Summary: “The key is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you.” The Start-up of You, front-cover flap Reid Hoffman (cofounder and chairman of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha share a little secret in their book, The Start-up of You: The workforce escalator is crowded. Not so long ago that wasn’t the case. After graduation, you made your way onto the escalator from the bottom step, and slowly rode your way to the top, attaining new career heights the longer you were on for the ride. But with the death of the traditional career path, the escalator’s overcrowded and many are left feeling exasperated and directionless. But it’s far from hopeless for those who look at themselves as a start-up. “The business strategies employed by highly successful start-ups and the career strategies employed by highly successful individuals are strikingly similar,” write the authors (page 20). All human beings are entrepreneurs. Get investing in yourself. Golden Egg The Evolution of You “So which is it? Should you follow a plan or stay flexible? Should you listen to your heart or listen to the market? The answer is both.” The Start-up of You, page 51 Starbucks and Flickr. They’re two of the biggest start-up successes in recent memory. But did you know that they were both very different companies when they started out? Initially Starbucks sold coffee beans and the equipment to brew it. Flickr wasn’t even called Flickr. It was called Gaming Neverending, where photo sharing was just one component. But it was that one component that took off. Recognizing that this feature filled a marketplace need, the entrepreneurs at the helm made photo sharing their singular focus, and Flickr is the result. Starbucks did the same, when they realized their quality beans and unique culture was their real market advantage. But for every Starbucks or Flickr who successfully (and almost seamlessly) evolved from Plan A to an unexpected Plan B, there are countless more examples of once successful companies who failed to evolve... and became extinct. One of the most obvious examples in recent years is Blockbuster. Blockbuster “just about laughed us out of their office” when a growing start-up met with them about teaming up in order to solve some of their distribution problems (page 20). That start-up was Netflix and the year was 1999. 11 years later, in 2010, Netflix made a profit of 160 million dollars, while Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy because they “failed to adapt to the Internet era” (page 20). Just as start-ups have to be adaptive, so do individual careers. Reid and Casnocha offer Sheryl Sandberg as an example. Sandberg grew up not taking her Western privileges for granted and graduated from school with the expectation that she would find a job directly helping others. And for awhile she was, working at the World Bank and later working on American policy. But her career took her to Google and most recently to Facebook where she is now the social media giant's COO. Sandberg isn’t helping others in such an obvious way, but when you look at the role social media (and Facebook in particular) has played in the Egyptian uprising, she’s still providing others with the tools to better their lives. The point is that no matter what you may think, the plan that you create for your career is bound to evolve... so long as you're open to the journey, no matter where it may take you. The two following GEMs will make it easier for you to shift your thinking now, in order adapt your career later. Because chances are you will have to. GEM # 1 Retain Your Identity “…have a professional identity that you can carry with you as you shift jobs. You own yourself. It’s the start-up of you.” The Start-up of You, page 64 We’re all our own commodities, and the faster we realize that, the better. Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor learned it when she was thirteen. When she wasn’t fired after telling off Louis B. Mayer,
