What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (Tina Seelig)

Tina Seelig（ティナ・シーリグ）は、起業家であり、大学教員である。彼女の著書から英文を抜粋した。長崎大学の過去問（2018年度）でも出題されているので、挑戦してみてほしい。また、TEDでスピーチもしている。

長崎大学過去問

https://shotosha.com/medical-school/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/03/%E9%95%B7%E5%B4%8E%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%A6%E5%8C%BB%E5%AD%A6%E9%83%A8_%E5%89%8D%E6%9C%9F_%E8%8B%B1%E8%AA%9E%E9%81%8E%E5%8E%BB%E5%95%8F%EF%BC%882018%E5%B9%B4%E5%BA%A6%EF%BC%89.pdf

TED

The little risks you can take to increase your luck

Before retiring, my father was a successful corporate execu­tive. He rose up through the ranks, from young engineer to manager to executive, and had senior roles at several large multinational companies. Growing up, I got used to learning that he had received promotions, from vice president to execu­tive vice president to senior executive vice president, and so on. It happened like clockwork every two years or so. I was always impressed by my father’s accom plishments and viewed him as a wonderful role m odel. That said, I couldn ’t have been more surprised when my father got annoyed with me after I showed h im one of my new business cards. They read "Tina Seelig, President." I had started my own venture and printed my own business cards. My father looked at the cards and then at me and said, “You can’t just call yourself president.’’ In his experience, you had to wait for someone else to promote you to a leadership role. You couldn’t appoint yourself. He was so steeped in a world where others promote you to positions with greater re­sponsibility that the thought of my anointing myself with that title perturbed him. I have come across this mentality time and again. For ex­ample, twenty years ago when I told a friend I was going to write a book, she asked, “What makes you think you can write a book? " She couldn’t imagine taking on such a project with­out the blessing of someone in a position of greater authority. On the other hand, I felt confident I could do it. The task was certainly ambitious, but why not try? At the time there weren’t any popular books on the chemistry of cooking. I wanted to read such a book, and since there wasn’t one available, I de­cided to write one myself. I wasn’t an expert on the topic, but as a scientist, figured I could learn the material along the way. I put together a detailed proposal, wrote some sample chapters, shopped it around, and landed a contract. After my first book came out, I was surprised by how little promotion my publisher did, and decided to start a business to help authors get more exposure for their work and to help read­ers learn about books that might interest them. Again, quite a number of people asked me what made me think I could start a company. This was clearly a stretch for me, but I assumed I could figure it out. I started BookBrowser in 1991, several years before the Web was born. The idea was to create a kiosk-based system for bookstore customers that would "Match Books with Buys." I built the prototype on my Mac computer using HyperCard, a program that allowed users to put links from one "card" to another "card," just like HotLinks on the Web today. The software allowed users to follow links for a particular author, title, or genre. I also met with local bookstore managers, who agreed to put the kiosks in their stores, and I talked with dozens of publishers who were enthusiastic about including their books in the system. Satisfied that the idea was sound, I hired a team of programmers to implement the product.