Episode #273
273: How to Get Lucky by Saying Thank You | Tina Seelig, Stanford Educator and Author
Tina Seelig is the Executive Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, the world’s largest fully endowed graduate fellowship program. She is also Director Emerita of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and has spent decades teaching creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership at Stanford, including in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and the d.school. Tina earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford Medical School, where she studied neuroplasticity, and has worked as a management consultant, multimedia producer, and entrepreneur. She is the author of numerous books on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, inGenius, Creativity Rules, and her newest book, What I Wish I Knew About Luck. Her work has earned numerous honors, including the National Academy of Engineering’s Gordon Prize for her contributions to engineering and entrepreneurship education. In this episode we discuss the following: For Tina, improving her luck by saying thank you means looking at her calendar at the end of each day and writing thank you notes to everyone who helped her that day. What a powerful story about her college professor. She thanked him 20 years after the class, and 20 years after that, her thank you letter was read at his funeral. As Tina said, there is no statute of limitations on saying thanks. Luck is also a long game. For years, Tina invited John Hennessy to speak to her class. And every year she wrote him a thank you note after he spoke. When she recently asked him if he would have kept speaking without the notes, he said, probably not. And she would have never known it was because she hadn’t expressed gratitude. Now Tina runs the Knight Hennessy Scholars program with John. I also love how Tina applies this in the workplace and creates a culture of people saying thank you by simply modeling the behavior.
