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

by Reid Hoffman

Pivot into an adjacent niche.

Start learning a skill during the evenings and weekends. Start building relationships with people who work in an adjacent industry. Apply for a part-time internship. Start a side consulting practice.

start on it as a side project and see where it goes. At a minimum, just start talking to people.

The way to feel comfortable with these entrepreneurial strategies is to have one plan in your life that’s highly certain.

Your Plan Z is there to prevent these unacceptable outcomes from becoming realities.

Invoking Plan Z should allow you to retreat, regroup, and develop an entirely new Plan A.

The strength of the cofounders and early employees reflects the individual strength of the CEO;

“The team you build is the company you build.”

if you want to accelerate your career, you need the help and support of others.

when it comes to getting promoted in your job, strong relationships and being on good terms with your boss can matter more than competence.

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

Your individual talent and hard work may not be sufficient for success, but it’s absolutely necessary.

The nuanced version of the story of success is that both the individual and team matter.

Think of it as IWe.

Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.

Relationship builders start by understanding how their existing relationships constitute a social network, and they meet new people through people they already know.

The first is seeing the world from the other person’s perspective.

how to see things from other people’s point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.”

it’s only when you truly put yourself in the other person’s shoes that you begin to develop an honest connection.

The second requirement is thinking about how you can help and collaborate with the other person rather than thinking about what you can get from him or her.

you should let go of those easy thoughts and think about how you can help first.

time spent searching for shared interests, asking questions of the other person, and forging common ground. The effective negotiators spent more time doing these things—thinking about ways the other person would truly benefit

Start with a friendly gesture toward the other person and genuinely mean it.

ask instead, “What’s in it for us?” All follows from that.

Building relationships is the thrilling if delicate quest to at once understand another person and allow that person to understand you.

the best way to engage new people is via the people you already know.

First, an ally is someone you consult regularly for advice. You trust his or her judgment.

Second, you proactively share and collaborate on opportunities together. You keep your antennae especially attuned to an ally’s interests, and when it makes sense to pursue something jointly, you do so.

Third, you talk up an ally to other friends. You promote...

to actually know that there is somebody who is really smart, who you care about, who has your interests, and who is rowing in the same direction, is something of immense value.”

it’s our similar interests and vision that have made our collaborations so successful.

With an ally, you don’t keep score, you just try to invest in the alliance as much as possible. What sustains all this collaboration? We are both driven by a passion

We complement each other. We like each other as friends. We’ve known each other for a while—it

Physical proximity is actually one of the best predictors of the strength of a relationship,

An alliance is always an exchange, but not a transactional one.

“volleys of communication and cooperation”

Trust, writes David Brooks, is “habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people … slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other.”

In other words, as the score keeping becomes less and less formal and as the expectation for reciprocal exchange stretches

over a longer and longer period of time, a relationship goes from being an exchange partnership to being a true alliance.*

So weak ties are one way to achieve a wide-reaching network, but any relationship that bridges you to another world will do.*

Diversity and breadth in your network encourages flexibility to pivot.”

There are different limits for each type of relationship.

While the number of close allies and weak ties you can keep up is limited,

You can actually maintain a much broader social network that exceeds the size

by smartly leveraging this exte...

À la Dunbar, there are limits to the number of first-degree connections you can have at any one time.

friends of friends are your second-degree connections.

friends of friends of friends are your third-deg...

the median distance that separated a

participant from a target was between five and seven degrees.