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by
Reid Hoffman
Started reading
June 22, 2022
You were born an entrepreneur.[1] This doesn’t mean you were born to start companies. In fact, most people shouldn’t start companies. The odds of success are small, the emotional roller coaster constant.
and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.
To adapt to the challenges of professional life today and take control of our careers, we need to rediscover our entrepreneurial instincts and use them to forge new paths.
in the twenty-first century you need to also think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm of at least one living, breathing, growing startup venture: your career.
As we write this in 2022, we have entered a brave new professional world.
Massive large-scale changes have occurred, from where we work, to how we communicate, to shifts in culture, to political upheavals, to global pandemics. This updated edition addresses these recent developments.
What you will find are the startup mindsets and strategies that will help you expand the reach of your network, gain a competitive edge, and land better opportunities.
Globalization and the tech revolution have undone traditional career assumptions.
Technology automates jobs that used to require hard-earned knowledge and skills, including well-paid white-collar jobs such as paralegals and radiologists, to name
technology doesn’t eliminate or change the skills you need in many industries, it at least enables more people from around the world (often cheaper freelancers) to compete for your job by allowing companies to offshore work more easily—knocking down your salary in the process. Trade and technology did not appear overnight and are not going away anytime soon. The labor market in which we all work has been permanently altered.
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 aren’t inclined to invest in you, in part because you’re not likely to commit years and years of your life to working there.
Forget the old world of careers. That era is over. The rules have changed.
What’s required now is an entrepreneurial mindset paired with the concrete skills of startup entrepreneurs.
you need to think and act like
you’re running a startup: your career.
Startup founders are always moving. Reflecting. Improving. Communicating. They take stock of their assets, aspirations, and the market realities to build competitive differentiation from other companies.
They craft flexible, iterative plans. They build a network of relationships throughout their industry that outlives their startup. They aggressively cultivate breakout opportunities, and yes, these opportunities usually involve a fair amount of risk. They actively manage that risk. They tap their network for the business intelligence to navigate daunting decision points. To break free from the pack and flourish as a professional in today’s world, you need to adopt these same entrepreneurial strategies.
In the same way, you need to stay lean and agile; you need to forever be a startup.
The business strategies employed by highly successful startups and the career strategies employed by highly successful individuals are strikingly similar.
What I mean is, the principles for successfully scaling a company aren’t so different from the keys to “scaling” a great career—quickly growing one’s skill sets, relationships, and market relevance in the same way that companies quickly
grow their products, operating capabilities, and custome...
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Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea,
not a strictly American one. And, as the two decades between us attest, building a career based on startup principles is also a lifelong idea, not a generational one.
Given the backdrop of inescapable volatility that will continue to define the future, it’s no surprise that one of the most interesting trends in twenty-first-century career strategy we’ve seen solidify itself involves the classic hedge against risk: diversification.
