Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black.

And I'm Laura Owens. Our guest on this episode is someone we've wanted to have on for a long time because we really admire

her wisdom and insight on life, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Our guest is Stanford

Engineering School professor Tina Seleague, author of 17 books, including the international

bestseller and one of my personal favorites, What I Wish I knew when I was 20. Tina was trained as a neuroscientist and has always been interested in how we think,

especially how we come up with bold new ideas.

Her TED talk on the little risks you can take to increase your luck has had close to

two and a half million views.

Tina, thank you so much for joining us. It's my pleasure.

Thank you so much. You have been called one of the most creative and inspiring teachers at Stanford.

People love your books. They love your TED Talk. And I'm wondering, how did you acquire the wisdom

and insight that so many of us want to learn from.

Well, that's a very interesting question.

It's obviously, the topic is very, very interesting to me.

I have been fascinated by creative problem solving for many, many years, and having the opportunity to teach classes on this topic allows me also to learn a lot

about it. So every course I teach, I stretch myself as well as the students. You know, Tina, like we

mentioned in our intro, you have this wildly popular TED talk. And the basis of it is that luck is

rarely a lightning strike and is more like a wind that blows constantly. What do you mean by that?

Right. I really love this metaphor that, you know, we think that luck is something that happens to us,

but I really believe that luck is something we can create and that we can catch, that there are opportunities

to be lucky all the time, and that every single day there is this wind that's blowing, and you

have to build a sale to catch the luck that's actually in your environment.

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