What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, written by Tina Seelig, is an excellent book that I read earlier this year.
Funny enough, I’m more than a few years past 20,
but I found great value in reading it and I am going to share the key points with you all.
So regardless of your age,
I’m confident you will find some valuable nuggets of information from this book summary.
Stay tuned.
What's going on guys,
J from MedSchoolInsiders.com.
Like my other book review on the Subtle Art,
I will be summarizing the author’s points but also inserting my own commentary on things I agree
or disagree with, along with relevant examples from my personal life.
This is a longer video, but there is a lot of information jam-packed here.
I hope you enjoy watching this video as much as I did making it.
The premise of this book as is as follows:
major life transitions, such as starting college, or graduating college and starting a career,
can be daunting.
There are an infinite number of possible paths to take,
and no one is able to tell us whether we are making the right choice.
Success, no matter how you define it, is not part of a simple equation.
While there are common traits among those we deem successful,
there is no clear delineated path or recipe for success.
Tina Seelig is a faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program,
and received her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford School of Medicine.
She is an excellent teacher and has won several accolades in recognition of her education work.
This book summarizes her model for reaching our highest potential and her life philosophy.
That being said, this information is relevant regardless of age.
Tina sets the tone early on by jumping straight into what makes an entrepreneur.
I love her definition, which is as follows
“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.”
Note that her definition does not mention anything about businesses, finances, or money.
Being an entrepreneur means seeing the world as opportunity-rich.
Tina argues that entrepreneurship is important for just about everyone to develop.
After all, it “cultivates a range of important life skills, from leadership and team building
to negotiation, innovation, and decision making.”
A common mindset that most of us fall into is to frame a problem or situation too tightly.
In one of her lessons, Tina challenges the students with the following:
earn as much money as possible in two hours starting with just five dollars.
They had time to plan their approach, but once the envelope was cracked open,
they only had two hours to generate as much money as possible.
Standard responses would be to start a car wash or lemonade stand,
using the $5 to purchase the starting materials.
However, teams that made the most money didn’t use the five dollars at all.
They realized that focusing on the money framed the problem too tightly,
so they reframed the problem as “what can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?”
The teams found incredibly innovative solutions, some bringing in upwards of $600.
Some of my favorites included offering a service to sell reservations to restaurants,
so customers did not have to wait around in line on busy nights.
As a cycling enthusiast, I also enjoyed hearing of the story
where a team set up a stand to measure bike tire pressures for free.
If the tires needed air, they would inflate the tires for one dollar.
When then they switched from charging a fee of one dollar to becoming donation-based,
and their income soared.
Next, school is not an accurate representation of the real world.
I am in no way saying that competition is a bad thing.
However, the current educational system often hinders collaborative team efforts.
In school, students are evaluated as individuals and graded on a curve.
This means when one student wins, someone else loses.
This adds unnecessary stress and is not an accurate representation of how the real world works.
Outside of school, people work on teams with a shared goal, and when they win so does everyone else.
Another great point she makes is how students learn.
I’m sure all of you can relate to being assigned a textbook chapter,
carefully reading and taking notes, and being tested on the material later.
After college, however, you become your own teacher and must figure out what you need to know,
where to find the information, and how to absorb it best.
Tina calls life the “ultimate open book exam.”
“The doors are thrown wide open, allowing you to draw on endless resources around you
as you tackle open-ended problems related to work, family, friends, and the world at large.”
We have been taught all our lives that problems are to be avoided and are something to be complained about.
By removing ourselves from these situations, we will view problems as opportunities in our everyday lives.
Learn to fail.
In contrast to school, most situations outside of school have a multitude of answers to every question,
many of which are correct in some way.
More importantly, it is acceptable to fail.
Tina actually encourages more failing, as 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.
The key to success is the ability to extract the lessons out of each of these experiences,
and to move on with that new knowledge.”
I have been in this situation, and I am sure many of you can relate.
There are times where I have felt like I need to pick the one right answer
when there is a wall of choices in front of me. It can be overwhelming.
And although family and friends will be happy to give advice,
it’s ultimately up to us to choose our own direction.
But the important part to remember is that we don’t have to be right the first time.
Life presents us with many opportunities to experiment with
and recombine our skills and passions in new and surprising ways.
For example, I would have never guessed that I would combine my passions for medicine,
education, and technology into this Youtube Channel.
Tina requires her students to write a failure resume.
That means they craft a resume of their biggest screw-ups -
personal, professional, and academic.
For each failure, the student describes what he or she learned from that experience.
This forces students to come to terms with the mistakes they have made along the way,
and reminds them that these are opportunities for growth above all else.
Many successful people believe that if you aren’t failing sometimes then you aren’t taking enough risks.
In some cultures, the downside for failure is so high that individuals are allergic to taking any risk at all.
This is in sharp contrast to the Silicon Valley,
where failure is acknowledged as a natural part of the process of innovation.
On the most basic level, all learning comes from failure.
Think of a baby learning to walk.
He or she starts out crawling and then falling,
before finally mastering the skill that as an adult we take for granted.
The entire venture capital industry essentially invest in failures,
since the majority of the companies they fund eventually go under.
Many of you have probably heard Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford in 2005.
He explained getting fired from Apple, the company he started, and how devastating that experience was.
He was a very public failure,
but then something began to dawn on him –
he still loved what he did.
He had been rejected, but he was still in love. So, he started over.
He said that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to him.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,
being less sure about everything.
He entered one of the most creative periods of his life, during which he started NeXT,
Pixar, and found the woman who later became his wife.
Pixar became the most successful animation studio in the world,
Apple bought NeXT and used its technologies at its core,
and he married Laurene and they started a family.
He was pretty sure that none of that would have happened if he had not been fired from Apple.
It was awful tasting medicine, but the patient needed it.
When we think of career trajectories on a graph with time on the X-axis and success on the Y,
we imagine a line steadily pushing up and to the right.
But in reality, life is riddled with failures and ups and downs.
As you move further along in your career, you will have great successes but also great failures.
Take Steve Jobs’ story as an example.
Most individuals’ paths are riddled with small and enormous failures.
The key is being able to recover from them.
“For most successful people, the bottom is lined with rubber as opposed to concrete.
When they hit bottom, they sink in for a bit and then bounce back,
tapping into the energy of the impact to propel them into another opportunity.”
Failures can serve as incredible opportunities in disguise.
They force us to reevaluate our goals and priorities,
and often propel us forward much faster than continued success.
Failure is the flip side of success, and you can’t have one without the other.
Remember, if you do take a risk and happen to fail,
you are personally not a failure.
The failure is external.
This perspective will allow you to get up and try again and again.
Have the right attitude.
“Attitude is perhaps the biggest determinant of what we can accomplish.
True innovators face problems directly and turn traditional assumptions on their head.”
And I don’t mean this in a lets-start-a-business sort of way or lets-make-money way either.
Problems are really just opportunities yet they go unnoticed more often than not.
Problems are abundant and are waiting for those willing to find inventive solutions.
This requires observation, coordinated teamwork, the ability to execute a plan,
willingness to learn from failure, and creative problem-solving.
But above all else, it requires having the right attitude;
the attitude that the problem can be solved.
So why is it that most of us don’t always focus on the opportunities that surround us each day
and take full advantage of them?
The reason is that most of us are not naturally good at identifying and challenging assumptions.
We follow the herd mentality,
meaning people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors.
Often times the status quo is so entrenched that those closest to the situation
cannot imagine anything different. Tina calls this “problem blindness”.
A brilliant way Tina approaches this issue is to have her students identify a problem,
and then pick a random object in their environment.
They then need to figure out how that object will help them solve the problem.
There is considerable research showing that those willing to stretch the boundaries of their current skills
and willing to risk trying something new are much more likely to be successful
than those who believe they have a fixed skill set and innate abilities that lock them into specific roles.
This goes back to the fixed mindset vs growth mindset that many of you have probably heard about.
Those who have a fixed image about what they can do
are much less likely to take risks that might shake that image.
But those with a growth mindset are typically open to taking risks
and tend to work harder to reach their objectives.
They are willing to try new things that push their abilities, opening up entirely new arenas along the way.
Embrace the impossible.
By not limiting ourselves to the status quo,
we are able to take on grand projects, make choices that seem radical,
and carve out a new path that leads us to unchartered territories.
And that’s where the magic really happens.
Instead, we watch these people, like Elon Musk,
in awe and limit ourselves from ever taking the risks or thinking in a similarly radical way.
Here’s another ingredient to the secret sauce -
the more experience you have tackling problems,
the more confident you become that you can find a solution.
It’s difficult to figure out when rules are just suggestions, and when suggestions morph into rules.
On a daily basis, we see physical signs that tell us what to do, written instructions direct us on how to behave,
and social guidelines urge us to act within specific parameters.
We also make a lot of rules for ourselves,
which are in large part encouraged by others.
These rules become woven into our individual fabric as we go through life.
Once you whittle away the recommendations, you realize there are often many fewer rules than you imagined.
Larry Page, co-founder of Google and badass-extraordinaire,
gave a lecture where he encouraged the audience to break free from established guidelines
by having a healthy disregard for the impossible.
Think as big as possible.
It’s easier to have big goals than it is to have small goals.
Why?
Because with small goals, there are very specific ways to reach them and more ways they can go wrong.
With big goals, you are usually allocated more resources and there are more ways to achieve them.
All the cool stuff happens when you do things that are not expected.
The well-worn path is there for everyone to trample.
But the interesting things often occur when you are open to taking an unexpected turn
and question the rules that others have made for you.
It’s easier to stay on the prescribed path, and that’s why many stay to it,
but it is more interesting and exciting to discover the world of surprises off the beaten path.
Here’s another brilliant exercise that Tina uses.
First, teams come up with a problem that is relevant for the group.
For example, a group of executives in the utility business may be trying to find a way to save energy.
Then each small team is come up with a best idea and a worst idea for solving the stated problem,
and write each on a piece of paper.
She then takes the best ideas, shreds them, and redistributes the worst ideas.
Each team now has an idea that another team thought was terrible.
And they are instructed to turn this bad idea into a fabulous idea.
After looking at this horrible idea, they realize it isn’t so bad after all.
It’s all about reframing perspective and embracing the impossible.
I love this exercise because it demonstrates that most ideas,
even if they look silly or stupid on the surface,
often have a least a seed of potential.
Ideas don’t have to be feasible to be valuable.
Sometimes the craziest ideas, which seem impractical when initially proposed,
turn out to be the most interesting in the long run.
There is a lot to go over and cover in this book,
so thank you so much for watching part one.
Please move on to part two for the rest of this video.