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Onkur Sen

"The way to be is to do." Confucius

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Notes from *What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20* by Tina Seelig

Mar 28, 2013

Chapter 1: Buy One, Get Two Free

• Challenge: given an envelope containing $5, raise as much money as possible in 2 hours
  • Unlimited planning time, but only have 2 hours once you open the envelope
  • Best approaches didn’t even use the $5; moved past the conventional appraoches
  • Subsequent challenges included paper clips, post its, etc. (inspired by One Red Paper Clip)
• Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP)
  • Helps build T-shaped people: depth in at least one area, but breadth across many fields
• d.school
  • Launched by David Kelley (founder of IDEO) to teach design holistically
• Thesis: the real world is different than the truths held in a traditional education system
  • Students in a classroom play a zero-sum game; organizations work when individuals cooperate
  • Traditional education is a dependent, unidirectional transfer of knowledge from teacher to student; actual knowledge is gleaned through self-teaching
  • Failure is not rewarded properly; the answer is more important than the process in multiple-choice exams

Chapter 2: The Upside-Down Circus

• Turn problems into opportunities
  • Jeff Hawkins, developer of Palm Pilot and author of On Intelligence
  • Do Bands: rubber bands with simple tasks written on them as motivation
• Assignment: identify a problem and use a random item to help you with that problem
• Key: identify and fill gaps
  • BioDesign program @ Stanford connected medical and engineering worlds
  • Balloon angioplasty procedure allowed non-invasive unclogging of arteries
  • Kimberly-Clark: marketing diapers positively
• Challenge assumptions
  • Guy Laliberte, founder of Cirque du Soleil; did the exact opposite of all the traditional associations with circus
  • Randy Komisar (KPCB Partner): focus on solving a grand problem, not making money or any material result

Chapter 3: Bikini or Die

• Differentiate between suggestions and rules
  • Larry Page: have a healthy disregard for the impossible; think as big as possible
• Experiment: break a group of people up into teams, give them a problem, and have them provide their best and worst idea to solve the problem. Throw away the best solutions and redistribute the worst solutions among the group. Often, they turn out to be useful from a fresh perspective
• Lesson: all ideas have potential, no bad ideas
  • Effective brainstorming: no bad ideas, expand on the ideas of others
  • Ideas are cheap, no need to commit to any of them
  • Imagine a world where constraints are different
• Examples
  • John Stiggelbout: was applying to grad school but decided to go to business school at the last minute; used a rec letter from a friend who pretended to be a prison inmate
  • Cooliris: hired lots of interns as advertisement to make it the cool place to work
  • Zune: team wasn’t going to make it on schedule, so they broke away from bureaucracy to get things done (similar to War Rooms at Facebook)
• “Don’t ask for permission, but beg for forgiveness”
• “My instructor told me the three things I should never do. All else is up to me.”
• Break expectations that you and others have for you

Chapter 4: Please Take Out Your Wallets

• Seize opportunities instead of waiting for them to be given to you
  • Debra Dunn at HP: moved into mulitple roles wihout all of necessary experience, but was able to fill gaps along the way
• Translate your skills into different settings
  • Seelig: got a PhD in neuroscience and then became a management consultant
  • In both, you “identify burning questions, collect & analyze relevant data, gather best results, make compelling presentation”, and repeat
• Take things others have discarded and make them useful
  • Sesame Street: “trash into treasure”
  • Michael Dearing: wrote to famous people and built up his network
• Those willing to try something new (i.e., have growth mind-set) are more likely to be successful
  • Pay attention to find problems that need to be solved
  • Example: break group up into pairs and ask them to take out their wallets and say what’s wrong with them. Then other person has little time to put together and “sell” a new wallet that fits those needs
  • David Rothkopf: “The biggest ally of superachievers is the inertia of others.”
• If you want something, make it happen. Try.

Chapter 5: The Secret Sauce of Silicon Valley

• Write a failure resume summarizing biggest personal, professional, and academic screwups
  • Viewing failures through the lens of experience makes you appreciate their value
• Willingness to take risks depends on environment
• All learning comes from failure (e.g., baby learning how to walk); impossible to learn anything without doing it yourself
• Kill bad projects early
  • da Vinci: “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
• When to walk away from a problem?
  • Know whether something has the potential to pay off; negotiate honestly with yourself
  • Quit well: One assistant quit a week before a huge project deadline and caused everyone much grief and extra work; Others provide advance notice, help transition duties over
• Prepare yourself for failures
  • Try lots of things, be confident that you will achieve greatness, but recognize there will be potholes along the way
  • Better to get a no sooner rather than later so that you can focus you energies on opportunities with higher probability of success
• A successful career is a wave of ups and downs, not a straight line
  • Carol Bartz, former Yahoo and Autodesk CEO: move along a 3D pyramid, not a 2D ladder; move laterally to gain skills and build experience
  • Steve Jobs fired from Apple. Founded NeXT and Pixar and found wife before returning to Apple. “It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.”
• Don’t get comfortable with failure; you might quit too early
  • 3M Post-it notes; initially, no one was interested; colleague used adhesive to keep track of church hymns
  • Can morph products based on what they are doing well
• 5 different risk types: physical, social, emotional, financial, intellectual
• Learning from others can reduce your failure rate

Chapter 6: No Way…Engineering is For Girls

• Following your passion isn’t enough; need to find where passion intersects with skills and market availability
  • Lao Tzu: “The master of the art makes little distinction between his work and his play…he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both. “
• Hindsight bias: things make sense in retrospect
• Distinguish what others want for you from what you want
  • Don’t plan your life out too far in advance; the most interesting experiences are often unplanned
• Important to reassess life and career frequently
• Find a role in the world that doesn’t feel like work

Chapter 7: Turn Lemonade Into Helicopters

• The harder you work, the luckier you get; you can maximize your chances by being well-prepared physically, intellectually, and emotionally
  • Quyen Vuong and QD3 pulled themselves out of poverty and drove themselves to work extremely hard
• Lucky people tend to be observant, open-minded, extraverted, and optimistic
• Carlos Vignolo (Univ. of Chile): meet someone new everywhere you go
• Lucky people use and recombine their knowledge/experiences in unexpected ways
• Make your own luck by working hard and focusing on your goals

Chapter 8: Paint the Target Around the Arrow

• Show appreciation for others; it will help you in the long run
• Your reputation is your most valuable asset, so don’t burn bridges; the same people will show up in your life multiple times in different roles
  • positive interactions with others are like clear drops of water; negative ones are red drops
  • Organizations capture information of how you behave with staff
  • Craft the story now so you’ll be proud to tell it later
• Take responsibility for your actions, and learn from your experiences
• Negotiate well
  • Incentives are not always opposed! Can create win-win situation
  • Figure out everyone’s interests to maximize outcome for everyone
  • If no win-win situation, can walk away; remember to consider Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement (BATNA)
• Be honestly willing to help others
• Reconcile doing the “right” thing with doing the “smart” thing
• Don’t take on too many responsibilities; find ways to combine work and other activities (e.g., have meetings on a hike)

Chapter 9: Will This Be on the Exam?

• “Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous!”
  • We’re often encouraged to “satisfice” and barely meet expectations, but show much more is possible when you remove the cap
  • Ashwini Doshi: 3.5 foot woman who overcomes many obstacles daily
  • Go beyond what’s expected at all times
• Regardless if you’re trying, you’re actually doing it or not. The rest is just excuses
  • No excuse is valid; if you really wanted it, you would make it happen
  • You are in charge of your own life; you are responsible for putting in your best effort at all times
• You don’t have to succeed at the expense of others; collaboration (“coopetition”) is often more lucrative than competition
• Be willing to reach for your true potential

Chapter 10: Experimental Artifacts

• Easy to get locked into traditional thinking, but we determine how we view the world
  • E.g., writing assignment to describe the same scene from the perspective of someone who has fallen in love vs. someone who has lost a child
• Don’t take yourself too seriously or judge others too harshly
• Success is sweet but transient
• The possibilities are endless if you push yourself outside your comfort zone, be willing to fail, disregard the impossible, and strive to be fabulous

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