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

Plan Z is the fallback position: your lifeboat. In business and life, you always want to keep playing the game. If failure means you end up on the street, that’s an unacceptable failure. So what’s your certain, reliable, stable plan if all your career plans go to hell or if you want to do a major life change? That’s Plan Z. The certainty of Plan Z

“help interesting people do interesting things.” That

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

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

After President Clinton left office, Sheryl asked then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom she had met at Treasury, for advice on her next career move. She recalls Schmidt’s reaction as she made a detailed presentation of the pros and cons of her various options: “No, no! Get out of the weeds. Go where there’s fast growth, because fast growth creates all

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.”

market realities. (Chapter 2)

Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.

when it comes to meeting people who can help you professionally, three degrees of separation is what matters. Three degrees is the magic number because when you’re introduced to a second-or third-degree connection, at least one person in an introduction chain personally knows the origin or target person. In this example: You—> Karen—> Jane—&g