Why I was happy to interview Tina Seelig (and you should listen right now)

For many years I’ve been a fan of Tina Seelig’s work. Her TED Talk on “the little risks you can take to increase your luck” is on my playlist. Her “$5 entrepreneurship challenge” once turned my class of passive undergrads in Kraków into beret-wearing, crêpe-flipping, revenue machines. Her books What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 and Creativity Rules sit on the short shelf of titles I actually press into the hands of founders and students.

So when the chance came to interview Tina for the New Books Network’s Entrepreneurship & Leadership channel, it was a genuine honour. The NBN is the world’s largest non-fiction author interview podcast network, and (full disclosure) - I’m an investor.

Her brand-new book, What I Wish I Knew About Luck, comes out in April 2026. The conversation is now online on the New Books Network and I’m glad to share it.

I think you’ll love the episode (and I’m proud of how it turned out):

  • Tina finally draws the sharp line between “fortune” (random stuff that happens to you) and “luck” (the kind you can systematically build). She then spends an hour handing you the exact tools to build it.

  • She tells the mortifying story of being accused of corporate espionage in an elevator three weeks into her first job — and how that shaped her moral compass.

  • We talk failure résumés, radical candor, why sending handwritten thank-you notes is such a good idea and why surrounding yourself with kind, open-minded people who disagree with you can give you an unfair advantage.

  • She explains the Knight-Hennessy Scholars programme she now leads at Stanford — think Rhodes Scholarship on steroids, funded by Phil Knight and John Hennessy, taking 100 future world-changers a year from every corner of the planet on funded scholarships meaning that you do not need to be wealthy to get in.

Even after 25 years of teaching this stuff, Tina still makes daily mistakes (she shared a fresh, embarrassing one from the week we recorded) and still keeps a failure résumé. If that doesn’t make the whole subject feel human and doable, nothing will.

You can listen to the full interview here: 🎙️ Tina Seelig on Making Your Own Luck – New Books Network

Or read my 300-word summary if you only have five minutes. Either way, carve out some time to listen. I’ll be coming back to it whenever I need a reminder that luck isn’t something that happens to other people — it’s something we get better at catching.

Enjoy — and thank you, Tina, for the years of inspiration, for your generosity of spirit and the example you set.

(And do pre-order the book) I have.

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What I Wish I Knew About Luck (Pre-order Tina Seelig's new book)

Richard Lucas