What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20

by Tina Seelig

  This theme comes up again and again when listening to those who have been successful, whether they have faced big or small challenges. They are willing to try lots of things and are confident that some of their experiments will lead to great outcomes. But they also recognize that there will be potholes along the way. This approach can be used for big and small challenges. The following story was told to me by a friend: There was a man who appeared to have endless luck with women. He wasn’t particularly charming, funny, smart, or attractive, so it was quite a mystery. One day my friend asked him how he managed to have such a steady flow of women in his life. He confided that it was simple—he asked every attractive woman he met for a date, and some of them said yes. He was willing to take his share of rejections in return for a handful of successes. This brings the lesson to its basest level. If you get out there and try lots of things, you’re much more likely to find success than someone who waits around for the phone to ring.

  This story is consistent with advice my father always gave me: being a squeaky wheel rarely changes the outcome, but it does allow you to get to the conclusion sooner. Don’t sit around waiting for a yes that will never come. It’s better to get to no sooner rather than later so you can put your energy into opportunities with a higher likelihood of success. This applies to job hunting, finding business funding, dating, and most other endeavors. That is, if you continue to push the limits and are willing to fail along the way, you will very likely find success. As described by Alberto Savoia in The Right It, this type of experimentation is called “pretotyping.”2 It involves performing quick experiments to rapidly determine if you are going in the right direction so you can continue adding fuel to the fire if the experiments prove you are onto something or abandon the effort if you are going in the wrong direction.

  Unrealistically, many people feel as though they should be consistently progressing up and to the right, moving along a straight success line. But this never happens, and is actually limiting. When you look closely at a graph representing a successful person’s career, there are always ups and downs. When viewed over a longer time period, however, the line moves up and to the right. When you are in a down cycle it is hard to see that the temporary dip is actually a setup for the next rise. In fact, the slope of the upward line is often steeper after a down cycle, meaning you are really achieving more than if you had stayed on a steady, predictable upward path.

  Carol Bartz, the former CEO of Autodesk and Yahoo!, uses another great analogy to describe a successful career path.3 She thinks you should look at the progress of your career as moving around and up a three-dimensional pyramid, as opposed to up a two-dimensional ladder. Lateral moves along the side of the pyramid often allow you to build the base of your experience. It may not look as though you’re moving up quickly, but you’re gathering a foundation of skills and experiences that will prove extremely valuable later.

  Adding another perspective, Josh McFarland, who has been deeply embedded in the world of startups for twenty years, points out that we are more sensitive to the rate of change in our position than the actual position. He says, “We actually feel acutely the rate of change more than the absolute value at any one point in time. . . . Think about when you’re flying in a plane. You can’t really tell if you’re going 300 or 400 miles an hour. You can tell, however, when you’re accelerating and decelerating. . . . [Also,] it’s really hard to tell whether you’re at 30,000 feet or 35,000 feet, [but] you can really tell when you hit a pocket of turbulence and you drop 500 feet. . . . So, when things are getting better, it feels really great. When things are getting worse, it feels really bad, regardless of where you are on that continuum of being up and to the right.”4

  A classic story about the cyclical and unpredictable nature of careers comes from Steve Jobs. As the founder of Apple and Pixar, his success stories are legendary. However, many of his finest successes grew out of failures. He described these stories beautifully when he gave the commencement address at Stanford in 2005. Here is an excerpt of his speech:

  We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him. So at thirty I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

  I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down—that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me: I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

  I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

  I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.5

  This story is echoed time and time again. Essentially, most individuals’ paths are riddled with small and enormous failures. The key is being able to recover from them. One of my favorite sayings is “It’s all good in the end. If it’s not good, it’s not the end.” We are always in the middle of the story, and there is usually a way to recover.

  * * *

  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. A great example is David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue.6 David initially started an airline called Morris Air, which grew and prospered, and he sold it to Southwest Airlines for $130 million in 1993. He then became an employee of Southwest.

  After only five months, David was fired. He was miserable working for Southwest, and as he says, he was driving them crazy. As part of his contract, he had a five-year non-compete agreement that prevented him from starting another airline. That seemed like a lifetime to wait. But after taking time to recover from this blow, David decided to spend that time planning for his next airline venture. He thought through all the details of the company, including the corporate values, the complete customer experience, the type of people they would hire, as well as how they would train and compensate their employees. David says that getting fired and having to wait to start another airline was the best thing that ever happened to him. When the non-compete period was over, he was ready to hit the ground running and launched JetBlue. Just like Steve Jobs, he was able to turn what seemed like a terrible situation into a period of extreme productivity and creativity.

  Failing, of course, isn’t fun. It’s much more fun to tell the world about our successes. But 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.

  Getting to
o comfortable with failure, however, seems risky. Are those who celebrate failure doomed to fail? Imagine corporate Employee of the Month photos showcasing the biggest screwups. However, as Bob Sutton points out in Weird Ideas That Work, rewarding only successes can stifle innovation because it discourages risk-taking. Bob suggests that organizations consider rewarding successes and failures, and punishing inaction. Doing so would encourage people to experiment, which is more likely to lead to interesting and unexpected outcomes.

  I am not saying that your company should reward people who are stupid, lazy, or incompetent. I mean you should reward smart failures, not dumb failures. If you want a creative organization, inaction is the worst kind of failure. . . . Creativity results from action, rather than inaction, more than anything else.7

  Bob adds that there is strong evidence that the ratio between our individual successes and failures stays the same. Therefore, if you want more successes, you’re going to have to be willing to live with more failures. Failure is the flip side of success, and you can’t have one without the other.

  At the d.school there is a lot of emphasis on taking big risks to earn big rewards. Students are encouraged to think really big, even if there’s a significant chance that a project won’t be successful. To encourage this, we reward spectacular disasters. Students are told that it is much better to have a flaming failure than a so-so success. Jim Plummer, the former dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering, embraces this philosophy. He tells his PhD students that they should pick a thesis project that has a 20 percent chance of success. Some students find this discouraging, interpreting this to mean they will have to do five different projects before they reach completion. Quite the contrary. The experiments should be designed so that a failure is informative and a success leads to a major breakthrough. Doing small, incremental experiments with predictable results is much less valuable than taking a big risk that will potentially lead to a much bigger reward.

  We often live on the edge of success and failure, and it is rarely clear which way we will land. This uncertainty is amplified in high-risk ventures, such as restaurants, technology startups, and even sports, where the line between success and failure may be razor thin. Consider the Tour de France. Even after twenty-one days of cycling up and down steep and winding mountain roads, the time difference between the winners and the losers boils down to a matter of minutes. Sometimes a little extra push is all it takes to flip the switch from failure to success.

  Some companies have mastered the ability to coax the value from products that others might discard as failures. Google and other web-based companies rely upon A-B testing. That is, they release two or more versions of software at the same time and receive quick feedback on what approach is more successful. These companies find that by making small modifications, such as changing the color of a button, adding a single word to a message, or moving images around on a page, they change the customers’ experience and that can dramatically alter their feedback. Some businesses release dozens of versions of the same software product a day, each altering the user experience in some small way so the businesses can evaluate the responses.

  * * *

  Trying new things requires a willingness to take risks. However, risk-taking is not binary. Most people are comfortable taking some types of risks and find other types quite uncomfortable. You might not even see in advance which risks are comfortable for you to take, discounting their riskiness, but you are likely to amplify the risk of things that make you more anxious. For example, you might love flying down a ski slope at lightning speed or jumping out of airplanes and don’t view these activities as risky. If so, you’re blind to the fact that you’re taking on significant physical risk. Others, who are not physical risk-takers, would rather sip hot chocolate in the ski lodge or buckle themselves tightly into their airplane seats than strap on a pair of ski boots or a parachute. Alternately, you might feel perfectly comfortable with social risks, such as giving a speech to a large crowd. But others, who might be perfectly happy jumping out of a plane, would never speak in a public forum.

  There are many types of risks, including physical, social, emotional, financial, ethical, creative, political, and intellectual. I ask my students to map their own risk profile using this Risk-o-Meter.

  Here is an example of my own:

  With only a little bit of reflection, each person knows which types of risks he or she is willing to take. They also realize pretty quickly that risk-taking isn’t uniform. It’s interesting to note that most entrepreneurs and investors don’t see themselves as big risk-takers. After analyzing the landscape, building a great team, and putting together a detailed plan, they feel as though they have squeezed as much risk out of the venture as they can. In fact, they spend most of their efforts working to reduce the risks, or de-risk, their businesses.

  Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, a professor in our department, is an expert in the field of risk management. She explains that when analyzing a risky situation, it’s important to define the possible outcomes and attempt to figure out the chances of each one. Once this is done, one needs to develop a full plan for each eventuality. Elisabeth says it makes sense to take the high risk/high reward path 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. I encourage you to read the previous two sentences several times. Experts in risk management believe you should make decisions based on 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.

  It’s also important to remember that good decisions, based on an accurate analysis of the risks involved, can still lead to bad outcomes. That’s because risk is still involved. Here is a simple example. Soon after I got out of school I was offered a job I wasn’t sure was a great fit for me. After many days carefully considering the opportunity, I decided to turn it down, assuming that soon thereafter I would be able to find another job that was a better match. Unfortunately, the economy turned south quite quickly, and I spent months looking for another job. I kicked myself for not taking that position, which started to look more and more appealing. I had made a good decision, based on all the information I had at the time, but in the short run it wasn’t a great outcome. This happens frequently since we aren’t in control of all the variables.

  As in this situation, under most circumstances you have to make decisions with incomplete information. That is, you have to make a choice and take action in the face of considerable uncertainty surrounding each option. So, how do you fill in the gaps of your knowledge? I suggest looking to “Stanley” for inspiration. The inner workings of Stanley, the autonomous vehicle designed and built by Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory for the DARPA Grand Challenge, offer clues to decision-making with incomplete information. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a government agency charged with the development of cutting-edge technology for the military. In the DARPA competition, driverless cars must navigate a 212-kilometer off-road race. Each must pass through three narrow tunnels, make more than a hundred sharp turns, and navigate mountain passes with steep cliffs on each side. Despite very low odds, Stanford’s car won the race.

  Stanley had a lot of powerful technology on board, including three-dimensional maps of the terrain, GPS, gyroscopes, accelerometers, video cameras, and sensors on the wheels. The on-board software analyzed and interpreted all incoming data and controlled the vehicle’s speed and direction. But the key to Stanley’s victory was its superior skill at making decisions with incomplete information. The designers accomplished this by building in the ability for it to learn the way humans do. They created a database of human decisions the car drew upon when making judgments about what to do. These data were incorporated into a learning program tied to the car’s control systems and greatly reduced errors in judgment.

  This story highlights the fact
that learning from others can significantly reduce your failure rate. You don’t have to figure everything out yourself. Like Stanley, you should gather all the data you can from your environment and then tap into the wisdom of those who have gone before you in order to make the best possible choice. All you need to do is look around to see hundreds, if not thousands, of role models for every choice you plan to make.

  If you do take a risk and happen to fail, remember that you personally are not a failure. The failure is external. This perspective will allow you to get up and try again and again. Your idea might have been poor, the timing might have been off, or you might not have had the necessary resources to succeed. As Jeff Hawkins says, “You are not your company. You are not your product. It’s real easy to believe you are, and it’s real easy to get wrapped up in it. . . . If you fail, or even if you’re successful, you really need to separate these things. . . . Your company may fail, your product may fail, but you’re not going to be a failure.”8 Failure is a natural part of the learning process. If you aren’t failing sometimes, then you probably aren’t taking enough risks.

  Chapter 7

  No Way . . . Engineering Is for Girls

  How many people have told you that the key to success is to follow your passion? I’d bet a lot. Giving that advice to someone who’s struggling to figure out what to do with his or her life is easy. However, that advice is actually simplistic and misleading. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of passion and think it’s incredibly important to know what drives you. But it certainly isn’t enough.

  Passion is just a starting point. You also need to know your talents and how the world values them. If you’re passionate about something but not particularly good at it, then it’s going to be pretty frustrating to try to craft a career in that area. Say you love basketball but aren’t tall enough to compete, or you’re enthralled by jazz but can’t carry a tune. In both cases you can be a terrific fan, going to games and concerts, without being a professional.