“What I wish I knew when I was 20”
A series on Tina Seelig’s book most important takeaways
Introduction
Tina Seelig’s book “What I wish I knew when I was 20” [1] is a great classic for entrepreneurs, college students, or in general anyone who wants to find their place in the world. Whenever I’m having a deep conversation with someone who “made it”, I love to ask these very simple but effective questions: “how were your days when you had my age? what habits did you develop?” along with “did you know you would eventually become successful? How did you know?”
You would be surprised, most if not all the times I heard the following answer:” I knew I would become successful, if I have to be completely honest though, I would have never expected to be SO successful”. It seems that most people wanted to improve their situation but had no idea how to get there. They “figured it out”, they took massive action to the best of their abilities and started a trial and error approach to problems, until they got it right. On top of that, their personality helped, because you are either born with traits that orient you to success or you can always develop them. The vast majority will not even bother and will simply accept their condition (if you’re reading this article chances are you’re not part of this group).
What if you are part of that category of people who wants to develop their personality to think and act like a person who is successful?
Being young is one of the best times of our lives, and simultaneously one of the most dangerous. The biggest mistake we all make is thinking we have plenty of time to take care of boring aspects of our lives, the truth is it’s not. The best moment (not the only one) to learn how to approach life is undoubtedly your 20s. Tina Seelig comes to help. She doesn’t lack any credentials as she is an incredibly successful researcher, entrepreneur, and author (New York Times best-selling author). After years of experience as a professor at Stanford, she condenses all her knowledge into a very easy-to-read and full of valuable information book. As I was reading it though, I felt the need to get deeper into Tina’s teachings, this is why during the guide I want to cover extensively every chapter. If you’re looking for a well-done summary or a review then, there are better places where to find them. The objective here is to extract the most valuable lessons the book can offer.
Summary Chapter One
The first chapter is called “Buy one get two free”, it starts with the following eye-hooking sentence:
”What would you do to earn money if all you had was five dollars and two hours?”
This is an assignment Tina asked her students to do during her entrepreneurship class at Stanford. While you think about what you would personally do, I’m here to give you a little hint: it’s not mandatory to use these $5; actually, the students’ best projects did not involve the 5$ at all. We can say these “businesses” have been started from scratch. One of the best ones involved a tire inflation service for bikes on the Stanford campus in exchange for $1. The students expected not to have that much success considering tires could be inflated for free at the closest gas station, the results were instead surprising. They were even able to increase the revenue stream when they changed the fixed price from $1 to donations. Over the years, the author explains the $5 has been changed to post-it notes or paper clips, the results were always surprising. One of the projects started something called “The Innovation Tournament” with hundreds of teams participating from around the world. There are indeed three main teachings out of the first chapter:
#1 Opportunities are abundant, everywhere.
It is not common to convince ourselves otherwise, to keep thinking:” I lost that great opportunity and another one will not come ever again”. Nothing is more wrong than such toxic self-talk. Opportunities are identified and seized, they do not “come” and disappear. The difference lies in our mindset. We have to be ready at all times because they can be found everywhere. After all, a new invention can be defined, studied, created, optimized, or even used wrong. Perspective is key.
#2 Regardless of the size of the problem, there are usually creative ways to use the resources already at your disposal to solve them.
Resources are important, but why Nokia (Finnish Multinational telecommunication and consumer electronics company), a multibillion-dollar company, went close to bankruptcy in 2012, and SpaceX (American aerospace manufacturer), around the same time started to close its biggest contracts with NASA? In comparison to SpaceX, Nokia had many more resources but they are not everything, creativity matters much more. Curiously enough, at the core of SpaceX’s success, there’s an AI able to land rockets so they can be reused. The team saw code as an invaluable resource and through knowledge and creativity, it became a competitive advantage.
#3 We often frame problems too tightly.
Earning money in two hours with just a $5 investment seems impossible. The list of available resources is very short ($5) and this leads to very few solutions if we apply a standard way of thinking. It is hard to step back and look at the problem more broadly. Tina Seelig’s students reflected they would have never had an excuse for being broke again. Please, don’t get me wrong here, framing problems is extremely important. Researchers believe proper problem framing brings you many steps forward close to the solution. Microsoft is a great example of this. The two founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, identified the main issue with personal computers at the time: they lacked an operative system. IBM, one of the largest PC manufacturers in the 1980s was only focused on hardware improvement. The company considered a huge achievement the 640Kb memory in 1981. They framed the “PC problem” as only related to the hardware portion. Microsoft, on the other hand, understood the machines needed to become user-friendly, showing a broader vision compared to IBM. The rest is history.
Conclusions
In conclusion of the first article of the series, I hope these first lessons are going to be as valuable to you as they were for me. Please note that these lessons are not limited to entrepreneurship, they can be applied to our everyday lives. I would love to complete this article with a fourth valuable lesson, perhaps the most important one
“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” (Warren Buffet)
The above is indeed valuable material from the author’s collection of trial and error; what is even more valuable is that you’re directly learning from Tina Seelig’s students’ mistakes and experiences; on top of that, you’re doing this at a far lower price compared to them. Treasure the lessons, more is coming.
[1] Tina Lynn Seelig. (2010). What I wish I knew when I was 20: a crash course on making your place in the world.
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