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

by Reid Hoffman

Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself.

Companies don’t want to invest in you, in part because you’re not likely to commit years and years of your life to working there—you will have many different jobs in your lifetime.

Professional loyalty now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted.

You never know what’s going to happen next. Information is limited. Resources are tight. Competition is fierce. The world is changing. And the amount of time you spend at any one job is shrinking. This means you need to be adapting all the time.

Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity.

Instead, Netflix stays nimble and iterates, always in the test phase. We call this mind-set “permanent beta.”

If you’re in permanent beta in your career, twenty years of experience actually is twenty years of experience because each year will be marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. 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.

If a company’s product isn’t massively different from a competitor’s—as Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin says, unless it’s first, only, faster, better, or cheaper—it’s not going to command anyone’s attention.

“A company hires me over other professionals because …” How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable?

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition.

Soft assets are things you can’t trade directly for money. They’re the intangible contributors to career success: the knowledge and information in your brain; professional connections and the trust you’ve built up with them; skills you’ve mastered; your reputation and personal brand; your strengths (things that come easily to you).

Hard assets are what you’d typically list on a balance sheet: the cash in your wallet; the stocks you own; physical possessions like your desk and laptop.

Usually, however, single assets in isolation don’t have much value. A competitive edge emerges when you combine different skills, experiences, and connections.

Your Aspirations and Values Aspirations and values are the second consideration. Aspirations include your deepest wishes, ideas, goals, and vision of the future, regardless of the state of the external world or your existing asset mix. This piece of the puzzle includes your core values, or what’s important to you in life, be it knowledge, autonomy, money, integrity, power, and so on.

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

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

Likewise, your skills, experiences, and other soft assets—no matter how special you think they are—won’t give you an edge unless they meet the needs of a paying market.

Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it’s going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to anything.

But graduate school, while stimulating, turned out to be grounded in a culture and incentive scheme that promoted hyperspecialization;

In reality, most companies don’t execute a single brilliant master plan. They go through stops and starts, a couple near-death experiences, and a great deal of adaptation.

So what do A, B, and Z refer to exactly?

Plan A is what you’re doing right now. It’s your current implementation of your competitive advantage.

Plan B is what you pivot to when you need to change either your goal or the route for getting there. Plan B tends to be in t...

Plan Z is the fallback position: your lifeboat. In business and life, you always want to keep playing the game.

But in the long run, the logic goes, a person with a foundation of knowledge and skills will make more money and most likely live a more meaningful life.

Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation. They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind.

Whatever the situation, actions, not plans, generate lessons that help you test your hypotheses against reality.

Start with a trial period. Keep your day job. ABZ Planning embraces recoverable failure so long as it generates real lessons.

Think Two Steps Ahead Planning and adapting means thinking carefully about your future.

Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.

So instead of trying to do the impossible and predict when an inflection point will threaten, prepare for the unknown. Build up your soft assets and proactively embrace new technology so that if and when the inflection point does come, you are ready to swiftly parlay skills into a Plan B.

When I started my first company, my father offered up an extra room in his house in the event it didn’t work out—living there and finding a job somewhere else to earn money was my Plan Z.

Whatever it is for you, think of it as a lifeboat, not a long-term plan. 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; that’s why investors don’t evaluate the CEO in isolation from his or her team.

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

Benjamin Franklin himself “artfully constructed his Autobiography as dazzling lessons in self-making.”

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.

“There is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.

Many people can maintain at most eight to ten strong professional alliances at any given point in time.

Physical proximity is actually one of the best predictors of the strength of a relationship, many studies show.

If a close friend knows about a job opportunity, you probably already know about it. Strong ties usually introduce redundancy in knowledge and activities and friend sets.

Thus, there’s a greater likelihood a weak tie will be exposed to new information or a job opportunity.

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

Milgram’s and Watts’s research shows planet Earth as one massive social network, with every human being connected to every other via no more than about six intermediary people.

Here’s where the caveat to the Six Degrees of Separation theory comes in. Academically, the theory is correct, but when it comes to meeting people who can help you professionally, three degrees of separation is what matters.

A key factor in the success of a musical, Uzzi concluded, is an optimal blend of cohesion and creativity (that is, strong ties and weak ties) within the social networks of the people behind the scenes.

People change. You change. Some relationships just aren’t meant to last beyond a certain point.

Likewise, in order to accomplish something significant in your career, 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.

In a start-up, growth usually isn’t slow and steady. Instead, unusually consequential opportunities—certain breakthroughs, deals, discoveries—rocket the company forward and accelerate the rate of growth.