What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (10 page)

After six months, I couldn’t see the value in [college]. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

This story emphasizes that you never know when your experiences will prove to be valuable. Steve Jobs was open-minded and curious about the world, collected diverse experiences independent of their short-term benefits, and was able to tap into his knowledge in unexpected ways. This is a sharp reminder that the more experiences you have and the broader your base of knowledge, the more resources you have from which to draw.

In my course on creativity I focus a great deal on the value of recombining ideas in unusual ways. The more you practice this skill, the more natural it becomes. For example, using similes or metaphors, to describe concepts that on the surface seem completely unrelated offers tools for revealing fresh solutions to familiar problems. We do a simple exercise to illustrate this point. Teams are asked to come up with as many answers as possible to the following statement:

Ideas are like ______________________________________

because ___________________________________________,

therefore __________________________________________.

Below is a list of some of the hundreds of creative answers I’ve seen. In each case the simile unlocks a new way of looking at ideas:

• Ideas are like babies because everyone thinks theirs is cute, therefore be objective when judging your own ideas.
  
• Ideas are like shoes because you need to break them in, therefore take time to evaluate new ideas.
  
• Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect the local environment, therefore consider changing contexts to get more diverse collections of ideas.
  
• Ideas are like hiccups because when they start they don’t stop, therefore take advantage of idea streaks.
  
• Ideas are like bubbles because they easily burst, therefore be gentle with them.
  
• Ideas are like cars because they take you places, therefore go along for the ride.
  
• Ideas are like chocolates because everyone loves them, therefore make sure to serve them up frequently.
  
• Ideas are like the measles because they are contagious, therefore hang out with other people with ideas if you want to get them yourself.
  
• Ideas are like waffles because they are best when fresh, therefore keep new ideas coming all the time.
  
• Ideas are like spider webs because they are stronger than they appear, therefore don’t underestimate them.
  

This exercise encourages you to stretch your imagination by tapping into the world around you for inspiration. Some people make these connections naturally and find unusual ways to extract value from them. Like Steve Jobs, those people are always scouting for ways to bring ideas together in interesting ways and then make the effort to bring their ideas to life.

A great example is Perry Klebahn, who broke his ankle in 1991. The injury was especially disappointing to this avid skier who didn’t want to miss a season on the slopes. However, he found a way to turn his bad fortune into good luck. While recovering from the injury, he discovered an old pair of wooden snowshoes and took them out for a spin, hoping this would provide an alternative to skiing. They didn’t work well at all, which was another disappointment. But instead of throwing them back into his closet and waiting for his ankle to heal, Perry decided to design a new snowshoe. He was a product design student at the time and figured he could use these new skills to solve his own problem. Over the course of ten weeks, he designed and built eight different versions of snowshoes. On weekdays he built prototypes in the school machine shop, and over weekends he went to the mountains to try them out. By the end of the tenth week he was ready to file patents on his innovations.

Once the design was perfected, Perry hand-built some snowshoes and set out to sell them to sporting goods stores. The buyers took one look at them and asked, “What are these?” They were unlike anything they had seen before and there was
no
market for snowshoes. But Perry persevered, knowing there must be lots of people who couldn’t ski for one reason or another but still wanted a way to spend time in the mountains during the winter. In the end, he decided to build the market himself.

Perry personally took sporting goods salespeople to the snow-covered mountains each weekend to let them try out his invention. He told them there was no obligation to promote snowshoes to their customers; he just wanted them to get a taste of this new sport. The salespeople loved the experience and passed the news on to the buyers at their stores. As a result, sporting goods stores started stocking Perry’s new product. But the challenge didn’t stop there.

After customers purchased Perry’s new snowshoes, they had no clue where to use them. So Perry had to convince ski resorts around the United States to promote snowshoeing. He encouraged them to create special snowshoe trails, to make maps for their customers, to provide trail passes, and to monitor the trails to keep them safe. Once done, the pieces were in place for the snowshoe market to balloon, and it grew from zero dollars to $50 million. Perry’s company, Atlas Snowshoe, was subsequently sold to K2, and snowshoes and well-marked trails for snowshoeing are now widely available.

Perry turned a series of bad breaks—literal and figurative—into a winning streak by seeing opportunities and connecting the dots between his broken ankle, his desire to spend time in the snow, his new product design skills, and his astute observation that others would benefit from a better snowshoe. He ultimately made out well, but only after huge investments of time, energy, and perseverance. Many people would have given up along the way, balking or even stopping at each new obstacle. But Perry saw opportunities in every challenge, and as each hurdle was overcome and all the pieces were put in place, his chances of seeing a positive end result increased. This only happened because Perry used every skill described by Richard Wiseman. He was observant, outgoing, adventurous, and optimistic, as well as hard-working. Each of these traits was important in contributing to his ultimate good.

While Perry worked incredibly hard to overcome obstacles in order to create his own luck, there are many examples of individuals making luck by fearlessly looking for exciting opportunities. A compelling example is found in Dana Calderwood’s story. Dana loved the theater and spent countless hours involved in school plays, starting when he was in high school. We were classmates at Summit High School in New Jersey, where we were both serious “drama freaks.” Acting was a hobby for me, but Dana had dreams of being a director, and started cooking up his own luck in order to optimize the chances of making that happen long before he left high school.

As stated above, Dana was fearless. He had the gumption to ask the head of the drama department if he could direct the next major school play. No student had ever asked for that role before, but the teacher agreed. Dana didn’t wait to be anointed by someone in authority; he simply asked for what he wanted. That moment launched Dana’s directing career. He went on to direct plays at the local Metropolitan Musical Theater, where a visiting alumni director, who had since gone on to a successful career in Hollywood, gave him some sage advice. He told Dana that the skills he was using at the theater company were the same skills needed in the big leagues. This advice gave Dana the confidence to set his sights even higher.

Dana went on to study at New York University’s film school, and while there squeezed the juice out of every opportunity. Dana always stayed after classes to meet guest speakers, and he asked them for follow-up meetings and names of other people he should contact. He also learned to make the most of every film assignment. At first, like his classmates, he used his friends as actors in his films (this is how I got my film debut in Dana’s version of the famous shower scene in
Psycho
). However, Dana soon realized there was an opportunity to invite famous actors to star in his pieces. One TV production class assignment involved creating a short program for television. Most of Dana’s classmates conducted simple interviews with one another to satisfy the requirement, but Dana asked the Academy Award–winning actress, Estelle Parsons, who was in the midst of performing in a Tony-nominated play, to participate—and she agreed. Again, he made himself lucky by paying attention to nonobvious but exciting alternatives. He put himself out there by asking for what he wanted.

As time went on, Dana took on bigger and bigger challenges, and eventually, he was asked to be the director for
Late Night with Conan O’Brien,
which he did for years before directing many more shows, including
Rachel Ray
and
The Iron Chef
. Had Dana seen his adult self when he was twenty, he would have been in awe of his good luck. Dana’s fortune comes from putting everything he knows into everything he does. He is fearless about asking for opportunities to do things he has never done before, and with each successful leap gains additional insights and knowledge that help him take on the next bigger challenge.

Dana long ago internalized the idea that directing on a small stage is similar to directing on a big stage, and this gave him the confidence to jump to ever-larger stepping-stones as he literally made opportunities present themselves. Many people don’t feel comfortable making such leaps, preferring instead to stay in smaller venues. And one could argue that there are many advantages to working with intimate teams on small projects. Others dream of a bigger stage, but are daunted by the perceived distance between where they are and where they want to go. Dana’s story shows that by seizing all the opportunities around us, we can slowly but surely pull ourselves from stage to stage, each time drawing ourselves closer to our final objective.

As we have seen, we can manufacture our own luck by working incredibly hard and focusing on our goals. But we have many other tools at our disposal, including being open to opportunities that come our way, taking full advantage of chance occurrences, paying careful attention to the world around us, interacting with as many people as we can, and making those interactions as positive as possible. Making one’s own luck is ultimately about turning bad situations around and making good situations much better. We dramatically increase the chances that we will be lucky by exposing ourselves to as many diverse experiences as possible, boldly recombining these experiences in unusual ways, and fearlessly striving to get to the stage on which we want to play out our life.

Who would have thought that the package of notecards my mother gave me for my tenth birthday would have been one of the most valuable gifts I have ever received. They were light blue and said “Tina” in block letters on the top. At that age my mother taught me how to write a thank-you note and how important they are. She couldn’t have been more correct. In fact, as I grew up and ultimately entered the work world, I often tried to channel my mother, who always seemed to know what to do in social settings. But the importance of writing thank-you notes remains one of her most valuable lessons.

Showing appreciation for the things others do for you has a profound effect on how you’re perceived. Keep in mind that everything someone does for you has an opportunity cost. That means if someone takes time out of his or her day to attend to you, there’s something they haven’t done for themselves or for someone else. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking your request is small. But when someone is busy there are no small requests. They have to stop what they’re doing, focus on your request, and take the time to respond. With that in mind, there is never a time when you shouldn’t thank someone for doing something for you. In fact, assume a thank-you note is in order, and look at situations when you don’t send one as the exception. Because so few people actually do this (unfortunately), you will certainly stand out from the crowd.

Some of the other little things that make a big difference in your life are simple, while others are more challenging. Some are intuitive and others surprising. Some are taught in schools but most are not. Over the years I’ve stumbled many times, sometimes irreversibly, by not understanding these “little things.”

First and foremost, remember that there are only fifty people in the world. Of course, this isn’t true literally. But it often feels that way because you’re likely to bump into people you know, or people who know the people you know, all over the world. The person sitting next to you might become your boss, your employee, your customer, or your sister-in-law. Over the course of your life, the same people will quite likely play many different roles. I’ve had many occasions where individuals who were once my superiors later came to me for help, and I’ve found myself going to people who were once my subordinates for guidance. The roles we play continue to change in surprising ways over time, and you will be amazed by the people who keep showing up in your life.

Because we live in such a small world, it really is important not to burn bridges, no matter how tempted you might be. You aren’t going to like everyone and everyone isn’t going to like you, but there’s no need to make enemies. For example, when you look for your next job, it’s quite likely that the person interviewing you will know someone you know. In this way your reputation precedes you everywhere you go. This is beneficial when you have a great reputation, but harmful when your reputation is damaged.

I’ve seen the following scenario play out innumerable times. Imagine you’re interviewing for a job that has dozens of candidates. The interview goes well and you appear to be a great match for the position. During the meeting, the interviewer looks at your résumé and realizes that you used to work with an old friend of hers. After the interview, she makes a quick call to her friend to ask about you. A casual comment from her friend about your past performance can seal the deal or cut you off at the knees. In many cases you will believe the job was in the bag, right before you receive a rejection letter. You’ll never know what hit you.

Essentially, your reputation is your most valuable asset—so guard it well. But don’t be terribly demoralized if you make some mistakes along the way. With time it is possible to repair a stained reputation. Over the years I’ve come up with a metaphor that has helped me put this in perspective: every experience you have with someone else is like a drop of water falling into a pool. As your experiences with that person grow, the drops accumulate and the pool deepens. Positive interactions are clear drops of water and negative interactions are red drops of water. But they aren’t equal. That is, a number of clear drops can dilute one red drop, and that number differs for different people. Those who are very forgiving only need a few positive experiences—clear drops—to dilute a bad experience, while those who are less forgiving need a lot more to wash away the red. Also, for most people the pool drains slowly. As a result, we tend to pay attention to the experiences that have happened most recently, as opposed to those that happened a long time ago. This metaphor implies that if you have a large reserve of positive experiences with someone, then one red drop is hardly noticed. It’s like putting a drop of red ink into the ocean. But if you don’t know a person well, one bad experience stains the pool bright red. You can wash away negative interactions by flooding the pool with positive interactions until the red drops fade, but the deeper the red, the more work you have to do to cleanse the pool. I’ve found that sometimes the pool color never clears; when that happens, it’s time to stop interacting with that particular person.

This serves as a reminder of the importance of every experience we have with others, whether they are friends, family, co-workers, or service providers. In fact, some organizations actually capture information about how you treat them, and that influences how they treat you. For example, at some well-known business schools, every interaction a candidate has with the school or its personnel is noted. If a candidate is rude to the receptionist, this is recorded in his or her file and comes into play when admissions decisions are made. This also happens at companies such as JetBlue. According to Bob Sutton’s
The No Asshole Rule,
if you’re consistently rude to JetBlue’s staff, you will get blacklisted and find it strangely impossible to get a seat on their planes.

Obviously, you can’t make everyone happy all the time, and some of your actions are going to ruffle feathers. One way to figure out how to handle these situations is to imagine how you will describe what happened later, when the dust has cleared. I’m reminded of a case a few years ago when a student came to me for advice. He was leading the campus-wide business plan competition and one team didn’t show up for the final round of judging. Like all the teams that reach that stage of the competition, the team had been working on the project for seven months and had managed to make it over a lot of hurdles to get to the finish line. The team hadn’t received the message about the presentation time, in part because it was posted late and in part because they weren’t paying attention. The student who came to ask my opinion was torn about what to do. He felt there were two clear choices: he could hold fast to the rules and disqualify the team, or he could be flexible and find another time for them to present their work. His gut reaction was to stick to the rules. Everyone else had managed to show up, and it was going to be a burden to reschedule. The only guidance I gave him was this: whatever he did, I hoped he would be pleased with his decision at a later date. I urged him to consider how he would describe this challenge if during a job interview he were asked how he handled an ambiguous situation. The delinquent team was subsequently allowed to present, and I realized afterward that thinking about how you want to tell the story in the future is a great way to assess your response to dilemmas in general. Craft the story now so you’ll be proud to tell it later.

Everyone makes mistakes, and floundering is part of life, especially when you’re doing things for the first time. I’ve spent countless hours kicking myself for stupid things I’ve done. However, I’ve also figured out that learning how to recover from those mistakes is key. For instance, knowing how to apologize is incredibly important. A simple acknowledgment that you messed up goes a long way. There’s no need for long speeches and explanations; just say, “I didn’t handle that very well. I apologize.” The sooner you do this after recognizing your mistake, the better. If you wait a long time to apologize, the damage continues to grow.

I’ve had many chances to practice recovering from errors. This story is particularly memorable: soon after I got out of school, I read an article in the local newspaper about plans to build the San Jose Technology Museum. It sounded like an amazing place to work. Jim Adams, a Stanford professor known for his pioneering work on creativity, would be the museum’s director. I called the museum office daily in an attempt to reach him, but each time was told Jim wasn’t there. Although I didn’t leave messages, the receptionist learned to recognize my voice and informed Jim every time I called. By the time I reached him, Jim had a stack of messages from me that was nearly an inch tall.

Jim finally agreed to meet with me. I managed to pass the test with him during the interview, but there really was no formal job to offer me and he ultimately suggested I talk with the woman who had recently been hired to lead the exhibit design effort. It’s not unlikely that her first assignment was to get rid of me. She invited me to lunch for an interview, but before we’d even ordered she said, “I just want to tell you that you’re not a good match for this organization. You’re just too pushy.” I felt tears welling up and had to think fast to pull out of the tailspin. I apologized, told her I appreciated the feedback, and said that most people would call me high energy and enthusiastic. I told her it was helpful to know I had inadvertently misrepresented myself. Clearly, my enthusiasm had been misinterpreted. The tension melted, we had a fascinating conversation, and I walked away with a job offer.

This story demonstrates that it is important to take responsibility for your actions and be willing to learn from your experiences. Once that happens, you can quickly move on. And echoing an earlier point, the course I now teach on creativity at Stanford, in the School of Engineering, was first taught by Jim Adams many years ago. It really is a very small world!

I recently learned from Jeannie Kahwajy, an expert on interpersonal interactions, that her research shows that those who demonstrate that they are willing to learn can turn negative situations around very effectively. Jeannie ran experiments involving mock interviews by recruiters of job candidates. The recruiter was primed beforehand to have a negative bias toward the candidate. Of the three groups of candidates, one was instructed to
prove
they should get the job; one was told to
learn
from the interaction; and the final group, the control, was given no specific instructions. She found that the recruiter’s negative bias was reinforced for both the control group and the group that tried to prove they should get the job. However, the candidates who set out to learn from the interaction reversed the recruiter’s negative bias.

Another essential life skill rarely taught in school is the ability to negotiate. Most of our interactions with others are essentially a series of negotiations, and we do ourselves a huge disservice by not knowing the basic tenets. We negotiate with our friends about what to do on Saturday night, we negotiate with our family about who does the dishes and who pays the bills, we negotiate with our colleagues about who will stay late to complete an assignment, and we negotiate with salespeople on the price of a car. We negotiate all day, but most of us don’t even realize it, nor do we have a clue how to do it well.

I run an exercise in class that on the surface appears to be a simple negotiation between a job candidate and an employer.
¹
There are eight terms—including salary, vacation time, and job assignment—to nail down, and each person has point values associated with each of the terms. Their individual goal is to each maximize their own points. Usually, the pairs of negotiators go down the list in order, trying to agree on each item. They quickly realize, however, that this strategy isn’t going to work. At the end of the thirty-minute negotiation, some of the negotiators have come to a resolution and others have decided to walk away without a deal. Those who have reached an agreement fall into one of two categories: those who are eager to work together, and those who feel uncomfortable with the outcome. Some pairs end up with similar point totals at the end, while others have wildly different totals. So what happened?

The most common mistake in this negotiation is making inaccurate assumptions, and the most common assumption is that the recruiter and the candidate have opposing goals. The candidate assumes the recruiter wants the exact opposite of everything the candidate wants, when in actuality they have two objectives in common, two that are opposing, two that are much more important to the candidate, and two that are much more important to the recruiter. Though contrived, this case mirrors most situations in life. Parties often share interests, even when they believe they’re on opposite sides of an issue, and some issues are usually more important to one person than to the other.

The key to a successful negotiation is to ferret out everyone’s interests so you can maximize the outcome for everyone. This is easier said than done, since most people hold their interests close to the vest, believing this gives them a stronger negotiating position. But oftentimes this strategy is misguided, because in actuality what you want might be right in line with what the other party wants.

Let’s take my recent experience purchasing a car. I assumed the salesperson wanted me to spend as much as possible, because I wanted to spend as little as possible. But I decided to test this assumption. While test-driving the car, I asked a lot of questions about the automobile industry, including how salespeople are compensated. I learned that this salesperson’s commission had nothing to do with the price I paid. His bonus was based upon getting an excellent evaluation from each customer regardless of the price of the car. I told him that wasn’t a problem for me, and that I’d be delighted to give him a fabulous review in return for a great price. We found a win-win situation. I would never have known or imagined that our interests were aligned unless I took the time to explore them.