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

by Reid Hoffman

it’s okay to simply let those friendships fade.

trust can endure.

it is possible to rekindle/reactivate friendships later on when your lives are more aligned.

Actively maintain the relationships you value, and consciously let f...

It’s up to you—with the help of your network—to go out and find and develop professional opportunities for yourself.

you need to focus on finding and capitalizing on those great career opportunities:

the opportunities that will extend your competitive advantage and accelerate your Plan A or Plan B.

There are always breakout projects, connections, specific experiences, and yes, strokes of luck—that lead to unusually rapid career growth.

telling characteristics,

other people involved in the show were high quality—always important.

Clooney hadn’t yet played the lead role on a majo...

It would be a ch...

A career move that makes you feel in over your head stretches you in new dimensions and usually ...

you can develop habits of behavior and habits of thinking that increase the likelihood that you find yourself in the right place at the right time

There’s one disposition and mind-set that must be “on” like electricity to power all the other opportunity-seeking behaviors:

curiosity.

You could even say that entrepreneurship begins in frustrated wonderment!

For you in your career, curiosity (with or without frustration) about industries, people, and jobs will make you alert to professional opportunities.

To cultivate, identify, and generate an opportunity takes ongoing investment.

even if you don’t have an immediate reason to actively look for an explicit opportunity—even

it’s important to keep generating professional oppo...

builds opportunity muscle memory: the more you try, the more you strengthen your intuitive sense of how, where, and wh...

most successful companies and careers in fact go through many adaptations and iterations.

The key, then, is to raise the likelihood that you stumble upon something valuable—namely, by courting good randomness and seeing the opportunities that reveal themselves.

they got lucky, to be sure,

but they also acted sagely and wisely in turning unexpected setbacks into opportunities.

Serendipity involves being alert to potential opportunity...

They were out on the move, exploring, traveling widely when they encountered their accidental good fortune,”

serendipity involves exploration and journeys.

When you do something, you stir the pot and introduce the possibility that seemingly random ideas, people, and places will collide and form new combinations and opportunities.

if the goal is to court good randomness, you don’t want to be too directed in your motion,

be open-minded, but set smart parameters.

better yet, you can go to a conference, identify someone you know is interesting, and approach the people you see that interesting

person talk...

being str...

“The best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure a lot of things happen.”

If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for people.

If you’re evaluating an opportunity, you’re really evaluating people. If you’re trying to marshal resources to go after an opportunity, you’re really trying to enlist the support and involvement of other people. A company doesn’t offer you a job, people do.

Those with good ideas and information tend to hang out with one another.

Priestley went from semi-isolation to plugging into “an existing network of relationships and collaborations that the coffeehouse environment facilitated.”

what we find most entrepreneurial about Franklin has less to do with his personal talents and traits and more to do with how he facilitated the talents of others.

Franklin believed that if he brought together a bunch of smart people in a relaxed atmosphere and let the conversation flow, good opportunities would emerge.

If you want to increase your opportunity flow, join and participate in as many of these groups and associations as possible.

This is IWe in action.

Maximizing your experience at meetups can take some ingenuity.

You don’t always have to approach groups as an outsider. There are plenty of networks at your fingertips where you are already an insider—you just have to be a little creative.

What is it about this network that makes it such a uniquely rich source of opportunities?

First, each individual is high-quality.

A group is only as good as i...

Second, the gang has something in common—the