The Start-Up of You

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• “Only the paranoid survive.
• 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
• unless it’s first, only, faster, better, or cheaper—it’s not going to command anyone’s attention.
• When sifting through applications for almost any job, employers and hiring managers are quickly overcome by the sameness.2 It’s a blur.
• 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.
• Entrepreneur and writer Chris Yeh says his career mission is to “help interesting people do interesting
• 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.
• 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).
• You will change. The environment around you will change. Your allies and competitors will change.
• Whatever the situation, actions, not plans, generate lessons that help you test your hypotheses against reality. Actions help you discover where you want to go and how to get there.
• come upon may offer immediate gratification,
• 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.
• 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.
• The best Plan B is different but very much related to what you’re already doing
• 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.
• The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
• 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.
• an optimal blend of cohesion and creativity (that is, strong ties and weak ties) within the social networks of the people behind the scenes.
• There are always breakout projects, connections, specific experiences, and yes, strokes of luck—that lead to unusually rapid career growth.
• When you have no resources, you create them. When you have no choice but to fight, you fight hard. When you have no choice but to create, you create.
• If Microsoft doesn’t hustle one year, it will still count billions of dollars in the bank; if the start-up doesn’t hustle, it’s game over. If you want to find out how resourceful you can be, shrink your budget. Move your deadlines up.
• “Keeping your options open” is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.
• Author John Battelle calls this search literacy—the ability to enter the optimal search terms, wade through the ocean of results, and follow the links that lead to the best information.
• the rise of a social web allows trusted connections to act as information curators.
• Acquiring good network intelligence is hard. Anyone can read a book or blog. Anybody can talk to random people around the office or neighborhood. It’s harder to identify the right people to talk to on different issues, ask these people questions that invite maximally useful answers, and synthesize points into something meaningful. Network intelligence is the advanced game: if you do it well, it’ll give you a competitive edge.
• For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.