Da: Date:

~§: l11e little risks you can take to increase your luck
f) 1'1:~: Tina Seelig

I've spent nearly two decades observing what makes people entrepreneurship
e luckier than others and trying to help people increase their luck. n.~J~~
You see, I teach entrepreneurship, and we all know that most new
innovators
ventures fail, and innovators and entrepreneurs need all the luck
they can get. n.~Jffi~

entrepreneur
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e So what is luck? Luck is defined as success or failure apparently

caused by chance. Apparently. That's the operative word. It looks
like it's chance because we rarely see all the levers that come into
e play to make people lucky. But I've realized, by watching so long,
that luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic. It's
much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Sometimes it's calm,
and sometimes it blows in gusts, and sometimes it comes from
0 directions that you didn't even imagine.

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So how do you catch the winds of luck? It's easy, but it's not
0 obvious. So I'm going to share three things with you that you can
do to build a sail to capture the winds of luck.

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The first thing you want to do is to change your relationship with 0

yourself. Be willing to take small risks that get you out of your
comfort zone.
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Now, when we're children, we do this all the time. We have to do quantum
this if we're going to learn how to walk or talk or ride a bike or mechanics
even quantum mechanics. Right? We need to go from someone Art.J~
one week who doesn't ride a bike to, next week, someone who
does. And this requires us to get out of our comfort zone and take comfort zone
some risks. The problem is, as we get older, we rarely do this. We HIX
sort of lock down the sense of who we are and don't stretch
anymore.
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Now, with my students, I spend a lot of time giving them

@rco..uragement to get out of their comfort zone and take some encouragemf:)
risks. How do I do this? Well, I start out by having them fill out a ~mb
risk-o-meter. Now, it's basically a fun thing we developed in our
class where they map out what risks they're willing to take. And it
becomes clear very quickly to them that risk-taking is not binary.
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 Day: Date:
e There are intellectual risks and physical risks and financial risks intellectual
and emotional risks and social risks and ethical risks and political risks
risks. And once they do this, they compare their risk profiles with ~t.J/XL~
others, and they quickly realize that they're all really different.
financial risks
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I then encourage them to stretch, to take some risks that get them
out of their comfort zone. For example, I might ask them to do an
intellectual risk and try to tackle a problem they haven't tried
before; or a social risk, talking to someone sitting next to them on
the train; or an emotional risk, maybe telling someone they really
care about how they feel.
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I do this myself all the time. About a dozen years ago, I was on
6 an airplane, early, early morning flight on my way to Ecuador.
And normally, I would just put on my(.tieadpffimes)and go to sleep, headphones
wake up, do some work, but I decided to take a little risk, and I 1§1:tJl,
started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. I introduced
myself, and I learned that he was a publisher. Interesting. We
ended up having a fascinating conversation. I learned all about the
future of the publishing industry.
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So about three quarters of the way through the flight, I decided to 0

take another risk, and I opened up my laptop and I shared with him
a book proposal I put together for something I was doing in my
class. And he was very polite, he read it, and he said, "You know 0
what, Tina, this isn't right for us, but thank you so much for
sharing." It's OK. That risk didn't work out. I shut my laptop. At
the end of the flight, we exchanged contact information.
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Acouple of months later, I reached out to him, and I said, "Mark,
would you like to come to my class? I'm doing a project on
re inventing the book, the future of publishing." And he said, reinvent
"Great. I'd love to come." So he came to my class. We had a great V.~
experience. 0
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A few months later, I wrote to him again. This time, I sent him a
bunch of video clips from another project my students had done.
He was so1 ntrigued by one of the projects the students had done, intrigued
he thought there might be a book in it, and he wanted to meet those adj.~~
students.
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0 I have to tell you, I was a little bit hurt.
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0 I mean, he wanted to do a book with my students and not with me,

but OK, it's all right. So I invited him to come down, and he and
his colleagues came to Stanford and met with the students, and
0 afterwards, we had lunch together. And one of his editors said to
me, "Hey, have you ever considered writing a book?"
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I said, "Funny you should ask." And I pulled out the exact same
E proposal that I had showed his boss a year earlier. Within two
weeks, I had a contract, and within two years, the book had sold
over a million copies around the world.
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0 Now, you might say, "Oh, you're so lucky." But of course I was
lucky, but that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took,
starting with saying hello. And anyone can do this, no matter
where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world --
even if you think you're the most unlucky person, you can do this
by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone. You
start building a sail to capture luck.
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The second thing you want to do is to change your relationship

0
with other people. You need to understand that everyone who
helps you on your journey is playing a huge role in getting you to
your goals. And if you don't show appreciation, not only are you 0
not closing the loop, but you're missing an opportunity.
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When someone does something for you, they're taking that time
that they could be spending on themselves or someone else, and
you need to ackn"owledge what they're doing. acknowledge
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Now, I run three fellowship programs at Stanford, and they are
very competitive to get into, and when I send out the letters to
those students who don't get in, I always know there are going to
be people who are di~.P..Q..inted. Some of the people who are disappointed
disappointed send me notes, complaining. Some of them send adj.~m89
notes saying what could I do to make myself more successful next Q
time around? And every once in a while, someone sends me a note
thanking me for the opportunity.
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0 This happened about seven years ago. Ayoung man named Brian
sent me a beautiful note saying, "I know I've.been rejected from
this program twice, but I want to thank you for the opportunity. I
8 learned so much through the process of applying."
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I was so taken by the graciousness of his message that I invited graciousness

him to come and meet me. And we spent some time chatting and nJi~tlJ ; ~,t,
cooked up an idea for an independent study project together. He
was on the football team at Stanford, and he decided to do a project
on looking at leadership in that context.

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We got to know each other incredibly well through that quarter,

and he took the project that he started working on in the
independent study and turned it, ultimately, into a company called
Play for Tomorrow, where he teaches kids from disadvantaged
backgrounds how to, essentially, craft the lives they dream to live.
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Now, the important thing about this story is that we both ended up
catching the winds of luck as a result of his thank-you note. But it
0 was the winds that we didn't expect in the first place.
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Over the course of the last couple of years, I've come up with some
tactics for my own life to help me really foster appreciation. My
favorite is that at the end of every single day, I look at my calendar
and I review all the people I met with, and I send thank-you notes
to every single person. It only takes a few minutes, but at the end
of every day, I feel incredibly grateful and appreciative, and I
promise you it has increased my luck.
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So first, you need to take some risks and get out of your comfort
zone. Second, you need to show appreciation. And third, you want
to change your relationship with ideas. Most people look at new
ideas that come there way and they judge them. "That's a great
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idea" or "That's a terrible idea." But it's actually much more
nuanced. Ideas are neither good or bad. And in fact, the seeds of
terrible ideas are often something truly .remarkable. remarkable
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One of my favorite exercises in my classes on creativity is to help

students foster an attitude of looking at terrible ideas through the
lens of possibilities. So I give them a challenge: to create an idea
for a brand new restaurant.
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They have to come up with the best ideas for a new restaurant and
the worst ideas for a new restaurant. So the best ideas are things
1ike a restaurant on a mountaintop with a beautiful sunset, or a mountaintop
restaurant on a boat with a gorgeous view. And the terrible ideas n.Ll.JID!
are things like a restaurant in a garbage dump, or a restaurant with
terrible service that's really dirty, or a restaurant that serves
cockroach sushi.
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So they hand all the ideas to me, I read the great ideas out loud,
and then I rip them up and throw them away. I then take the
horrible ideas and redistribute them. Each team now has an idea
C that another team thought was horrible, and their challenge is to
tum it into something{brilliant. brilliant
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e Here's what happens. Within about 10 seconds, someone says,
"This is a fabulous idea."And they have about three minutes before fabulous
they pitch the idea to the class. So the restaurant in the garbage idea
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food from Michelin star restaurants that was going to get thrown
out, and they have another restaurant at a much lower price, with
all the leftovers.
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Pretty cool? Or the restaurant that's dirty with terrible service?

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Well, that turns into a restaurant that's a training ground for future
restauranteurs to figure out how to avoid all the pitfalls. And the
restaurant with cockroach sushi? It turns into a sushi bar with all
sorts of really interesting and exotic ingredients.
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cockroach sushi

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If you look around at the companies, the ventures that are really
innovative around you, the ones that we now take for granted that
have changed our life, well, you know what? They all started out
as crazy ideas. They started ideas that when they pitched to other
people, most people said, "That's crazy, it will never work."

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So, yes, sometimes people were born into terrible circumstances,
and sometimes, luck is a lightning bolt that hits us with something
wonderful or something terrible. But the winds ofluck are always
there, and if you're willing to take some risks, if you're willing to
really go out and show appreciation and willing to really look at
ideas, even if they're crazy, through the lens of possibilities, you
can build a bigger and bigger sail to catch the winds of luck.
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