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Start-up of You
Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
The Start-Up of You (2012) is a guide to how you can leverage strategies used by start-ups in your own career: being adaptable, building relationships and pursuing breakout opportunities.
In a world where entire industries are being ravaged by global competition and traditional career paths are fast becoming dead-ends, everyone needs to hustle like an entrepreneur.
- Anyone who wants to understand what the right career is for them and how to achieve it
- Professionals who are considering a career or industry change
- Professionals who want to leverage their network more effectively
Reid Hoffman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. He has either invested in or worked for a number of high-profile companies, including PayPal, Zynga and Facebook, but is perhaps best known for being the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn.
Ben Casnocha is an American entrepreneur and author. He founded his first company at 12 and at 18 was named one of America’s best young entrepreneurs by BusinessWeek.
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Start-up of You
Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
- Read in 13 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 9 key ideas
Synopsis
The Start-Up of You (2012) is a guide to how you can leverage strategies used by start-ups in your own career: being adaptable, building relationships and pursuing breakout opportunities.
In a world where entire industries are being ravaged by global competition and traditional career paths are fast becoming dead-ends, everyone needs to hustle like an entrepreneur.
Key idea 1 of 9
Adopt a start-up mentality to succeed in today’s turbulent professional world.
In the past, the career of an educated person usually followed a fairly predictable trajectory: Much like getting on an escalator, he or she would start with an entry-level position at a large organization, and gradually rise through the ranks, gaining more seniority and income as the years passed.
Today, however, due to macroeconomic forces like globalization and technology, the escalator has come to a standstill at every level. There are fewer people retiring, hardly any entry-level positions opening up and employees in middle management find themselves waiting for promotions which might never come.
If your own career plan has thus far relied on this escalator, alarm bells should be ringing in your head.
Fortunately, you can succeed professionally even without the escalator. Start-up companies have always had to live with unpredictability and change, and hence to succeed professionally today, you must apply a start-up mindset to your professional development.
The most important lesson is to be adaptable and vigilant: always consider yourself in permanent beta, i.e. as a work in progress, eager to learn and develop.
Prioritize learning opportunities. Too often, 20 years of experience really means one year of experience repeated 20 times. In permanent beta each year should be full of new challenges and developments.
Although a cozy corporate job on the escalator may seem low-risk, it actually increases your risks in the long run. If you are used to constantly adapting, even drastic changes cannot hurt you, because you will always land on your feet. If, however, you are used to passively standing on the career escalator, an unexpected event like being fired could be disastrous.
So remember, adopt a start-up mentality to succeed in today’s turbulent professional world.
Key ideas in this title
- Adopt a start-up mentality to succeed in today’s turbulent professional world.
- Find your competitive advantage in the intersection of your assets, aspirations and the market realities.
- Make plans A, B and Z so you can adapt as your understanding of yourself and the world changes.
- Pursue breakout opportunities resourcefully and tenaciously.
- Engage a lot of people to ensure lucky things happen.
- Gain an advantage by taking intelligent risks.
- Build high-quality relationships with trusted allies and establish a broad network of weak ties.
- Use your network to help you meet people, find opportunities and get information.
- Final summary
