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Title: Why didn't anyone tell me this at 20? Intensive to find yourself in this world

About the book “Why didn’t anyone tell me this at 20? Intensive to find yourself in this world" Tina Seelig

According to Tina Seelig, real life is an examiner who can ask any question. Leaving the walls of the university, you feel deceived in something - much of what you had to learn by heart turns out to be useless, while the most fundamental concepts of theory seem to be bashfully bypassed. And most importantly - where can I get such a cheat sheet that will fit for each of these new items?

Fortunately, such a universal cheat sheet exists - it is a bestseller "Do it yourself", which has earned a cult status among people who have decided to start their own business. Ask, is it too early to start your own business, barely leaving the university? In an era of breakthrough startups and “million dollar ideas”, it’s not too early, says Tina Seelig. However, the spirit of the times still forced the author to rebrand the popular book. An adapted version of the DIY book was titled Why Didn't Nobody Told Me This at 20? - and it really is the best guidebook for 20-year-olds in a world so unlike the world of textbooks with their strict hierarchy and orderliness. In the world of Seelig - the real world - "black swans" live, non-standard solutions and improvisation are valued, and the emphasis is not only on diligence, but also on imagination.

In Why Didn't Nobody Tell Me This at 20? Seelig voices an idea that is non-standard, even blasphemous for the traditional model of education - that it is more useful to learn from less brilliant teachers. This teaches future graduates to be more independent: while most tests that assess performance are designed to know a specific correct answer, in life several decisions can be correct at the same time.

Tina Seelig is convinced that students should not be turned into highly professional robots! And you don't need to help the world around you to make such an automaton out of you. Using a wealth of vivid examples from her own teaching, entrepreneurial, and scientific practice (Seelig, Ph.D. in neuroscience), she teaches readers how to find unconventional paths to success. From the book "Why didn't anyone tell me this at 20?" you will learn how to abandon the standard climb up the career ladder and at the same time not be thrown to the sidelines of life. Or maybe you are satisfied with the proven path to the goal, but you want to dilute it with experiments? Read about this and more in new version bestseller "Do it yourself"!

On our site about books lifeinbooks.net you can download and read for free online book“Why didn’t anyone tell me this at 20? Intensive on finding oneself in this world ”Tina Seelig in epub, fb2, txt, rtf formats. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and a real pleasure to read. Buy full version you can have our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginner writers there is a separate section with useful tips and recommendations interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary skills.

This is a repackaged version of the mega bestseller DIY.

Why did we decide to rebrand?

We have always positioned DIY as a business guide for those who want to come up with breakthrough ideas and build start-ups.

But we noticed that the book is very often bought, advised and given as a gift to young guys aged 18-20 who are just starting their journey. And then it dawned on us: after all, this book is much wider than just a business manual!

It is about how to find your way at any age, not to be dependent on other people's opinions and not to perceive life as an exam, where only one answer can be correct. It is about the fact that we are only limited by our energies and imagination.

She talks about how to use every chance and perceive life as a game, as a challenge. DIY author Tina Seelig teaches a course on entrepreneurship and innovation at Stanford University. Using many vivid and unexpected examples from own practice scientist and entrepreneur, Tina Seelig talks about a non-standard approach to solving business problems, breakthrough thinking and innovation in business.

What to look for when starting your own business? Where to find new idea? How to learn to solve problems? What to work on and what to spend time and energy on?

There are no rules at 20 or at 40. The only rule is that you are only limited by your energy and imagination.

That's why we decided to create a new packaging for the bestseller loved by everyone. Oh, if we ourselves knew everything that Tina Seelig writes about at the age of 20!

From the author

AT typical class there is a teacher who believes that his job is to convey information to students. The door to the classroom is closed and the chairs are bolted to the floor facing the teacher. Students take notes, knowing that they will then be tested for knowledge of the material. As homework they are asked to read the texts from the textbook and understand them on their own. This is not at all like the life they will have to lead after graduation. In it, we ourselves become our teachers, independently determine what we should know, where to find information and how to process it.

In fact, real life is an exam where absolutely any question can be asked. The doors are wide open, you can use a wide variety of resources and find solutions to a lot of non-obvious problems related to work, family, friends and the world in general. Carlos Viñolo, an excellent teacher at the University of Chile, shared with me that it is sometimes good for students to learn from the worst teachers - it prepares them much better for a life in which they may not have talented mentors.

In addition, when teaching in large groups, students' knowledge is usually tested using multiple-choice tests (of which only one is correct). To get a good mark, you need to indicate the required answer option. AT real life For each question, you can find several answers at once, correct to one degree or another. More importantly, there is room for error.

In fact, failure is an essential part of the learning process. Like evolution, which is a series of trial and error, our life is full of false starts and inevitable defeats. The key to success lies in the ability to learn from experience and move forward with this new knowledge.

For most people, the real world is nothing like a classroom. There is no single answer that inevitably leads to success, and the number options action can seem overwhelming. And while family, friends, and neighbors are happy to share their advice for any occasion, choosing the direction to move in remains our sole responsibility. That being said, it's good to know that we don't have to be absolutely right from the start.

Life gives each of us a lot of opportunities to experiment and combine our skills and passions in very different, new and unusual ways.

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The first thing Tina advises her son is to learn to see the opportunity behind any problem and look at all tasks more broadly.

For example, her class at Stanford begins with the fact that on Friday she divides students into several teams and gives them envelopes with 5 dollars. On Sunday evening they have exactly two hours to create one and cash in on it. And on Monday, all students are gathered together. Each team has 3 minutes of presentation to tell what they have done.

What ideas do you think students come up with?

One team bought a bicycle pump and pumped up flat bike tires on campus. Another team made reservations at popular restaurants and sold reservations around rush hour.

But most of all - as much as $ 650 - the team that came up with this earned it. The students looked at the conditions of the problem even more broadly and found out that the most valuable thing in their situation is not even $ 5, but 3 minutes of presentation time on Monday. The guys found a company that would like to hire Stanford students, and sold them these same 3 minutes. Great move.

Plans cost nothing

The father of management, Peter Drucker, said, "Plans cost nothing, but planning is priceless." Scientist Nassim Taleb has a black swan theory, according to which all the best (and negative) events in our lives happen unplanned.

Tina is also sure that, of course, it is necessary, but only in order to set the direction of movement.

“Remember your last trip to an unfamiliar city or a new country? No matter how carefully you plan it, the most memorable things happen to you completely unplanned: you suddenly meet an interesting person who shows you places that are not on the map. Or you take a wrong turn and discover some interesting sights that are not in the guidebook, writes Tina. - I advise you to plan your career as well as travel planning. Mark some points for yourself, but at the same time always be ready to seize and recognize a new opportunity.

Every day you get a million dollars

Carlos Vignolo from the University of Chile is sure that every day you can go out into the street and find a million dollars there. A million dollars is, of course, a metaphor. It means that the world is full of opportunities that you just need to take.

When you leave your home, you meet daily interesting people, some events happen to you, opportunities open up that can change your life.

If you're wary of the world, wary, and closed to what's knocking on your life, you're almost guaranteed to lose a million dollars every day.

Eyes wide shut

Tom Kelly, author of Art of Innovation, says that every moment we must behave like a traveler in a foreign country or who has just been born. We must take off our blinders and actively explore the space around us.

James Barlow, head of the Scottish Enterprise Institute, does this exercise with students. He divides them into several groups and gives them a puzzle consisting of 500 pieces. Then starts a timer to find out which group will complete the puzzle first. The secret is that each piece of the puzzle is numbered from 1 to 500 on the reverse side. Knowing the unique number of each piece, the puzzle can be assembled quite quickly. However, students are so preoccupied with theories about how to get the job done the fastest that they lose sight of this “minor” detail.

Our life is a puzzle

Another lesson is that we never know where we might need certain knowledge. “Even if you think that, for example, a course in calligraphy will never be useful to you in your life, but for some reason you are very drawn to it, study it! Don't look at how rational it is or not,” writes Tina and recalls the story (Steve Jobs).

When Jobs dropped out of college, he didn't have to take required classes. Then he - as Jobs himself said - a guy who had absolutely no idea what he wanted from life, went to calligraphy courses.

He later said: “I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about the correct space between different combinations of letters, and about what makes typographic art so great. I never thought that this knowledge would be so useful for my future life!

However, 10 years later, when we designed the Macintosh, we used them to build the Mac. And if Windows hadn't copied the Mac's ideas, it's unlikely that other personal computers would have had such fonts. If I hadn't left college, I would never have gotten into calligraphy classes, and computers might not have had the great art they have now. Of course, while I was in college, I could not compare everything that I knew and what I wanted. However, when I look back 10 years later, my path seems quite clear and correct to me.

In order to develop metaphorical creative thinking in yourself, you can do an exercise that is practiced at Stanford. Take any concept. For example, ideas.

Now write:

Ideas are like ______________________________,

because ___________________________________,

and therefore _______________________________.

And come up with as many options as possible, for example:

• Ideas are like sex because they are exciting too, and therefore you need to come up with ideas more often!
• Ideas are like a crystal glass, because they are just as fragile, so they must be protected.
• Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect everything around, so there is nothing to blame on the mirror if the face is crooked!

I wish I knew this at 20!

“I would call each chapter of this book “Allow yourself.” Give yourself permission to challenge assumptions, see the world differently, experiment, fail, forge your own path, and test the limits of your abilities. In fact, this is what I would like to know when I was 20, and 30, and 40 ... I have to constantly remind myself of this even now, when I am already over fifty, ”says Tina.

So allow yourself to step over the edge and see new opportunities.

In my creativity classes, I put a lot of emphasis on the value of creating new and unusual combinations of ideas. The more you practice this skill, the more natural it becomes. For example, we use similes or metaphors to describe concepts that at first glance seem unrelated. This gives us the opportunity to find fresh solutions to familiar problems. We usually do a simple exercise to illustrate this. We ask teams to provide as many responses as possible to the following statement.

Ideas are like ______________________________,
because ____________________________________,
Consequently, _______________________________ .

The list below is just a few of the hundreds of creative responses I've seen. In each case, the comparison allows you to take a fresh look at .

• Ideas are like children because everyone around them thinks their own children are wonderful, so be objective when evaluating your ideas.
• Ideas are like shoes because shoes need to be broken in, so you need time to evaluate new ideas.
• Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect environment, therefore, to search for even more diverse ideas, it is worth paying attention to what surrounds us.
• Ideas are like hiccups. Once you start, their flow will never stop, so you need to take full advantage of the time when you constantly come up with good ideas.
• Ideas are like bubbles: they burst easily, so you have to be careful with them.
• Ideas are like cars because they have the power to move you to a new place, so they must be used to move you in the direction you want to go.
• Ideas are like chocolate because everyone loves it, so remember to eat them often.
• Ideas are like measles because they are contagious, so if you want to have your own interesting ideas, spend more time with other people who are prone to.
• Ideas are like waffles because the best ones are fresh, so you need to keep coming up with new ideas.
• Ideas are like cobwebs because they are tougher than they seem, so don't underestimate them.

This exercise helps you expand your own imagination and look to the world around you for inspiration. Some people are able to do this quite naturally, with considerable benefit. Like , they are always looking for new ways to combine their ideas in an unconventional way, and then work hard to bring them to life.

An excellent example is the story of the entrepreneur Perry Kleban, who, unfortunately, in 1991, broke his ankle. The injury was extremely unfortunate, because this avid skier did not want to miss the season on the slope. Nevertheless, he managed to find a way to turn the problem into luck. While recovering from his injury, he found a pair of old wooden snowshoes and decided to try them out. It didn't work out particularly well, which was another reason for Perry's frustration. However, instead of throwing them back in the closet and waiting for the ankle to heal, Perry decided to design new type snowshoes. At that time, he was just studying industrial design and realized that he could well use the acquired skills to solve his own problems. Over the next ten weeks, he designed and built eight different snowshoes. On weekdays, he worked on prototypes in the university workshop, and on weekends he traveled with them to the mountains and tested them. By the end of the tenth week, he was ready to patent his innovations.

Atlas Race, Perry Kleban snowshoes

So, as we have seen, we are quite capable of projecting our luck through hard work and focus on goals. However, we have other tools at our disposal: openness to new opportunities that come our way, taking advantage of the opportunities that arise, carefully paying attention to the world around us, communicating with the widest possible range of people and making this interaction as positive as possible. A person's luck is always associated with turning a bad situation into a good one or improving an already good situation. When we begin to consciously place ourselves in unfamiliar circumstances and gather new and unusual experiences as we fearlessly attempt to rise to the stage where we want to play the play of our lives, our chances of success are greatly enhanced.

The author is a professor at Stanford University, and also a neurologist, lecturer, entrepreneur, wife and mom, Tina Seelig (Tina Seelig). She created this book based on the notes for her son, who was preparing to enter college, and did it in an emergency mode in a few months. Two points follow from this:

The book is chaotic and chaotic in places; You can easily lose the thread of the story. This is not the most ordered Tracy with chewed frogs, although at the end of the book Tina Seelig summarizes everything that she managed to scatter across the pages.

The book is intended for those who are at the beginning of the path, mainly entrepreneurial. However, it will come in handy for a startupper, a training leader (there are a lot of exercises and ideas for working in a group in the book), and a teacher, and just a lover of motivating business literature. Tina herself calls a person an entrepreneur

who is concerned with identifying problems and turning them into outstanding opportunities.

In 2013, this book was published under the title "Do it yourself. Tips for those who want to leave their mark" . The new edition returned the original title "Why didn't anyone tell me this at the age of 20? Intensive to find yourself in this world."

An intensive is not equal to an algorithm or a recipe, it is just a concentrated collection of ideas and stories that, although very American in spirit (people, firms, realities), are read somehow livelier than in the sincere "Chicken Soup for the Soul". From the heap of these notes, you need to isolate the main thing, and this book by Tina Seelig reminded me of "Bird by Bird".

The feature of the book is a large number of references to research and thematic videos (one of them - with counting basketball passes - I even looked, I was so interested in its book description). Links are convenient to use in the electronic version of the book, it will be more difficult to enter them from paper.

Basic moments:

Constantly looking for something to improve, the problem to be solved. If not, create and promote your ideas (did you come up with a special model of snowshoes? - go and praise it to sellers in sporting goods, take them out for walks in the forest, offer hotels to organize special tracks). Don't wait for someone to let you do it - kick yourself.

In fact, we are not taught to take problems for granted. On the contrary, we are taught that problems should be avoided or complained about.

Find unresolved issues in your organization, ask yourself what you want, find a way to apply your skills and experience, express a desire to take the first step and go somewhere you haven't been yet. There are always plenty of opportunities around you waiting for you to work on them.

If you think about it even in the most crazy idea you can find a rational grain(bikini in Antarctica? - yes easily!).

Sometimes people reject ideas because they can't see their value or because they don't have time to study them carefully. But often these discarded ideas turn out to be quite promising.

In essence, the purpose of this book is to encourage you to look at life from a new perspective, recognize the obstacles you face every day, and chart a plan for moving into the future. The book allows you to question conventional wisdom and re-evaluate the rules by which the world around us lives.

- a clear plan does not have to be followed exactly(the authors of the methodology and the book about 12 weeks a year do not agree!).

I advise you to plan your career as well as travel planning. Mark some points for yourself, but at the same time always be ready to seize and recognize a new opportunity.

- work must be meaningful- understand why you are trying

“If you pour gasoline on a log, you end up with a wet log. However, if you pour gasoline on a small fire, you will get hellfire. In other words, it is important to clearly understand whether you are investing your energy in something that can provide a return. This is one of the biggest problems in life. We too often spend a lot of time moving into a dead end.

So, this is another book about getting out of your comfort zone (send me a book that says how to get into this zone and stay in it!). Finding a problem, solving it in amazing ways, working through failures and going beyond.

In real life, for every question you can find several answers at once, correct to one degree or another. More importantly, there is room for error. In fact, failure is an essential part of the learning process.

The author constantly gives examples of people who did this, including Steve Jobs. Of course, it is interesting to be inspired by someone's example and decide on a risk or a sharp turn. But the fact that the book does not contain stories of people who did not succeed does not mean that such people did not exist. They simply were not written about ... This, too, must be borne in mind when rushing to turn a paper clip into a house and earn your "a lot of money" in five minutes.

P.S. When I had already finished writing this review, my second grader came to ask for advice on school project. We got into a conversation, and the example of the Cirque du Soleil came up very well. You never know where and what you read will come in handy.