What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World

A revised and updated edition of the international bestseller

Inspiring readers all over the globe to reimagine their future, this revised and updated edition of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 offers timeless career advice for young adults and features new material to complement the classic text.

Major life transitions such as leaving the protected environment of school or starting a new career can be daunting. It is scary to face a wall of choices, knowing that no one is going to tell us if we make the right decision. There is no clearly delineated path or recipe for success. Even figuring out how and where to start can be a challenge.

As head of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Tina Seelig’s job is to guide her students as they make the difficult transition from the academic environment to the professional world―providing tangible business skills and a mindset for success that will last a lifetime. Seelig is a wildly popular and award-winning teacher and in What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 she shares with us what she offers her students –provocative stories, inspiring advice, and a big dose of humility and humor.
 
These pages are filled with captivating examples, from the classroom to the boardroom, of individuals defying expectations, challenging assumptions, and achieving unprecedented success. Seelig throws out the old rules and provides a new model for reaching our potential. We discover how to have a healthy disregard for the impossible; how to recover from failure; and how a creative problem-solving approach can turn most problems into remarkable opportunities in disguise.
 
What I Wish I Knew When I Was Twenty is a much-needed book for everyone looking to make their mark in the world.

In this indispensable guide to navigating life’s transitions, you’ll discover a new model for reaching your potential:

• Challenging Assumptions: Throw out the old rules and learn why having a healthy disregard for the impossible is the first step toward achieving unprecedented success.
• Turning Problems into Opportunities: Uncover captivating examples, from the classroom to the boardroom, of how most challenges are actually remarkable opportunities in disguise.
• Learning from Failure: Understand how to recover from setbacks and missteps, transforming them into the tangible skills and insights that will last a lifetime.
• An Entrepreneurial Mindset: Based on her wildly popular course at Stanford, Tina Seelig shares a new model for navigating the transition from academia to the professional world.

Tina Seelig has taught at Stanford University for more than 25 years. She is Executive Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a highly-selective leadership program for 300 graduate students across Stanford University, and Director Emerita of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the entrepreneurship center at Stanford School of Engineering. She teaches courses in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) and has led several fellowship programs in the School of Engineering that are focused on creativity, innovation, leadership, 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 inGenius, Creativity Rules, and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. Her TED talk on luck has been viewed over 3.4 million times; and based on her classes on creative problem solving, Dr. Seelig was the subject of a 10-part television series in Japan, produced by NHK. She is the recipient of the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Olympus Innovation Award, the Silicon Valley Visionary Award, and the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers Legacy Award.