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

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 sa

Andy Kessler, “Is Your Job an Endangered Species?” Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2011,

So evaluate each piece of the puzzle in the context of the others. And do so regularly: the pieces of the puzzle change in shape and size over time. The way they fit together shifts over time. Building a competitive advantage in the marketplace involves combining the three pieces at every career juncture.

Use ABZ Planning to formulate a Plan A based on your competitive advantages, and then iterate and adapt that plan based on feedback and lessons learned. (Chapter 3) Build real, lasting relationships and deploy these relationships into a powerful professional network. (Chapter 4) Find and create opportunities for yourself by tapping networks, being

If you’re unsure what your first, or even your second, step should be, pick a first step with high option value, meaning that it could lead to a broad range of options.

The business professor Clayton Christensen once told graduating students at Harvard Business School, “If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find [a] predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.”

Second, this philosophy presumes that fixed, accurate self-knowledge can be easily attained. In fact, lofty questions about identity and moral purpose, along with deceptively simple ones like “What am I passionate about?” take time to work out, and the answers frequently change. It’s unwise, no matter your stage of life, to try to pinpoint a single

The best thing to do is to think and plan two steps ahead. If you’d like to be promoted from analyst to associate,

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition. The best direction has you pursuing worthy aspirations, using your assets, while navigating the ma