Climbing the Wrong Hill | Cdixon Blog

Chris Dixon: "The mistake I see a lot of young people making early in their career. The next prize, promotion, bonus, is six months away. And they're on that treadmill, never willing to join a startup and take what appears to be a step backward, but is, in reality, a bigger hill."

The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjust

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- The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.- The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time. You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You have no idea what industries you’ll enter, what companies you’ll work for, what roles you’ll have, where you’ll... See more

Product Mistakes that Apply to Careers: focusing on acquisition instead of retention (focusing on networking instead of relationships & reputation). Or working in a space that doesn’t get more valuable over time (e.g working in a dying industry), or building another “me-too” product without differentiation (not taking enough career risk). Choos... See more

The key is that you’ll probably do your best work when your’ve earned your colleagues’ trust, which is the hidden value of staying put. This is especially true if your job involves making good decisions vs. doing something physical with your body. Good decisions require lots of quiet time alone in your head, maybe sitting on the couch thinking or g... See more