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

by Reid Hoffman

To adapt to the challenges of professional life today, we need to rediscover our entrepreneurial instincts and use them to forge new sorts of careers.

Whether you’re a lawyer or doctor or teacher or engineer or even a business owner, today you need to also think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm

of at least one living, growing start-up ventu...

What you will find are the start-up mind-sets and skill sets you need to adapt to the future.

You’ll find strategies that will help you expand the reach of your network, gain a competitive edge, and land better professional opportunities.

So forget what you thought you knew about the world of work. The rules have changed. “Ready, aim, fire” has been replaced by “Aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire.”

Searching for a job only when you’re unemployed or unhappy at work has been replaced by the mandate to always be generating opportunities. Networking has been replaced by intelligent network building.

if you want to seize the new opportunities and meet the challenges of today’s fractured career landscape, you need to think and act like you’re

running a start-up: your career.

This means you need to be adapting all the time. And if you fail to

adapt, no one—not your employer, not the government—is going to catch you when you fall.

you need to forever be a start-up.

The business strategies employed by highly successful start-ups and the career strategies employed by highly successful individuals are strikingly similar.

He told me that even if his next move wasn’t to start a new company, he still was going to approach all of these critical career questions as an entrepreneur would.

entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one;

The forces of competition and change that brought down Detroit are global and local. They threaten every business, every industry, every city. And more important, they also threaten every individual, every career.

when it comes to your career, right now, you may be heading down the same path as Detroit.

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.

You can think like a start-up, whoever you are and whatever you do. Anyone can apply this entrepreneurial skill set to his or her career.

In 1997 Reed Hastings, a software entrepreneur living in the hills of Silicon Valley, was faced with a problem. He had rented Apollo 13 from a video store, returned it days late, and was dealt a late fee so nasty that he was too embarrassed to tell his wife what had happened.

His entrepreneurial instinct kicked in: What if you could rent a movie and never face the risk of a late fee?

but Reed knew from his years in the technology industry that it would inevitably evolve. He avoided calling his business DVDs-by-Mail (or some other name that was specific to the business’s current iteration) and instead came up with a more expansive company name: Netflix.

at the time of writing, Netflix accounts for more than 30 percent of all Internet traffic during the week. Soon, online streaming may well feature significant Netflix original programming, or incorporate some new technology not yet invented.

Gmail, for example, launched in 2004 but only left official beta in 2009, after millions of people were already using it. Jeff Bezos, founder/CEO of Amazon, concludes every annual letter to shareholders by reminding readers, as he did in his first annual letter in 1997, that “it’s still Day 1” of the Internet and of Amazon.com:

Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress.

Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. Keeping your career in permanent beta forces you to acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself, that you will need to adapt and evolve.

Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth.

Develop your competitive advantage in the market by combining three puzzle pieces: your assets, your aspirations, and the market realities.

This is what has made Zappos a trusted destination for millions of loyal online shoppers (and it’s also why it was acquired by Amazon for close to a billion dollars).

“A company hires me over other professionals because …”

What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable?

In other words, don’t try to be the greatest marketing executive in the world; try to be the greatest marketing executive of small-to-midsize companies that compete in the health-care industry.

What we explain in this chapter is how to determine the local niche in which you can develop a competitive advantage.

People list impressive-sounding-yet-vague statements like “I have two years of experience working at a marketing firm …” instead of specifying, explicitly and clearly, what they are able to do because of those two years of experience.

Whatever your values and aspirations, know that they will evolve over time.

And keep in mind that the “market” is not an abstract thing. It consists of the people who make decisions that affect you and whose needs you must serve: your boss, your coworkers, your clients, your direct reports, and others.

How badly do they

need what you have to offer, and if they need it, do you offer value that’s bett...

Specifically, entrepreneurs spend vast amounts of energy trying to figure out what customers will pay for.

Because ultimately, the success of all businesses depends on customers willing to sign on the line that is dotted.

In turn, the success of all professionals—the start-up of you—depends on employers and clients and partn...

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.

Developing a key skill, for example, doesn’t automatically give you a competitive edge. Just because you’re good at something (assets) that you’re really passionate about (aspirations) doesn’t necessarily mean someone will pay you to do it (market realities).

Following your passions also doesn’t automatically lead to career flourishing.

Building a competitive advantage in the marketplace involves combining the three pieces at every career juncture.

it’s equally effective to place yourself in a market niche where your existing assets shine brighter than the

competition’s.

LinkedIn, from the outset, struck a different path from its competitors. In 2003, when LinkedIn started, its competitors were largely enterprise focused. Enterprise networks tied a person’s profile and identity to a specific company and employer. Instead, LinkedIn placed the individual professional at the center of the system.

LinkedIn’s founding belief was that all individuals should own and manage their identities.

They should be able to connect with people from other companies to work more effectively in their current jobs and find strong ...