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

Whatever the situation, actions, not plans, generate lessons that help you test your hypotheses against reality. Actions help you discover where you want to go and how to get there.

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.

Ronald Brownstein, “Children of the Great Recession,” The Atlantic, May 5, 2010,

But as much as you can, prioritize plans that offer the best chance at learning about yourself and the world. Not only will you make more money in the long run, but your career journey will be more fulfilling. Ask yourself, “Which plan will grow my soft assets the fastest?” Even simpler: “Which plan offers the most learning potential?”

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.”

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 bra

Weak ties can uniquely serve as bridges to other worlds and thus can pass on information or opportunities you have not heard about. We would stress that it’s not that weak ties per se find you jobs; it’s that weak ties are likely to be exposed to information or job listings you haven’t seen. Weak ties in and of themselves are not especially valuabl

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