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Tina Seelig: The Power of Persistence and Inspiring Others

Name: Tina Seelig: The Power of Persistence and Inspiring Others
Uploaded: 2014-10-17T16:28:27+00:00
Duration: 1 min 55 s
Channel: GHION.AI
Description: In this talk, Tina Seelig emphasizes that successful entrepreneurship—and any ambitious undertaking—relies on two core capabilities: persistence (grit)…

17 Oct 2014 · 2 min

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1:55

In this talk, Tina Seelig emphasizes that successful entrepreneurship—and any ambitious undertaking—relies on two core capabilities: persistence (grit) and the ability to inspire others. She defines persistence as the willingness to push through obstacles, likening it to walking through walls, and illustrates its necessity with a story about founders facing near‑death experiences weekly. Seelig connects persistence to motivation and creativity, noting that these elements reinforce each other. She then stresses that ideas cannot be realized in isolation; they require convincing others—through pitching or storytelling—to join, invest, or consume the product. The talk underscores teaching these skills to students, framing them as essential for turning ideas into reality.

Chapters

Entrepreneurship requires two things. It requires persistence and inspiring others. Now, what is persistence? Persistence is essentially grit. It's those people who basically will walk through walls to get things done. It's amazing how important this is because starting a company is incredibly hard. In fact, it doesn't have to be a company. Starting anything is incredibly hard. Starting a rock band, right, Starting a trip around the world, starting anything is really hard. And getting it going and keeping it going and keeping it alive. It's interesting. This morning I was off site at a company with some of our students, and the founders of the company were telling their story and everyone was sitting on the edge of their chair because the company was having near death experience experiences just about every week. And it is amazing how much grit they needed to make it through all of those hurdles. So you need this persistence and grit, which is very much tied to motivation. Remember, we had motivation in the creativity piece. And the thing is that motivation and the creativity ends up sort of spinning around and affecting your persistence here. But that's only one piece because it's also critical that you inspire other people to join you. You cannot bring ideas to life by yourself. It's about getting people to join your team, getting people to invest in your ideas, getting people to use their products. I mean, even if you're artists, getting people to come to the play you put on or to look at your artwork in a museum, this requires incredible ability to inspire others. Now, we spend a lot of time teaching our students how to do this. On one side of campus, it might be called giving a pitch. On another side of campus, it might be called storytelling. But all in all, it's about inspiring other people.