What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20

by Tina Seelig

  Of course, if Joe responds as portrayed in scenarios 1 or 2, he isn’t going to get fired. But he has missed an opportunity to build trust with Sarah. After months and years, he probably won’t even see all the opportunities he missed. In scenarios 3 and 4, Joe builds a meaningful relationship with Sarah. And, not surprisingly, as opportunities arise, she is more likely to offer them to Joe. Others might not see the small things Joe has done and will look at his progression as just good fortune. In reality, by helping others, others are more likely to help us.

  The opportunity to build a trusting relationship with others happens hundreds of times each day. Heidi Roizen, a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist, shared a particularly memorable example in one of our classes. She had just dropped off her child at college and was much more affected by the experience than she thought she would be. Teary-eyed, she arrived at a meeting she had set up immediately afterward with a fellow who wanted to pitch her his new company. Heidi mentioned that she was very emotional after dropping her child at college. Instead of responding in a caring and empathetic way, he opened his laptop and started in on his pitch. She was amazed—he had missed the opportunity to be compassionate. She walked away knowing that she would never do business with this fellow. Had he taken a few minutes to ask her about the experience and to offer some kind words, it would have dramatically shifted the way she viewed him and his venture.

  * * *

  Essentially, by understanding the physics of luck we are much more prepared to identify and capture opportunities that lead us to our desired goals, allowing us to thrive, not just survive. The following 2 × 2 matrix illustrates the different ways people engage with the world, allowing them to see and seize opportunities—or not.

  Those in the upper left quadrant see possibilities but don’t act on them, leaving it to others. They are observant enough to identify opportunities but don’t execute on those ideas. They watch others succeed and are likely to say “I could have done that” or “I thought of that idea, too.” They end up bitter because they saw the opportunity but didn’t act on it.

  Those in the bottom right quadrant seize opportunities without paying careful attention to the environment and act blindly without fully comprehending the situation. For example, they start a business without understanding their customers’ real needs. As a result, they’re surprised and disappointed when their ideas don’t pan out or have less-than-optimal results.

  Those in the lower left quadrant—who don’t see or seize possibilities—don’t pay attention or act on opportunities, sitting on the sidelines of life. They watch others get ahead and are baffled that opportunities seem to pass them by. They are clueless.

  Those in the upper right quadrant, who pay careful attention to identify opportunities and find ways to act on them, are “lucky.” They move through the world seeing and seizing opportunities.

  There are ways to move into the upper right quadrant. Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire in England, has studied luck and found that “lucky people” share traits that tend to make them luckier than others. First, he recognized that lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them and, therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation. They’re more likely to pay attention to an announcement for a special event in their community, to notice a new person in their neighborhood, or to see that a friend is in need of some extra help. Lucky people are also open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside their usual experiences. They’re more inclined to pick up a book on an unfamiliar subject, to travel to less familiar destinations, and to interact with people who are different from them.

  Lucky people tend to be optimistic and expect good things to happen to them. They make more eye contact and smile more frequently, leading to more positive and extended encounters. These actions, in turn, open the door to more opportunities. These become self-fulfilling prophecies, because even when things don’t go as expected, lucky people find ways to extract positive outcomes from the worst situations. Their attitude affects those around them and helps to turn negative situations into positive experiences. In short, being observant, open-minded, friendly, and optimistic invites luck your way.

  This simple story shows how this works. Several years ago I was at a small, local grocery store frequented mostly by those who live nearby. A man and his young daughter approached me in the frozen-food aisle and politely asked how to prepare frozen, canned lemonade. The man had an accent I couldn’t identify, and I was pretty sure he must be new to the area. I told him how to prepare the lemonade and asked where he was from. He said Santiago, Chile. I asked his name and what brought him to our town. I had no ulterior motive. I was just curious. He told me his name was Eduardo and that he and his family were in the area for a year so he could learn about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. He was in line to run his family’s business and was in search of tools to make it more innovative. I told him about our entrepreneurship program at Stanford’s School of Engineering and said I’d be happy to do what I could to be of help. Over the next few months I introduced Eduardo to various people in the entrepreneurship community, and he expressed his thanks for my assistance.

  Fast-forward two years. I was heading to a conference in Santiago, Chile, and sent Eduardo a message asking if he wanted to get together for coffee. At the last minute, he wasn’t able to make it but invited me to go to a specific location in downtown Santiago with a few of my colleagues. We showed up at the office building and were led to the roof, where we were picked up by Eduardo’s family’s private helicopter for a simply spectacular ride above the city, up to the surrounding mountains, and over his family’s ski resort. It was incredible! And to think that it resulted from helping him figure out how to make lemonade. Of course, I didn’t help Eduardo because I wanted a helicopter ride. But by putting myself out there, being open to helping someone, and following up years later, I became quite “lucky.” Earlier I discussed the art of turning lemons (problems) into lemonade (opportunities). But luck goes beyond this—it’s about turning lemonade (good things) into helicopters (amazing things!).

  On the other hand, there are people who are truly unlucky. They aren’t observant, are close-minded, unfriendly, and pessimistic. There is a video, called “The Secret of Luck,”3 set in the small West Yorkshire town of Todmorden, that demonstrates this. As part of the film, the producers followed a man, named Wayne, who claimed that he was terribly unlucky. They then observed how Wayne engaged with the world around him.

  It became clear that Wayne really was unlucky. Even when the producers put all sorts of lucky opportunities in his path, he missed them all. For example, Wayne was a butcher, and they approached him on the street pretending to be doing a market survey. The survey was about cuts of meat, and there was a cash prize. He didn’t participate and missed out. They put a winning scratcher lottery ticket in his mailbox. If he had scratched it, he would have won a television. He didn’t. Instead, he looked at it and threw it away. He missed out again. And they literally put a fifty-pound note on the sidewalk, and he walked right over it. Finally, out of desperation to get his attention, they put an enormous sign on the side of a truck that said, WAYNE, CALL THIS NUMBER . . . They had to follow him around town all day before he finally saw it and made the call. He was prompted to leave a voice mail message. Later, the producers showed up and told him all the things they had done to tempt luck his way. He immediately realized that his lack of good luck was very much self-imposed.

  Essentially, the world is full of doors through which we can find a staggering array of opportunities—we just have to be willing to open them. Carlos Vignolo, from the University of Chile, likes to say that if you go somewhere and don’t meet someone new, you have missed out on making a friend as well as the possibility of making a million dollars. He tells his students that every time they walk onto a city bus, a million
dollars is waiting there for them—they just have to find it. In this case “a million dollars” is a metaphor for learning something new, making a friend, or, indeed, making money. In fact, this book is the direct result of my talking with someone sitting next to me on an airplane, as I describe in my letter at the end of this book. If I hadn’t started that conversation, it’s unlikely this book would exist.

  * * *

  We are faced with large and small opportunities to make our own luck every moment of every day. In fact, luck is not like a lightning strike but more like the wind. With the right attitude and tools, you build a sail that captures luck as it blows by. That wind is constantly blowing—sometimes lightly, sometimes in gusts, and sometimes in directions you didn’t anticipate. When your sail is up, you are always ready. Even when the wind is negligible, it can be used to guide you slowly toward your objectives. And when the wind picks up, you are ready!4

  There are dozens of possibilities in every situation, and it is up to you to see and seize some of them. The trick here is that opportunities don’t have red flashing neon signs on them. Echoing this point, Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation, says that every day you should act like a foreign traveler by being acutely aware of your environment. In everyday life we tend to put on blinders and cruise down well-worn paths, rarely stopping to look around. But as a traveler in a foreign country, you see the world with fresh eyes and dramatically increase the density of your experiences. By tuning in, you find fascinating things around every turn.

  James Barlow, the former head of the Scottish Institute for Enterprise, did a provocative exercise with his students to demonstrate this point. He gave jigsaw puzzles to several teams and set a timer to see which group would finish first. Each piece had secretly been numbered on the back, from 1 to 500, so it would be relatively easy to put them together if one paid attention to the numbers. But even though the numbers were right in front of them, it took most teams a very long time to see them, and some never saw them at all. They could have easily bolstered their luck just by paying closer attention.

  I do a simple exercise in my class that illustrates this clearly. I send students to a familiar location, such as the local shopping center, and ask them to complete a “lab” in which they go to several stores and pay attention to all the things that are normally “invisible.” They take the time to notice the sounds, smells, textures, and colors, as well as the organization of the merchandise and the way the staff interacts with the customers. They observe things they’d never seen when they had previously zipped in and out of the same environment. They come back with their eyes wide open, realizing that we all tend to walk through life with blinders on.

  Lucky people don’t just pay attention to the world around them and meet interesting individuals; they also find unusual ways to use and recombine their knowledge and experiences. Most people have remarkable resources at their fingertips but never figure out how to leverage them. However, lucky people appreciate the value of their knowledge and their network, and tap into these gold mines as needed. Here’s a powerful example from the 2005 commencement address that Steve Jobs delivered at Stanford. In short, he dropped out of college after six months because he wasn’t sure why he was there, and the tuition was much more than his parents could afford. Here’s how Steve tells it:

  Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

  None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. . . . Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.5

  This story emphasizes that you never know when your experiences will prove to be valuable. Steve Jobs was open-minded and curious about the world, collected diverse experiences independent of their short-term benefits, and was able to tap into his knowledge in unexpected ways. This is a sharp reminder that the more experiences you have and the broader your base of knowledge, the more resources you have from which to draw.

  In my course on creativity I focus a great deal on the value of recombining ideas in unusual ways. The more you practice this skill, the more natural it becomes. For example, using similes or metaphors to describe concepts that on the surface seem completely unrelated offers tools for revealing fresh solutions to familiar problems. We do a simple exercise to illustrate this point. Teams are asked to come up with as many answers as possible to the following statement:

  Ideas are like ______________ because ______________, therefore ______________.

  Below is a list of some of the hundreds of creative answers I’ve seen. In each case the simile unlocks a new way of looking at ideas:

  Ideas are like babies because everyone thinks theirs is cute, therefore be objective when judging your own ideas.

  Ideas are like shoes because you need to break them in, therefore take time to evaluate new ideas.

  Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect the local environment, therefore consider changing contexts to get more diverse collections of ideas.

  Ideas are like hiccups because when they start they don’t stop, therefore take advantage of idea streaks.

  Ideas are like bubbles because they easily burst, therefore be gentle with them.

  Ideas are like cars because they take you places, therefore go along for the ride.

  Ideas are like chocolates because everyone loves them, therefore make sure to serve them up frequently.

  Ideas are like the measles because they are contagious, therefore hang out with other people with ideas if you want to get them yourself.

  Ideas are like waffles because they are best when fresh, therefore keep new ideas coming all the time.

  Ideas are like spiderwebs because they are stronger than they appear, therefore don’t underestimate them.

  This exercise encourages you to stretch your imagination by tapping into the world around you for inspiration. Some people make these connections naturally and find unusual ways to extract value from them. Like Steve Jobs, those people are always scouting for how to bring ideas together in interesting ways and then make the effort to bring their ideas to life.

  A couple of stories illustrate how this works in real life. Perry Klebahn broke his ankle in 1991. The injury was especially disappointing to this avid skier, who didn’t want to miss a season on the slopes. However, he found a way to turn his bad fortune into good luck. While recovering from the injury, he discovered an old pair of wooden snowshoes and took them out for a spin, hoping this would provide an alternative to skiing. They didn’t work well at all, which was another disappointment. But instead of throwing them back into his closet and waiting for his ankle to heal, Perry decided to design a new snowshoe. He was a product design student at the time and figured he could use these new skills to solve his own problem. Over the course of ten weeks, he designed and built eight different versions of snowshoes. On weekdays he built prototypes in the school machine shop, and over weekends he went to the mountains to try them out. By the end of the tenth week, he was ready to file patents on his invention.

  Once the design was perfected, Perry hand-built some snowshoes and set out to sell them to sporting goods stores. The buyers took one look at them and asked, “What are these?” They were unlike anything they had seen before, and there was no market for snowshoes. But Perry persevered, knowing there
must be lots of people who couldn’t ski for one reason or another but still wanted a way to spend time in the mountains during the winter. In the end, he decided to build the market himself.

  Perry personally took sporting goods salespeople to the snow-covered mountains each weekend to let them try out his invention. He told them there was no obligation to promote snowshoes to their customers; he just wanted them to get a taste of this new sport. The salespeople loved the experience and passed the news on to the buyers at their stores. As a result, sporting goods stores started stocking Perry’s new product. But the challenge didn’t stop there.

  After customers purchased Perry’s new snowshoes, they had no clue where to use them. So Perry had to convince ski resorts around the United States to promote snowshoeing. He encouraged them to create special snowshoe trails, to make maps for their customers, to provide trail passes, and to monitor the trails to keep them safe. Once this was done, the pieces were in place for the market for his snowshoes to balloon, and it grew from $0 to $50 million. Perry’s company, Atlas Snowshoe, was subsequently sold to K2, and snowshoes and well-marked trails for snowshoeing are now widely available.

  Perry turned a series of bad breaks—literal and figurative—into a winning streak by seeing opportunities and connecting the dots between his broken ankle, his desire to spend time in the snow, his new product design skills, and his astute observation that others would benefit from a better snowshoe. He ultimately made out well, but only after huge investments of time, energy, and perseverance. Many people would have given up along the way, balking or even stopping at each new obstacle. But Perry saw opportunities in every challenge, and as each hurdle was overcome and all the pieces were put in place, his chances of seeing a positive end result increased. This only happened because Perry used every skill described by Richard Wiseman. He was observant, outgoing, adventurous, and optimistic, as well as hardworking. Each of these traits was important in contributing to his ultimate goal.