Start-up of You summary

For anything desirable in the world, be it customers, jobs or attractive spouses, there is always competition. Just as a start-up must find a specific edge over its competitors, you too must focus on finding your own competitive advantage.

A strong competitive advantage should emerge from the intersection of three forces:

Before Flickr became a hugely successful photo-sharing service, it was a multiplayer online game which just happened to have a popular application for sharing photos.

Before Sheryl Sandberg became the COO of Facebook, she worked at the World Bank, the US Treasury Department and even arch-rival Google.

Sometimes life hands you a breakout opportunity, a seemingly once-in-a-lifetime chance for rapid career development.

Consider, for example, the actor George Clooney, who after 12 years of acting had only landed occasional roles on B-list TV shows. Hearing about a new groundbreaking medical show called ER, he decided it was his breakout opportunity and convinced the producers to let him audition. The show was a huge hit, and the rest is history.

Just as life-changing job openings are rarely advertised on public job boards, breakout opportunities are not available at dedicated opportunity stores. Finding your golden chance is often really a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve your odds.

Risk is an inherent part of life, and almost all opportunities worth pursuing involve some degree of risk.

Different people have differing attitudes toward risk, and those attitudes evolve over time. The younger you are, the more open to risks you usually are.

Just as a start-up needs a team to run it, you too must assemble a professional network around you. A strong network exponentially increases your chances of professional success.

Unfortunately, the mere concept of networking can be a turn-off for many people. It is seen as slimy and transactional: collecting business cards from scores of people at parties and trying to extract favors from them later.

Few people engage their professional network to its full potential.

At its best, a strong network can help you gain access to interesting people, hear about new breakout opportunities and allow you to extract knowledge from a broad range of experts.