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

by Reid Hoffman

LinkedIn had the right philosophy. The large social networks like Friendster, MySpace, and now Facebook have massive popularity, but none t...

LinkedIn continues to invest in features that appeal to professionals and skips features like photo sharing or games that don’t con...

Matt Cohler,

Update your profile on LinkedIn so that your summary statement articulates your competitive advantages. You should be able to fill in this sentence: “Because of my [skill/​experience/​strength], I can do [type of professional work] better than [specific types of other professionals in my industry].” • How would other professionals you work with fill in the above sentence (i.e., describe your competitive advantage)? If there’s a gap, you either have a self-judgment problem, or a marketing problem.

Conventional career planning can work under conditions of relative stability, but in times of uncertainty and rapid change, it is severely limiting, if not dangerous.

Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield (who teamed up with Jason Classon),

Go where there’s fast growth, because fast growth creates all opportunities,”

Work in a market with natural momentum. Ride the big waves.

Instead of locking herself in to a single career path, she evaluated new opportunities as they presented themselves, taking into consideration her (ever-growing) set of intellectual and experiential assets. She pivoted to new professional tracks without ever losing sight of what really mattered to her.

“The reason I don’t have a plan is

because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s op...

Winning careers, like winning start-ups, are in permanent beta: always a work in progress.

It’s important to understand, though, that while entrepreneurial companies and people are always evolving, the

choices they’re making are disciplined, not random. There is real planning going on, even if there are no firm plans. We call this kind of disc...

ABZ Planning isn’t something you do once early in your career. It’s a process as important for someone in their forties or fifties as for

a newly minted college grad. There is no beginning, middle, or end to a career journey; no matter how old you are or at what stage, you will always be planning and adapting.

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. Within a Plan A you make minor adjustments as you learn; you iterate regularly. 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 the same general ballpark as Plan A. Sometimes you pivot because Plan A isn’t working; sometimes you pivot becaus...

elaborate Plan B—things will change too much after the ink dries—but do give thought to your parameters of motion and alternatives. Once you pivot to a Plan B and stick with it, that becomes your new Plan A. Twenty years ago Sheryl Sandberg’s Plan A was the World Bank. Today, her Plan A is Facebook, because it’s where she is right now. Plan Z is the fallback position: your lifeboat. In business and life, you always want to keep playing the game. If failure means you end up on the street, that’s an unacceptable failure. So what’s your certain, reliable, stable plan if all your career plans go to hel...

In the early days of LinkedIn, the plan was to have members invite their trusted connections by email—an invitation mechanism would fuel membership growth. But it turned out that the best way to enable viral spread was

actually to enable members to upload their address books and see who else was on the service already.

Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you’re vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B. Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry.

For example,

make the headline of your LinkedIn profile not a specific job title (e.g., “VP of...

but personal-brand or asset-focused (e.g., “Entrepreneur. Product Str...

Max Levchin

Peter Thiel

What I learned from the PayPal experience equipped me for my next pivot: trying again to start my own company. That company was LinkedIn.

How do you know when to pivot from Plan A (what you’re doing now) to a Plan B? When is it time to change divisions, change jobs, or even change the industry you work in? You’ll rarely know for

sure when to pivot or when to persist in what you’re doing.

What you’re doing now doesn’t have to be failing for it to make sense to shift.

If you find that the grass really is greener somewhere else, go there!

Andy Grove,

First and second order changes.

James Gaines

By the summer of 2008, just shy of his sixty-first birthday, Gaines moved back to the United States with two published books to his name. With a lifetime of print journalism and publishing experience, he could have held any number of senior posts in the trade. But he saw that the future had arrived and that old media may not have a place in it. So he pivoted to Plan B. He was excited, not panicked. Rather than mourn the past, he embraced the unique storytelling possibilities of a digital canvas. This positive mind-set sustained him during his learning curve.

Flickr’s Plan A was an online multiplayer game. My original career Plan A was to be an academic. Sheryl’s was to help the underprivileged, starting in India. James Gaines’s was to be a magazine editor. None is on the original plan now, and at first glance the current plans seem unrelated; but if you look closely you’ll see a logical evolution through the various pivots.

I am still

spreading knowledge and ideas about social life through LinkedIn, through the companies I choose to fund, and now through this book with Ben. Sheryl is still helping the underprivileged in places like Syria and Egypt who are using Facebook to organize and rally against oppressive governments. The best Plan B is different but very much related to what you’re already doing. As you think about your own Plan B alternatives, favor options...

Unless you need to take immediate action, one way to begin the process of

pivoting is to start your potential Plan B on the side.

Radio Show and Public Speaking Class

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. This is what I did when I began advising PayPal while still working at Socialnet: it was a side project that h...

At a minimum, just start talking to people.

If you want an even smaller baby step, take a “vocation vacation.” A company by the same name lets you test-drive dream jobs—whether

Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, industry. Reserve a personal domain name (yourname.com). Print up a second set of business cards with just your name on it and a personal email address.

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

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

In fact, the word company is derived from the Latin cum and pane, which means “breaking bread together.”

Business schools rarely teach relationship-building skills. It’s all about me, me, me, me. Why do we rarely talk about the friends, allies, and colleagues who make us who we are?

Research shows that a team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member.4

Your career success depends on both your individual capabilities and your network’s ability to magnify them.