As Grove says, “[A] career inflection point results from a subtle but profound shift in the operating environment, where the future of your career will be determined by the actions you take in response.”6 An inflection point at your company or industry usually will require you to either change your skills or change your environment. In other words,

“help interesting people do interesting things.” That

while entrepreneurial companies and people are always evolving, the choices they’re making are disciplined, not random. There is real planning going on, even if there are no firm plans. We call this kind of disciplined, adaptive planning ABZ Planning, and it’s what we’ll cover in the balance of the chapter.

Identify three people who are striving toward aspirations similar to your own. Use them as benchmarks. What are their differentiators? How did they get to where they are? Bookmark their LinkedIn profiles, subscribe to their blogs and tweets.

Entrepreneurs brim with curiosity: they see opportunity where others see problems, because while others simply complain, entrepreneurs ask Why?

Research shows that a team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member.4

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.

You have two types of career assets to keep track of: soft and hard. Soft assets are things you can’t trade directly for money. They’re the intangible contributors to career success: the knowledge and information in your brain; professional connections and the trust you’ve built up with them; skills you’ve mastered; your reputation and personal

The key, then, is to raise the likelihood that you stumble upon something valuable—namely, by courting good randomness and seeing the opportunities