What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (5 page)

I met with a dozen current and former students, and asked them to share their stories about breaking free from expectations. After listening to all their tales about getting around obstacles in school, in the workplace, and when traveling, Mike Rothenberg, who graduated two years ago, summarized all he heard by stating, “All the cool stuff happens when you do things that are not the automatic next step.” The well-worn path is there for everyone to trample. But the interesting things often occur when you are open to taking an unexpected turn, to trying something different, and when you are willing to question the rules others have made for you. All agreed that it is easy to stay on the prescribed path, but it is often much more interesting to discover the world of surprises lurking just around the corner.

Knowing that you can question the rules is terrifically empowering. It is a reminder that the traditional path is only one option available to you. You can always follow a recipe, drive on the major thoroughfares, and walk in the footsteps of those before you. But there are boundless additional options to explore if you are willing to identify and challenge assumptions, and to break free of the expectations that you and others project onto you. Don’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone, to have a healthy disregard for the impossible, and to turn well-worn ideas on their heads. As the students described above learned, it takes practice to do things that are not the “automatic next step.” The more you experiment, the more you see that the spectrum of options is much broader than imagined. The sole rule is that you are limited only by your energy and imagination.

Before retiring, my father was a successful corporate executive. He rose up through the ranks, from young engineer to manager to executive, and had senior roles at several large multinational companies. Growing up, I got used to learning that he had received promotions, from vice president to executive vice president to senior executive vice president, and so on. It happened like clockwork every two years or so. I was always impressed by my father’s accomplishments and viewed him as a wonderful role model.

That said, I couldn’t have been more surprised when my father got annoyed with me after I showed him one of my new business cards. They read “Tina L. Seelig, President.” I had started my own venture and printed my own business cards. My father looked at the cards and then at me and said, “You can’t just call yourself president.” In his experience, you had to wait for someone else to promote you to a leadership role. You couldn’t appoint yourself. He was so steeped in a world where others promote you to positions with greater responsibility that the thought of my anointing myself with that title perturbed him.

I have come across this mentality time and again. For example, twenty years ago when I told a friend I was going to write a book, she asked, “What makes you think you can write a book?” She couldn’t imagine taking on such a project without the blessing of someone in a position of greater authority. I, on the other hand, felt confident I could do it. The task was certainly ambitious, but why not try? At the time there weren’t any popular books on the chemistry of cooking. I wanted to read such a book, and since there wasn’t one available, I decided to write one myself. I wasn’t an expert on the topic, but as a scientist, figured I could learn the material along the way. I put together a detailed proposal, wrote some sample chapters, shopped it around, and landed a contract.

After my first book came out, I was surprised by how little promotion my publisher did, and decided to start a business to help authors get more exposure for their work and to help readers learn about books that might interest them. Again, quite a number of people asked me what made me think I could start a company. This was clearly a stretch for me, but I assumed I could figure it out. I started BookBrowser in 1991, several years before the Web was born. The idea was to create a kiosk-based system for bookstore customers that would “Match Books with Buys.” I built the prototype on my Mac computer using HyperCard, a program that allowed users to put links from one “card” to another “card,” just like HotLinks on the Web today. The software allowed users to follow links for a particular author, title, or genre. I also met with local bookstore managers, who agreed to put the kiosks in their stores, and I talked with dozens of publishers who were enthusiastic about including their books in the system. Satisfied that the idea was sound, I hired a team of programmers to implement the product. Nobody told me I could or should do this…I just did it.

Over time, I’ve became increasingly aware that the world is divided into people who wait for others to give them permission to do the things they want to do and people who grant themselves permission. Some look inside themselves for motivation and others wait to be pushed forward by outside forces. From my experience, there’s a lot to be said for seizing opportunities instead of waiting for someone to hand them to you. There are always white spaces ready to be filled and golden nuggets of opportunities lying on the ground waiting for someone to pick them up. Sometimes it means looking beyond your own desk, outside your building, across the street, or around the corner. But the nuggets are there for the taking by anyone willing to gather them up.

This is exactly what Paul Yock discovered. Paul, as previously introduced, is the director of Stanford’s BioDesign Program. His home base is the medical school, which is literally across the street from the engineering school. About ten years ago, Paul realized that Stanford was missing a huge opportunity by not finding ways for the medical school students and faculty to work with the engineering school students and faculty to invent new medical technologies. The medical folks, including doctors, students, and research scientists, needed engineers to design new products and processes to improve patient care; and the engineers across the street were looking for compelling problems to solve using their skills. Over the course of months, the various stakeholders met to discuss ways that they could work together. It was a complicated process since the two groups work so differently and have quite different vocabularies. Eventually, they hammered out a plan and the BioDesign Program was born. During the same time period, other colleagues in different medical and technical disciplines developed similar partnerships and the groups were gathered under one large umbrella, known as BioX. The idea was so big that it took several years to implement and resulted in productive cross-disciplinary collaboration and a stunning new building that now stands between the medical school and the engineering school. This story illustrates the fact that sometimes opportunities can be found right across the street—you just have to look up from your desk to see them. Nobody told Paul to do this. But he saw the need and filled it.

I’ve talked with many other people who have found constructive ways to bridge gaps and fill holes that others merely walk around, and in the process have anointed themselves to roles others might not have chosen for them. A wonderful example is Debra Dunn,
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who spent a good part of her career at Hewlett-Packard. Her first job with HP was in the corporate headquarters. After several years she was strongly encouraged to take on a role within one of the operating units of the company, which would give her a better understanding of the inner workings of the organization. A position in human resources opened up in the test and measurement group. Although Debra didn’t see herself as a career human resources manager, she decided to take the job because it would give her a chance to get an in-depth look at the functioning of an operating unit of the company.

After a couple of years, HP offered early retirement across the entire company as a way to avoid layoffs. With this incentive, the entire management team of her group decided to leave. The charter of the group changed completely, and a new general manager was brought in. There were some big holes to fill. Debra looked at the voids in the organization and decided to seize that opportunity. She volunteered to run all of manufacturing for the newly configured division. She’d never run a manufacturing group before, but having spent so much time working with the prior manufacturing directors, she was confident she could do it, and knew she could fill in her gaps of knowledge along the way. She was certainly not the typical candidate for the position, but she successfully convinced her new boss she could retool. In the end, Debra brought in a fresh perspective and was able to make many positive changes in the group. After only two years, she used the same strategy to move into a senior marketing job at HP. Again, Debra didn’t wait for someone to tap her for the post; she simply figured out how to repackage her skills for the new position.

As demonstrated by Debra’s story, one of the best ways to move from one field to another is to figure out how your skills can be translated into different settings. Others might not see the parallels on the surface, so it’s your job to expose them. Sometimes the vocabulary in two disparate fields is completely different, but the job functions are remarkably similar. Consider the similarities between being a scientist and a management consultant: soon after earning my PhD in neuroscience, my sights were set on working in a startup biotechnology company. The only problem? I wanted a job in marketing and strategy, not in the lab. This seemed nearly impossible without any relevant experience. The startup companies with whom I interviewed were looking for individuals who could hit the ground running. I interviewed for months and months and often got close to a job offer, but nothing came through.

Eventually, I got an introduction to the managing director of the San Francisco branch of Booz Allen Hamilton, an international consulting company. My goal was to impress him enough that he would introduce me to some of the company’s life science clients. I walked into the meeting and he asked me why someone with a PhD in neuroscience would be a good management consultant. I could have told him the truth—that I actually hadn’t considered that option. But on the spot, with nothing to lose, I outlined the similarities between brain research and management consulting. For example, in both cases you need to identify the burning questions, collect relevant data, analyze it, select the most interesting results, craft a compelling presentation, and determine the next set of burning questions. He arranged other interviews for later that day, and I walked out that evening with a job offer. Of course, I took it. In fact, it turned out to be an amazing way to learn about business and a wide range of industries, and I certainly did leverage my prior training as a scientist. Out of necessity and curiosity, I’ve done this again and again, constantly re-framing my skills to create new opportunities. When people ask me how a neuroscientist ended up teaching entrepreneurship to engineers, I have to say, “It’s a long story.”

All of these cases illustrate that in any complex organization, there are always opportunities around you. Even if tackling them doesn’t seem like a natural fit for you, with a little bit of creativity, you can usually find a way that your skills are relevant to the challenge. Paul Yock identified a missed opportunity in a university setting and designed a brand-new program to fill the need; Debra Dunn saw holes in her organization and found a way to leverage what she knew to take on roles others would not necessarily have chosen for her; and I figured out a creative way to reframe my skills so I could move between two fields that on the surface looked completely disparate.

Another way to anoint yourself is to look at things others have discarded and find ways to turn them into something useful. There is often tremendous value in the projects others have carelessly abandoned. As discussed previously, sometimes people jettison ideas because they don’t fully appreciate their value, or because they don’t have time to fully explore them. Often these discarded ideas hold a lot of promise.

Michael Dearing started his career in strategy at Disney, went on to launch a retail venture that failed, and then landed at eBay, a leading online auction Web site. Michael was initially assigned to a job he wasn’t thrilled about. He decided to use his free time to look at features that had been designed but then ignored or abandoned, ideas just waiting for someone to exploit them. It was the year 2000, and Michael saw that there was a new feature that let customers add a photo to their standard listing for an additional twenty-five cents. Only 10 percent of eBay customers were using this feature. Michael spent some time analyzing the benefits of this service and was able to demonstrate that products with accompanying photos sold faster and at a higher price than products without photos. Armed with this compelling data, he started marketing the photo service more heavily and ended up increasing the adoption rate of this feature by customers from 10 percent to 60 percent. This resulted in $300 million in additional annual revenue for eBay. Without any instructions from others, Michael found an untapped gold mine and exploited it with great results. The cost to the company was minimal and the profits were profound.

This wasn’t the first time Michael found a way to tap into resources around him. Even as a kid he wrote letters to famous people and was pleased to see that most of the time they wrote back. He still continues that habit, sending unsolicited e-mails to people he admires. In almost every instance they respond, and in many cases the correspondence results in long-term relationships and interesting opportunities. He never asks the folks he writes for anything. His initial contact is all about thanking them for something they’ve done, acknowledging something they’ve accomplished, asking a simple question, or offering to help them in some way. He doesn’t wait for an invitation to contact these people, but takes it upon himself to make the first move.

There is considerable research showing that those willing to stretch the boundaries of their current skills and willing to risk trying something new, like Debra Dunn and Michael Dearing, are much more likely to be successful than those who believe they have a fixed skill set and innate abilities that lock them into specific roles. Carol Dweck, at Stanford’s psychology department, has written extensively about this, demonstrating that those of us with a fixed mind-set about what we’re good at are much less likely to be successful in the long run than those with a growth mind-set. Her work focuses on our attitude about ourselves. Those with a fixed image about what they can do are much less likely to take risks that might shake that image. But those with a growth mind-set are typically open to taking risks and tend to work harder to reach their objectives. They’re willing to try new things that push their abilities, opening up entirely new arenas along the way.

So how do you find holes that need to be filled? It’s actually quite simple. The first step is learning how to pay attention. My colleagues at the d.school developed the following exercise, which gets at the heart of identifying opportunities. Participants are asked to take out their wallets. They then break up into pairs and interview one another about their wallets. They discuss what they love and hate about their wallets, paying particular attention to how they use them for purchasing and storage.

One of the most interesting insights comes from watching each person pull out his or her wallet at the beginning. Some of the wallets are trim and neat, some are practically exploding with papers, some are fashion statements, some carry the individual’s entire library of photos and receipts, and some consist of little more than a paper clip. Clearly, a wallet plays a different role for each of us. The interview process exposes how each person uses his or her wallet, what it represents, and the strange behaviors each has developed to get around the wallet’s limitations. I’ve never seen a person who is completely satisfied with his or her wallet: there is always something that can be fixed. In fact, most people are walking around with wallets that drive them crazy in some way. They discuss their frustrations with the size of their wallets, their inability to find things easily, or their desire to have different types of wallets for different occasions.