These days I'm really into creativity, and how we can foster it, and how it can help us lead happier and more fulfilled lives. Plus it's fun. So when I saw today's guest, Tina Seelig, give 90 seconds of truly excellent advice to Daniel Pink's audience in his PinkCast, I reached out to see if she would be willing to share her wisdom "long form" with the Plant Yourself crowd.
Here's what we can learn about Tina from the first paragraph of her website:
"Tina Seelig is Professor of the Practice in Stanford University’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, and is a faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She teaches courses in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) and leads three fellowship programs in the School of Engineering that are focused on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
"Dr. Seelig earned her PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford Medical School, and has been a management consultant, entrepreneur, and author of 17 books, including
Insight Out (2016),
inGenius (2012), and
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (2009). She is the recipient of the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Olympus Innovation Award, and the Silicon Valley Visionary Award."
I wanted to see how to apply the advice from her latest book, Creativity Rules, to the problem of how to live a healthy life. Dr Seelig graciously played along, as we discussed the concepts in Creativity Rules and brainstormed ways to apply them to eating, working out, and dealing with social pressure.
We covered:
- the art of seeing and seizing opportunities
- the passion/confidence matrix
- "it's a crime not to teach people to be entrepreneurial"
- a workaday definition of entrepreneurship: "doing more than is imaginable with less than is possible" (I may be paraphrasing; my typing can't compete with her speaking ;)
- the invention cycle
- imagination: the ability to envision things that don't yet exist
- creativity: applying imagination to address a challenge
- innovation: applying creativity to create a unique solution
- entrepreneurship: applying innovation to scale ideas and bring them into the world
- the importance of asking the right question, and the skill of reframing
- the key strategy of doing experiments
- the "first right answer" trap
- the "challenging assumptions" game - "what would happen if the opposites were true?"
- pretotyping to avoid costly mistakes
- the goal: shortest time to data
- the palm pilot and the Pinocchio test
- what should we visualize: the outcome, or the steps required to get us there?
- a new writing form: the failure resume
- the abundance mindset makes it easier to resist food
- the compounding effect of very small daily improvements
- and much more...