Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Reorient your brain and body to creativity and innovation!
This book will make you want to become an innovator so bad.


I'm a 20-year-old Stanford sophomore who learned what Tina wished she had known when she was 20.


As a freshman, I took her class "Creativity & Innovation," mainly offered for graduate students. When, on the first day, Tina said "Creativity can be learned," I was skeptical. I simply thought her class would be no different from typical college classes with competitive individuals, problem sets, and grade curves.


The class was given the first assignment to come up with the best and the worst business ideas. My teammates and I were enthusiastic about developing fantastic ideas and scribbled total nonsense for the bad ideas when the time was running out.


I was baffled, however, when Tina ripped up all sheets of paper with the good ideas and gave us the bad idea submitted by another team. The idea was "selling used hypodermic needles." We laughed out loud at how terrible it was until three seconds later when we all turned silent and questioned, "Wait, is this really the worst idea?" We ended up coming up with a really clever plan that involved selling used needles to doctors who need small tissue and blood samples for their experiments. We even felt as if we could start selling used needles right away! Besides learning that it is always worthwhile to question our assumptions, my classmates and I were no longer competitors but awesome business partners!


Tina taught us that there are no bad ideas and how to redefine problems in different ways. In following assignments we got to redesign the cover for a large national magazine (and they even used our idea!); I got to try on a 3-carat diamond ring in a private salon at Tiffany's as part of a study on consumer experiences; and we set up the entire frozen yogurt shop into the classroom as part a class project on innovative companies.


Unlike other books of the sort, Tina's book avoids ambiguous principles embellished with fancy words but rather suggests ready-to-go strategies that you can implement in your daily life right away. Furthermore, she gives you good examples, that stimulate you and give you the nerve for action. You will end up being an active "doer" after reading this book. (For instance, I employed her methods to reinvent my messy closet!)


I'm truly happy that now the whole world can share her insights on creativity and innovation. Her book is a "crash" course, yet a very thorough, inspirational guide on how to change yourself and the world! I hope you all share the special excitement that I had while learning from her. Although I love the title, as you read this book you will see that it is never too late and there's no time to hesitate to become innovative.

How many times have we heard the expression, "Follow your Bliss" (at least you hear it alot in LA where I live!!) but where is the practicality in that, especially in today's economy?? I thoroughly enjoyed Tina Seelig's wisdom and realistic inspiration throughout "What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20" but especially on this topic. Tina says, "It's important to know whether you're putting energy into something that has the potential to pay off. This is one of life's biggest challenges...it's always a mammoth challenge to separate your desire to make something work from the reality of the probability that it will work." I have seen that with many career twists and turns before I found the job that utilizes my skills best and is something the world wants and will pay nicely for. Tina's book helps you to look at what isn't working in your career and turn it around to your benefit.
I enjoyed Tina's viewpoint about being practical with risk-taking too while not letting risk restrain your potential.
She says that if you are going to take the high-risk/high reward road, only do so if you're willing to live with all the potential consequences. You should fully prepare for the downside and have a backup plan in place. Tina writes, "Experts in risk management believe you should make decisions based upon the probability of all outcomes.including the best and worst-case scenarios, and be willing to take big risks when you are fully prepared for all eventualities."
If you want a roadmap to a great career looking at the big picture vision without losing sight of necessary practical details and passion along the way, I highly recommend Tina's book.

As a student at Stanford, I was required to read this book for a class immediately upon its release. While the book contains many interesting anecdotes, that's all the book really is. There's nothing in the book that you can use to transform your life, career, or business, and thus I give the book only two stars. There are enough books out there that simply tell you what is important, but very few that actually teach you how to implement it.

Open letter to Professor Seelig:

I picked up your book eagerly when it came out, because I'm a Haas Business School student wishing to make a contribution to this world through entrepreneurship. But I stopped after the first 10 pages or so, and made sure to flip through the rest of the chapters to make sure I wasn't missing out on some big message. I was disappointed.

"What would you do to earn money if all you had was 5 dollars and 2 hours?" Seemingly harmless and interesting experiment, but your example of the "winning" team had me furrowing my brow in disbelief that a Stanford professor would laud this team for rigging restaurant reservations and taking a commission cut as being "innovative" and "creative" thinkers. Are you serious?? Can nobody else see how ridiculous this is?

Umm....hello? It's called SCALPING. Scalping is not a novel, innovative concept. Anyone can do it and earn $600 in two hours - ethical people just choose not to.

Innovative: 0. You can find ticket scalpers anywhere, from crowded sold-out railroad stations of third world countries, to rock concerts. These ticket scalpers are often street kids who don't even have a high school education and are just trying to survive to feed themselves. How is this "creative thinking" by privileged Stanford students?

Unethical: 1. Those unsuspecting people who are outside waiting in line aren't "benefitting" and "happily paying" for a spot, they've been duped out of a spot, and are unfairly waiting in line because these Stanford students took up a fake spot in the first place. That's like creating an anti-virus software company and then creating a virus so that you can make money from your anti-virus software. It's a cruel and meaningless way to make money.

Contribution to Society: 0. Who likes middlemen whose sole purpose is to take a commission? Haven't we as a society been working to eliminate travel booking agencies and wanting to deal directly? It's a huge annoyance and unfair rig in the system. And it's easy. Anyone can do it, but it's reprehensible, and we simply choose not to because it's wrong.

After you laud this team for scalping, you go on to describe how they creatively got the females to sell the spots. Umm...hello? Sex trafficking? Need I go on?

Stanford is supposed to stand for something - a place for big minds and big ideas that will transform and contribute to our society in a positive and benevolent way. Instead, your "two hours and $5" exercise is inadvertently training a cohort of immoral and unethical business leaders, who will make no contribution to society, and will try to eek out selfish advantage at any price. Enron-in-the-training.

What would you think of Stanford if you were patiently waiting in line at your favorite restaurant with your wife, only to find that a bunch of Stanford business kids had rigged the system by taking away all the spots ahead of time to turn a profit? Sure, scalping can be a business opportunity Stanford students are allowed to take, but they should not, because they're supposed to be better than that. Aren't Stanford students better than that?

So what should entrepreneurship at Stanford look like? Why don't you train your students to study macroeconomic trends, identify entrepreneurial opportunities in Asia's shifting markets, how to save our failing economy, or analyze big-picture ideas like Warren Buffet does? Why are you training them to employ get-rich-quick tactics that any street kid in the developing world or city ghettos already know, and then complimenting them for "winning" the exercise and boasting about it in a non-contributing book? You forgot one vital component to the exercise: must contribute to society and be of social value.

Please, Prof. Seelig, let's teach our nation's brightest minds to be big-picture thinkers and effective philanthropists like Warren Buffet, not get-rich-quick people like Guy Kawasaki who for all we know probably made his actual money from his books and audio tapes. By teaching this approach, you're basically saying Kawasaki is qualified to be a Stanford professor too. Aren't you of a better ilk than him?

By having the "Stanford" label of approval on these methods, you are harming others even more, because college-aged kids all over will think that well, if Stanford approves, it must be ok. It is NOT okay to scalp money and make a living by tricking unsuspecting people into paying you a commissioner's cut.

I'm 26 years old, and I know these principles without reading your book. It boggles my mind how this book could be touted as innovative and creative. I learned nothing new, and worry for the kids who will take away the wrong message.

In fairness though, your intentions were probably good, just misguided, and there were a few good tidbits later on in the book - like the "failure resume" - a good practice that teaches humility I hope. Just please do away with the "2 hours, $5" exercise, or at least, modify it to include principles of decency, and teach your students ethics and how to be upstanding moral citizens worthy of Stanford's branding.

Instead of "Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous"...at another's expense...how about "Never miss an opportunity to do the right thing"? It's a dangerous mix when you encourage intelligent minds toward selfish attainments that disregard the greater good. Intelligence can be used for good or evil, and these intelligent kids need your guidance toward good if they're going to be our world leaders, helping the less fortunate.

I just finished reading Dr. Tina Seelig's book and want to share how her insights have inspired me. I've followed Dr. Seelig's podcasts via the Stanford Technology Ventures (STVP) program (go to Stanford on iTunes U), where I first listened to her "What I Wish I Knew When I was 20" lecture. I found myself listening to it several times over, and I was ecstatic to hear that she was going to be publishing a book of the same name.

Much to my satisfaction, in her book, Dr. Seelig explored in further depth a lot of the themes from her talk. In particular, I find her lesson that "you don't have to wait to be anointed" strikes a chord with me personally. I'm a not-so-recent Stanford graduate who has recently experienced some setbacks in my academic and career pursuits and has found the inspiration from Tina's writing to keep going. I also found that the book does a great job, through its storytelling aspect, of describing the profile of a successful entrepreneur (willing to take risks, open to learning/meeting people) as well as the fact that opportunities for creative solutions to big problems are all around us . . . there's no excuse not to innovate!

So . . . I am grateful to Dr. Seelig for encouraging us to innovate and make our place in the world, and I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to do the same.

I've had the good fortune of seeing Tina Seelig at Stanford on numerous occasions. So when I pre-ordered her book, I knew that it was going to be good. But little did I know that it was going to be *this* good.

Like a fast car going from zero to sixty in three point some seconds, Tina's book has blasted straight to be amongst the top books I would recommend to anyone. It is one of the few books that I can say I've literally read cover to cover in one sitting. It is so full of amazing stories and anecdotes -- each one with a unique lesson, but at the same time it is also one of the easiest books I've read. The prose flows beautifully and each chapter hits home with its lessons -- not just one lesson, but multiple ones.

At one point in reading the book I felt like I needed to start underlining and marking the pages with the great quotable quotes in the book -- till I realized I would end up marking up almost every page or at least every other page! I had to reconcile myself to thinking that this is just my first read, and that this is one of those books you have to go back to reading again and again because it's impossible to absorb all its wisdom in one go.

I would strongly recommend this book for any person who has ever had even an iota of self-doubt or career angst. It is a book that should be "required reading" for any high school student getting ready to go to college, any college graduate going out into the workforce, and for any person even remotely thinking about doing anything entrepreneurial. Tina shows us that it's okay to sometimes not know what you're doing, and sometimes the best opportunities are right there in front of us, just waiting for us to seize them. We can't always wait for someone else to push us up or forward, sometimes you just have to reach out and do that for yourself. And it's okay to fail, because the best lessons come from failures and failures are very often the springboard to bigger successes.

Tina tells us to "Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous" -- and I can say with conviction that this is yet another occasion where Tina Seelig has done exactly that -- been fabulous. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

This was a great, fun, light read. However, for those of us who have already been through entrepreneurship courses at college, or who are already consumers of a lot of entrepreneurial media, this isn't going to be earth shattering. There is some really good stuff in here though, and given how quick and easy it is to read, I recommend it.

This book is filled with action-packed advice and great stories about taking the leap and about character traits entrepreneurs must develop.

Very inspirational read for entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs of all ages.

As a would be entrepreneur and a young woman in her twenties, I found that this book made me rethink many preceonceived ideas. The book provided a unique perspective on how to navigate young careers and spurred me on to think and read more about entrepreneurship. I ended up buying 2 more copies of the book to give to my 19 year old sister and my college roommate!

I find the author's blog equally inspiring and hope to see more of her writing in the near future.

I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon as soon as it was possible and, after reading the book, I've gotten other copies to give away. It makes for a terrific gift. I'm a Stanford graduate student and had the fortune and privilege to have Tina as a teacher not once, but in two courses. She has been an amazing inspiration for me and I'm delighted to see her teachings reach a wider audience through this book -including the people I care about and wanted to share what I'd learned with.

As the complexity of the world's problems increases exponentially, we need our children to grow up equipped with the skills and mindsets to tackle a future their parents and teachers can't even imagine. We need them to be entrepreneurial and regard problems as opportunities; we need them to be biased towards action and be ready to challenge assumptions and leverage limited resources. This is what Tina Seelig teaches her college students. And it is a message that everyone -regardless of age- can benefit from.

You certainly won't get a pre-digested pontificating list of bullet-points for success in life. Instead, Tina delivers her inspiring teachings using stories she has gathered from successful entrepreneurs, as well as from her classroom experiences (I personally believe that a teacher who is eager to learn from her students as much as they learn from her, is the type of teacher we should want for our youth). Also, as has been documented by another reviewer (Alana), the book is full of links to other interesting books and resources. Get this book and give yourself -or someone else- the gift of inspiration. You'll be glad you did.

And if, after reading the book, you are left wanting more (as I suspect will happen in most cases), be sure to check out Tina's latest writings on her Psychology Today's blog:

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