Dr. Seelig’s TEDxStanford talk: A Crash Course in Creativity —

One trick that has helped me: before I go to sleep at night I give myself the challenge of thinking about a certain topic I want to work on for that next day. Then I get up and write for three hours on that topic.I rarely go to sleep without giving myself something to noodle on. Somehow there is some sort of subconscious processing going on and I usually wake up with a bunch of really good ideas.You know, I’ve noticed that the most interesting people I’ve met have taken very unusual career paths. I could tell you the story of my career and make it look like it was completely planned and there were never any side trips. Or I could tell the whole story of serendipity and surprises which was the inspiration for the book What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 .If you had told me when I was a 20-something and getting my PhD in neuroscience that I was going to be doing what I’m doing now, teaching entrepreneurship and innovation at Stanford, I would have been totally surprised and completely delighted. I would never have imagined it.http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gyM6rx69iqg

To do this, did you have to ignore your mentors’ advice?



There were many, many places along the way where the advice I was getting was counterintuitive to what I wanted to do. I hear this from my students as well, and I tell them that it’s really a gift when people disagree with you and don’t support your choice. You know why? Because it tests your conviction about how important it is to you.

If everyone always supports you and says, “Oh, great idea, go to work for McKinsey or go to Stanford,” you don’t actually know if you want to do it. Especially if you’re like me and want to please other people and not rock the boat. It’s really easy to go with the flow.

I see the biggest problem with young graduates is they’ve always done what everyone else wants them to do and then one day they wake up and ask “Wait, how’d I get here?” So having that resistance is good because it tests the strengths of your convictions.

What’s a key ingredient for doing innovative work?

You need the right surrounding environment. You can be an incredibly creative person but if you’re not in an environment that fosters that, your creativity is going to be stifled.

If there are rules in place where you get punished if things don’t work out that’s really unfortunate because you’re obviously not going to try anything new.

To get over this, I think leaders should fail publicly and acknowledge it in a thoughtful way, “You know, we tried this. It didn’t work. Here’s what we learned from it.” That’s the point – you need to mine the failures for insights.