Tina Seelig

This is a story that has gone viral many times.

And I think the reason it has is because it so captures this idea.

I give the students $5 and two hours to make as much money as possible.

And I knew they could do something.

I knew they could have a lemonade stand or they could do a car wash or they could do something little.

There was something they could do.

But the students started continuing to frame and reframe all the possibilities.

And there were the students who said, hey, listen, that $5 is actually a distraction.

My skills are worth a lot more.

And they started doing things using their skills like, okay, I'm going to set up a bike tire workshop.

pressure measuring in the middle of campus and charge people a dollar to pump up their tires.

And they were extremely successful.

The ones who said, hey, there are all of these restaurants in Palo Alto near campus that have long lines on Saturday night.

I'm going to go make reservations and then sell them as the time comes up.

So they just kept doing things where they were making several hundred dollars.

And then the team that realized, hey, the $5 and that two hours were a distraction.

Their most valuable thing was the three-minute presentation time in class that they sold to a company that wanted to recruit those students for $650.

And the lesson from this is that opportunities are actually abundant.

We often just don't see them.

And so the framing just has to be, you need to think about the frame you're using all the time.