Set aside one day a week or month or even every few months to work on something that could be part of your Plan B. If you have a business idea you want to pursue, a skill you want to learn, a relationship you want to form, or some other curiosity or aspiration, start on it as a side project and see where it goes. At a minimum, just start talking to

ABZ Planning is the antidote to the “what color is your parachute” approach to career planning. It is an adaptive approach to planning that promotes trial and error. It allows you to aggressively pursue upside and mitigate against possible downside risks. ABZ Planning isn’t something you do once early in your career. It’s a process as important for

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

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—> Sarah.

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

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,

market realities. (Chapter 2)

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

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.