Stanford Professor Tina Seelig on Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Tina Seelig (0:00)

Before something is your passion, it's something you know nothing about.

That you can't assume that I'm just going to sit quietly by myself and my passions will reveal themselves. That's not the way it works. I mean, people have this fantasy that, you know, I'm going to go sit on a desert island and my passions will reveal themselves. No, you need to be engaged in the world. You need to try lots of things and see what resonates. And your passions reveal themselves through experiences.

Michael Gervais (0:40)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And the idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, to better understand what they're searching for, to understand their unique path, to understand their psychological framework, which is how they understand how the world works, how they understand how people work, their craft works, how they understand how they work. And we also want to work to understand the unique mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft.

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Okay, now this conversation is with Tina Seelig. Tina is a professor of the Practice in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a faculty director at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University School of Engineering.

So at Stanford, she teaches courses and she leads three fellowship programs focused on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Dr. Seelig also earned her PhD in neuroscience at Stanford Medical School and she's authored 17 books, including, which you might have heard of, Insight Out, Ingenious and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 It's a fun book. Okay, she is the recipient of the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Olympus Innovation Award, and the Silicon Valley Visionary Award. Tina is on it. In this conversation, we talk about the difference between innovation and creativity, and she's got a really clear and crisp idea between those two.