The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

by Reid Hoffman

Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.

The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

Serendipity is the delightful word we use to describe accidental good fortune. An English novelist named Horace Walpole coined the word to describe a phenomenon he first observed in an old Persian fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip.”

By introducing regular volatility into your career, you make surprise survivable. You gain the “ability to absorb shocks gracefully.”

For centuries, literacy meant the ability to read and write. Those who could read books—and write them—held the power in a society.

Power shifted to those who, in addition to being reading-writing literate, could also wade through billions of bits and find the best information online. Author John Battelle calls this search literacy—the ability to enter the optimal search terms, wade through the ocean of results, and follow the links that lead to the best information.