Book Byte #15 Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman

Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

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📣 Curious Quotes from the Author:

“If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.”

“Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially.”

“The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.”

“For many people “twenty years of experience” is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.”

“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”

“Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.”

“For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.”

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“All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.”

“Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.”

“You need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.”

“If you’re in permanent beta in your career, twenty years of experience actually is twenty years of experience because each year will be marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”

“When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music”

“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.”

“There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. It is sorely needed.”

“A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member”

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📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:

This Book talk about how you should take the mindset of a startup and apply it to your Career. It gives use cases and charts a lot of startup type topics to you’re individual career. Some examples are make a Plan A, B and Z, pivot when you need to and use the plan Z as a fall back whenever you need it. Make little adjustments here and there amongst the pivots to experiment and find out what you really should be doing in your Career.

Another suggestion was to build a small network of people to help you in your career. A lot of Networking is just small talk with acquaintances. Narrowing in on that will result in many opportunities, as most actual opportunities come from people you are connected with but don’t know very well.

The Key Ideas for making your Tech Career more Startup Like Are:

1. Find your competitive advantage by combining your assets, aspirations, and market realities.

2. Plan a Plan A, B, and Z so that you can adapt as your understanding of yourself and the world evolves.

3. Pursue breakout Career Opportunities with tenacity and resourcefulness.

4. Engage a large number of individuals to ensure that you grab some luck

5. Take calculated risks to get an edge.

6. Establish high-quality relationships with trusted allies and a large network of weak ties.

7. Make use of your network to meet people, uncover opportunities, and obtain information.

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🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry

The Tech Industry moves fast and pays well. But there is one fault that it seems to carry more than any other industry, and that’s its Employee Unloyalty. Skills are insanely transferrable in the industry, so most of the time when you ask for a raise, you could easily be replaced with someone else vying for your job that would take half your current Salary, especially if they search from a Global Pool of Workers.

You must take every advantage you can to get ahead and use your network to find those big opportunities you might miss if you were comfortable with your job and getting paid extremely well for it. Get Busy Living, or Get Busy dying. If you’re not growing, your shrinking.

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🤝 Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:

What is one thing you can do today to better your skills and pool of opportunity’s in your Tech Career? What do wish you would’ve done 5 years ago if you aren’t happy with where you are now? How do you not repeat that same mistake 5 years from now?

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