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

You won’t encounter accidental good fortune—you won’t stumble upon opportunities that rocket your career forward—if you’re lying in bed. When you do something, you stir the pot and introduce the possibility that seemingly random ideas, people, and places will collide and form new combinations

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.

A career move that makes you feel in over your head stretches you in new dimensions and usually contains significant upside.

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

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.

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

Develop your competitive advantage in the market by combining three puzzle pieces: your assets, your aspirations, and the

Learn by doing.

“vocation vacation.” A company by the same name lets you test-drive dream jobs—whether