to understand how we think. From his extensive research, Jeff came up with a new and provocative theory about how the neocortex in the brain processes information, which he describes in his book On Intelligence. With these theories in hand, Jeff used his ideas as the foundation for a “smarter” computer that processes information like the human brain does. As in all his ventures, problems crop up frequently, and he is ready to tackle them.

  Of course, one could argue that Jeff Hawkins is one of a kind and that we can’t all develop revolutionary theories and groundbreaking inventions. But it is much more productive to see Jeff as a source of inspiration, as someone who demonstrates that problems can be solved if we give ourselves permission to look at them differently.

  * * *

  One project that came out of the Innovation Tournament sheds light on how to turn problems into opportunities. Participants were challenged to create as much value as possible with rubber bands. One team came up with the idea for Do Bands, bracelets that would give people a simple incentive to “do” the things they often put off doing.1 Do Bands was a clever idea, inspired by the now-familiar rubber bracelets worn to show solidarity with a cause. Do Bands had a few guiding principles:

  Put one around your wrist with a promise to do something.

  Take it off when you have completed the task.

  Record your success online at the Do Bands website. Each Do Band came with a number printed on it so you could look up all the actions it had inspired.

  Pass the Do Band along to someone else.

  Do Bands gave individuals an incentive to do what they wanted to do all along. 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, to bridge the gap between inaction and action. The Do Bands campaign lasted only a few days, but in that short time it inspired a long list of actions: some people called their mothers, some showed their appreciation to others by sending thank-you notes, and one began a new exercise program. One participant used the Do Band as an impetus to start a summer camp, one was inspired to reach out to long-lost friends, and some donated money to charities of their choice. It’s fascinating that a lowly rubber band was catalyst enough to move people to act. It’s also a clear reminder that there is just a tiny gap between doing nothing and doing something, but the two options have wildly different outcomes. Lewis Pugh, an environmentalist who swam across the North Pole to bring attention to the issues facing our planet, poignantly says, “You are always one decision away from a completely different life.”2

  I assign a simple challenge in my creativity class that’s designed to give students the experience of looking at obstacles in their lives from a new perspective. In this challenge I ask them to identify a problem they are facing and then pick a random object in their environment and figure out how that object will help them solve their problem. Of course, I have no notion about their personal challenges or what objects they will select. However, in most cases they manage to find a way to use random objects to tackle a seemingly unrelated problem. Selecting the object gives them permission to look at the problem differently and an incentive to find a solution.

  My favorite example is a young woman who was moving from one apartment to another. She had to transport some large furniture and had no idea how to make it happen. If she couldn’t move the furniture, she would have to leave it in her old apartment. She looked around her apartment and saw a case of wine that was left over from a party a few weeks earlier. Aha! She went to Craigslist, an online community bulletin board, and offered to trade the case of wine for a ride across the Bay Bridge with her furniture. Within a few hours, all of her furniture was moved! The leftover wine collecting dust in the corner had been transformed into valuable currency. The assignment gave this student the ability and motivation to see her problem as solvable.

  There is no limit to the types of problems you can tackle. In fact, most of the Innovation Tournament projects are crafted to create “social value.” That is, students use the competition as an opportunity to address a significant problem in our community, such as saving energy, encouraging people to stay healthy, or providing support for disabled children.

  * * *

  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
. In fact, it’s a key component of the curriculum for the Biodesign program at Stanford.3 Postgraduates who have studied engineering, medicine, and business come together for a year to identify significant needs in medicine and then design products to address them. Paul Yock, a cardiologist, inventor, and entrepreneur, launched and runs the program. Paul believes that a well-characterized need is the DNA of an invention. In other words, if we clearly define a problem, the solution will logically present itself. This echoes a quote attributed to 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.”

  The Biodesign Fellows spend three months shadowing doctors in action and identifying problems the doctors appear to be facing. They watch carefully, talk with all of the stakeholders—including physicians, nurses, patients, and administrators—and figure out where things can be improved. They whittle down a list of hundreds of needs to just a handful, with the goal of picking the biggest problems they have found. After they settle on the challenge, they design and quickly build prototypes for a variety of solutions. After a focused, iterative process, they present their new product concepts to the key stakeholders to find out if they have successfully met the needs.

  Interestingly, in many cases those who are on the front lines of medicine are so used to the problems they experience every day that they don’t even see them or can’t imagine radical approaches to solving them. Paul Yock shared a story about the development of balloon angioplasty, a technique that involves inserting a balloon into an artery and expanding it to open the blocked artery. Before this breakthrough invention, most cardiologists believed that the only way to deal with clogged arteries was to do bypass surgery to remove the damaged blood vessels. This procedure required open-heart surgery, which carried substantial risks. When the balloon angioplasty procedure, which is much less dangerous and invasive, was first introduced, it was met with tremendous skepticism and resistance among physicians, especially surgeons who “understood best” how to treat the disease. Significant roadblocks appeared in front of pioneers of the procedure. For example, John Simpson, one of the inventors of balloon angioplasty, wound up having to leave his university to do his research at a private hospital. However, over time, the efficacy of balloon angioplasty was firmly established and it became the standard of care for most patients with clogged arteries. This is a great example of how the status quo can be so entrenched that those closest to the situation can’t imagine anything different.