What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (8 page)

Getting too 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.

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 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 that 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.

The flip side of being comfortable with failure, and walking away from a project that doesn’t work, is the risk of quitting too early. Take the classic story of 3M’s Post-it notes, which began with an adhesive that didn’t stick and turned into a multibillion-dollar business. In 1968, Spencer Silver invented this “low tack” adhesive and promoted it internally at 3M, but initially no one was interested. It wasn’t until 1974 that a colleague, Art Fry, realized he could use the substandard glue to keep bookmarks in place in his church hymnal and spent his free time designing the product we now know as Post-its. It wasn’t until six years later that 3M launched the product across the United States. Today they sell more than six hundred Post-it products in more than a hundred countries. Imagine the lost opportunity if the engineers at 3M hadn’t realized the potential in this “failed” product. This mind-set is captured in the class project discussed earlier, where teams turn bad ideas into great ideas.

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 days of cycling up and down steep and winding mountains, the time difference between the winners and the losers boils down to a matter of seconds, if not milliseconds. 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. Marissa Mayer, who leads product development at Google, says it is important not to kill projects too early, but to morph them instead.
¹⁰
That is, figure out what part is working well and what needs to be improved instead of discarding it. Marissa believes that there is usually a way to extract some value from any project, even one that doesn’t seem to be working.

Google and other Web companies rely upon “A-B” testing. That is, they release two versions of the 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 the page, they can dramatically alter a customer’s response. Some Web-based businesses release dozens of versions of the same product a day, each altering the user experience in some small way so that they can evaluate the response.

A company founded by two former Stanford students, Jeff Seibert and Kimber Lockhart, uses this approach all the time. GetBackboard.com is a Web site for collecting feedback on documents. They continue to experiment with different “calls to action” on their Web site and keep track of which approach works best. When they had a green bubble that said “Get an Account Today,” they had an 8 percent sign-up rate. When the message was changed to “Easy Quick Signup,” the response rate increased to 11 percent. And when the text offered a “Free 30 Day Trial,” the response jumped to 14 percent. This type of experimentation turns failures into successes, and makes successes more successful.

Trying new things requires a willingness to take risks. However, risk taking is not binary. I’d bet that you’re comfortable taking some types of risks and find other types quite uncomfortable. You might not even see the risks that are comfortable for you to take, discounting their riskiness, but 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, like me, 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. Alternatively, you might feel perfectly comfortable with social risks, such as giving a speech to a large crowd. This doesn’t seem risky at all to me. But others, who might be perfectly happy jumping out of a plane, would never give a toast at a party.

On reflection, there appear to be five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual. For example, I know that I’m comfortable taking social risks but not physical risks. In short, I will readily start a conversation with a stranger, but please don’t ask me to bungee jump off a bridge. I will also happily take intellectual risks that stretch my analytical abilities, but I’m not a big financial risk taker. On a trip to Las Vegas I would bring only a small amount of cash, to make sure I didn’t lose too much.

I often ask people to map their own risk profile. With only a little bit of reflection, each person knows which types of risks he or she is willing to take. They realize pretty quickly that risk taking isn’t uniform. It’s interesting to note that most entrepreneurs 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 for their business.

Elisabeth Pate Cornell, chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, 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 last few sentences several times. 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.

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 several 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 upon all the information I had at the time, but in the short run it wasn’t a great outcome.

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 Lab 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, due in large part to its ability to make quick decisions with incomplete information.

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 to learn the way humans do. They created a database of human decisions that the car drew upon when making judgments about what to do. This data was 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 is real easy to think you are and it is real easy to get wrapped up in it…. But if you fail, or even if you are successful, it is not you. Your company may fail, your product may fail, but you aren’t the failure.” Keep in mind that failure is a natural part of the learning process. If you aren’t failing sometimes, then you probably aren’t taking enough risks.

How many people have told you that the key to success is to follow your passions? I’d bet it’s 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 passions and think it’s incredibly important to know what drives you. But it certainly isn’t enough.

Passions are 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.

Taking this a step further, perhaps you’re passionate about something and are quite talented in the field, but there’s no market for those skills. For example, you might be a skilled artist and love to paint, or crave surfing and can ride any wave. But we all know that the market for these skills is small. Trying to craft a career around such passions is often a recipe for frustration. Think of them instead as wonderful
hobbies.
¹

Alternatively, if you have talent in an area and there’s a big market for your skills, then that is a great area to find a
job
. For example, if you are an accomplished accountant, there’s always a position for someone who can build a balance sheet. For most people in the world, this is where they live. They have a job that uses their skills, but they can’t wait to get home to focus on the activities they love—their hobbies. They count the days until the weekend, until vacation, or until retirement.

The worst-case scenario is finding yourself in a position where you have no passion for your work, no skills in the field, and there’s no market for what you’re doing. Take the classic joke about trying to sell snow to Eskimos. Now imagine doing that if you hate snow and are a terrible salesperson. This is a bad situation all the way around.

The sweet spot is where your passions overlap with your skills and the market. If you can find that spot, then you’re in the wonderful position in which your job enriches your life instead of just providing the financial resources that allow you to enjoy your life
after
the workday is over. The goal should be a
career
in which you can’t believe people actually pay you to do your job. A quote attributed to the Chinese Taoist philosopher Lao-Tzu sums this up:

The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. 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.

The wisdom of this is reflected in the observation that hard work plays a huge part in making you successful. And, the truth is, we simply tend to work harder at things we’re passionate about. This is easy to see in children who spend endless hours working at the things they love to do. A child passionate about building will spend hours designing amazing cities with Legos
^®
. A child who loves art will draw for hours without a break. And to a child who loves sports, shooting hoops or hitting baseballs all afternoon will seem like fun, not practice. Passion is a big driver. It makes each of us want to work hard to perfect our skills and to excel.

The process of finding the gold mine where your skills, interests, and the market collide can take some time. Consider Nathan Furr, who started his academic career as an English major. Nathan was passionate about reading and writing, and spent his college days soaking up turn-of-the-century literature and writing essays that analyzed the work. But he soon realized that the market for English professors was impossibly limited. And even if he got a job in the field, the compensation would be pretty low. This was going to be a tough way to support the big family he was planning. Nathan spent some time thinking about other ways he could use his skills and channel his passions. After scanning the horizon for other options, it became pretty clear that he would fit well in the world of management consulting, which would allow him to use his research and writing skills as well as his joy of learning. The only problem was that Nathan didn’t know enough to get that first job in the field. So he gave himself a year to prepare. He joined organizations on his college campus that would allow him to learn more about consulting, and he practiced doing mini–case studies such as those presented during the typical job interview. By the time the one-year mark rolled around, Nathan was ready and landed a prime job as a management consultant for a top firm. It was a great fit in so many ways, tapping into his skills and his passions, and providing him with the financial security he needed.

Nathan picked a career path after he’d been exposed to a variety of options. But most of us are encouraged to plan much further ahead. People love to ask kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This forces children to nail down their goals, at least in their minds, long before they’ve been exposed to the wide array of opportunities. We also typically visualize ourselves doing the things we see others doing in our immediate environment, which is a terribly limited view considering the world of possibilities. Also, my guess is that you, like me, were heavily influenced by people around you who liked to tell you what
they
thought you should be doing. I clearly remember one of my teachers saying, “You’re really good at science. You should consider being a nurse.” A fine suggestion, but it is only one of an almost infinite number of things one can do with a gift for science.

During my creativity course, teams of students each pick an organization they think is innovative. These teams visit the firm, interview employees, watch them in action, and come to their own conclusions about what makes the organization creative. They then present this information to the class in an innovative way. One team picked the San Jose Children’s Discovery Museum. They followed the staff and visitors for days to see what really made it tick. At one station kids were building a miniature roller coaster, changing different variables to see the results, and an eight-year-old girl was experimenting with the equipment. She changed the length, the height, and the angles of the various parts and ran different simulations to see the effect. A member of the museum staff watched her experimentation for a while and simply commented, “You’re doing the same types of things that engineers do.” Later that day my students asked the girl what she had learned at the museum. She thought for a second and said with confidence, “I learned that I could be an engineer.”

Like the girl in the museum, we all receive explicit and implicit messages about the roles we’re expected to play. A couple of years ago a colleague of mine, a mechanical engineering professor, told a remarkable story. She has several women friends from her university who are also engineers in different disciplines. They often came over to her house for dinner and socializing. Her young son was usually around, watching and listening to their conversations. As he got older and proved to be good at math and science someone said to him, “Gee, you should consider studying engineering.” He twisted his face and said, “Absolutely not, engineering is for girls.” My women friends who are physicians have told me similar stories. Their young sons called discussions about medicine “girl talk.”

Consider the following riddle: A boy and his father are in an accident and end up in the hospital. The surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son.” What’s going on? When I told my very progressive women doctor friends this riddle, even they couldn’t figure out that the surgeon in the riddle was the boy’s mother. They tried to come up with convoluted answers to the riddle, all involving a male doctor. Once they were told the answer they were terribly embarrassed that they, too, had fallen into this traditional trap.

When I think back on the messages I received, it’s clear that specific individuals had a big impact—some were encouraging and others were not. When I was about fourteen years old we had a family friend who was a neurosurgeon. I was fascinated by the brain and finally mustered the courage to ask him about his work. He thought it was “cute” and made a joke. I was disappointed and didn’t ask again.

It wasn’t until college that I found a professional in the field who explicitly encouraged me to pursue my interest in the brain. I was in my first neuroscience class during my sophomore year and the professor gave us an unusual assignment. He asked us to design a series of experiments to figure out what a specific part of the brain does. He told us that nobody knew its role and that it was our job to come up with a strategy to find out. When I got my paper back a week or so later a note written on the top said, “Tina, you think like a scientist.” At that moment I became a scientist. I was just waiting for someone to acknowledge my enthusiasm—and to give me permission to pursue my interests. We are all powerfully influenced by the messages around us. Some are direct, such as a teacher saying, “You should be a nurse,” or “You think like a scientist.” Others are embedded into our environment, such as years of seeing only female engineers or male surgeons.

When I was in my early twenties, it was surprisingly difficult for me to separate what I wanted for myself and what others wanted for me. I know this is true for many of my students as well. They tell me they’re getting so much “guidance” from others that they have a tough time figuring out what they want to do. I remember clearly that I sometimes had the urge to quit or to avoid things that others strongly encouraged me to do, just so I would have the space to figure out what I wanted, independent of what they wanted for me. For example, I started graduate school at the University of Virginia right after I graduated from the University of Rochester. My parents were thrilled. They were so proud of me and were comforted that my path for the next few years was set. But after only one semester of graduate school I decided to take a break and go to California. The hardest part of the entire process was telling my parents I was taking a leave of absence. My decision was extremely hard for them. I appreciated their support and encouragement, but it made it difficult for me to truly know if being in school was the right decision for me. I drove across the country to Santa Cruz with no idea of what I was going to do next.

In retrospect, taking a break from school turned out to be a great choice. My time in Santa Cruz was completely unstructured. I felt like a leaf in the wind, ready for any eventuality. It was exciting and scary. It was the first time I didn’t have a specific assignment, a focused goal, or a clear plan. Although often stressful, it was the perfect way to figure out what I really wanted to do. I took odd jobs so I could support myself and spent a lot of time thinking at the beach. After a while I started going to the University of California at Santa Cruz’s biology library to keep up on neuroscience literature. At first it was monthly, then weekly, then daily.

After about nine months in Santa Cruz, I was ready to get back into the lab, but not ready to go back to graduate school. With that objective, I tracked down a list of the neuroscience faculty at Stanford University, which was not far away, and wrote each one a letter. I told them about my background and asked if they had a research job for me. Over the next few weeks, I got letters back from all of them, but no one had an open position. However, one faculty member passed my letter on, and I received a call from a professor in the anesthesia department. He asked if I would like to work in the operating room testing new medical equipment on high-risk patients. This seemed interesting, so I jumped at the chance.

Within days I was at Stanford, getting up at the crack of dawn, wearing scrubs, and monitoring surgical patients. This experience was fascinating in a million unexpected ways. Once the project was over, I managed to negotiate a job as a research assistant in a neuroscience lab and eventually applied to graduate school at Stanford. I took detours that might look to others like a waste of time. But this wasn’t the case at all. Not only did the twists in my path give me a fresh perspective on my goals, they also gave me time to experiment with options that helped confirm what I wanted to do. Also, this time I was going to graduate school for myself, not for others.

People who are close to you often expect you to make decisions about your career path and stick with them. They want you to be a “fire and forget” missile that zeros in on a target and pursues it relentlessly. But this just isn’t how things work. Most people change course many times before finding the best match for their skills and interests. This is similar to the process of developing a product or designing new software—it’s important to keep experimenting, trying lots of things until you find out what works. Being too set on your path too early will likely lead you in the wrong direction.

I’ve met many students who literally show me a detailed map of what they plan to do for the next fifty years. Not only is this unrealistic, but it’s sadly limiting. There are so many unexpected experiences ahead that it’s best to keep your eyes open instead of blinding yourself to the serendipitous options that might present themselves. Planning a career should be like traveling in a foreign country. Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and a place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned. You might end up meeting a fascinating person who shows you places that aren’t in the guidebook, or you might miss your train and end up spending the day exploring a small town you hadn’t planned to visit. I guarantee that the things you’re likely to remember from the journey are those that weren’t on your original schedule. They will be the unexpected things that jumped in your path, surprising you along the way.