Professional loyalty now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted. (Location 147)
The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. (Location 248)
What do these companies have in common? The principles of Silicon Valley are the principles in this book. Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity. (Location 295)
“Most of the time, change in the world overtakes you,” Reed says. When a Hollywood executive once asked him during an on-stage interview whether he makes five-year strategic plans or three-year strategic plans, Reed said he does neither: three years is an eternity in Silicon Valley, and they can’t plan that far in advance. Instead, Netflix stays nimble and iterates, always in the test phase. We call this mind-set “permanent beta.” (Location 327)
sentence, “A company hires me over other professionals because …” How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable? (Location 396)
Tags: orange
If you try to be the best at everything and better than everyone (that is, if you believe success means ascending one global, mega leaderboard), you’ll be the best at nothing and better than no one. (Location 402)
Instead, compete in local contests—local not just in terms of geography but also in terms of industry segment and skill set. In other words, don’t try to be the greatest marketing executive in the world; try to be the greatest marketing executive of small-to-midsize companies that compete in the health-care industry. (Location 403)
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. (Location 413)
Tags: orange
you may not see inexperience as an asset to highlight, but the flip side of inexperience tends to be energy, enthusiasm, and a willingness to work and hustle in order to learn. (Location 450)
Tags: pink
Aspirations and values are both important pieces of your career competitive advantage quite simply because when you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better. The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money. (Location 464)
Tags: orange
You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges. (Location 474)
Tags: orange
the success of all professionals—the start-up of you—depends on employers and clients and partners choosing to buy your time. (Location 492)
Tags: blue
Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in (Location 504)
Tags: blue
the career marketplace, it’s going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to anything. (Location 505)
Tags: blue
In other words, there’s less competition and significant opportunity to be an all-star right-hand man. (Location 562)
Tags: pink
Update your profile on LinkedIn so that your summary statement articulates your competitive advantages. You should be able to fill in this sentence: “Because of my [skill/experience/strength], I can do [type of professional work] better than [specific types of other professionals in my industry].” • How would other professionals you work with fill in the above sentence (i.e., describe your competitive advantage)? If there’s a gap, you either have a self-judgment problem, or a marketing problem. (Location 569)
Tags: pink
Create a soft-asset investment plan that emphasizes learning about growth markets and growth opportunities. Maybe this means taking a trip to China, attending a conference on clean technology, or signing up for a software programming course. Email your plan to three trusted connections and ask them to hold you accountable. Budget money to pay for these things, if necessary. (Location 585)
Tags: pink
Entrepreneurs are told they must be really persistent in fulfilling their vision, but also be ready to change their business based on market feedback. They are told to do a business they’re passionate about, but also to adapt to customer needs. (Location 623)
Tags: blue
“The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options,” (Location 692)
Tags: blue
Winning careers, like winning start-ups, are in permanent beta: always a work in progress. (Location 697)
Tags: blue
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. (Location 712)
Tags: orange
Career plans should leverage your assets, set you in the direction of your aspirations, and account for the market realities. (Location 718)
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. (Location 750)
Tags: orange
Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer. This way, you’ll have a professional identity that you can carry with you as you shift jobs. You own yourself. It’s the start-up of you. (Location 777)
The best Plan B is different but very much related to what you’re already doing. As you think about your own Plan B alternatives, favor options that let you keep one foot planted while the other one swings to the new territory. Pivot into an adjacent niche. (Location 906)
Write out your current Plan A and Plan Z, and jot some notes about what possible Plan B moves might be in your current situation. (Location 941)
Tags: pink
Writing skills, general management experience, technical and computer skills, people smarts, and international experience or language skills are examples of skills with high option value—that is, they are transferable to a wide range of possible Plan B’s. (Location 945)
Tags: blue
Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, industry. Reserve a personal domain name (yourname.com). Print up a second set of business cards with just your name on it and a personal email address. (Location 952)
Tags: blue
Reach out to five people who work in adjacent niches and ask them to coffee. Compare your plans with theirs. Keep up these relationships over time so you can access diverse information and so you’re in a better position to potentially pivot to those niches when necessary. (Location 954)
Tags: blue
Quite simply, if you want to accelerate your career, you need the help and support of others. (Location 972)
Tags: blue
slightly less-competent person who gets along with others and contributes on a team can be better for the company than somebody who’s 100 percent competent but isn’t a team player. (Location 987)
Tags: blue
The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be. (Location 991)
Tags: pink
Your career success depends on both your individual capabilities and your network’s ability to magnify them. Think of it as IWe. An individual’s power is raised exponentially with the help of a team (a network). But just as zero to the one hundredth power is still zero, there’s no team without the individual. (Location 1018)
Tags: pink
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. (Location 1061)
A study on negotiation found that a key difference between skilled negotiators and average negotiators was the time spent searching for shared interests, asking questions of the other person, and forging common ground. The effective negotiators spent more time doing these things—thinking about ways the other person would truly benefit as opposed to just trying to drive a hard bargain out of pure self-interest.7 Do the same. Start with a friendly gesture toward the other person and genuinely mean it. (Location 1090)
Tags: pink
Unless the process of bonding and allying with others comes off as effortlessly as tying your shoes, which is to say, unless allying and helping really is what you want to be doing, the collaborative mind-set will fail, and so, ultimately, will the relationship. (Location 1105)
Tags: pink
The first is professional allies. Who would be in your corner in a conflict or when you come under stress? Whom do you invite to dinner to brainstorm career options? Whom do you trust and proactively try to work with if you can? From whom do you solicit feedback on key projects? Whom do you review life goals and plans with? These are your allies. Many people can maintain at most eight to ten strong professional alliances at any given point in time. (Location 1130)
Tags: blue
The second type of relationship we’ll cover is weaker ties and acquaintances. With whom are you friendly but not full-on friends? With whom do you email occasionally? Of whom can you ask a lightweight professional favor? Can you recall a conversation with this person from a couple years ago? There’s quite a bit of variance in how many of these weak ties you can maintain; you may be able to maintain a maximum of a couple hundred or a couple thousand depending on your personality, your line of work, and the nature of your relationships. (Location 1133)
Tags: orange
“Competitive ally” may seem like an oxymoron. But you know it’s a strong alliance if you are able to navigate the occasional tricky situation with mutual respect intact.* (Location 1168)
Tags: orange
An alliance is when a coworker needs last-minute help on Sunday night preparing for a Monday morning presentation, and even though you’re busy, you agree to go over to his house and help. (Location 1204)
Tags: orange
In other words, as the score keeping becomes less and less formal and as the expectation for reciprocal exchange stretches over a longer and longer period of time, a relationship goes from being an exchange partnership to being a true alliance.* (Location 1213)
Tags: orange
Figuring out how you can help the person you want to connect with—or at least figuring out the tightest point of mutual interest—does take some legwork. (Location 1367)
Tags: pink
You can conceptualize and map your network all you want, but if you can’t effectively request and broker introductions, it adds up to a lot of nothing. Take it seriously. If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network. (Location 1376)
Tags: blue
What matters are your alliances, the strength and diversity of your trust connections, the freshness of the information flowing through your network, the breadth of your weak ties, and the ease with which you can reach your second- or third-degree connections. (Location 1413)
Tags: blue
Helping someone out means acknowledging that you are capable of helping. Reject the misconception that if you’re less powerful, less wealthy, or less experienced, you have nothing to offer someone else. Everyone is capable of offering helpful support or constructive feedback. (Location 1431)
Tags: orange
“Tell me more about your skills, interests, and background.” (Location 1439)
Tags: orange
Intel on what college students—the next generation—are thinking or doing is always of interest yet hard to get no matter how much money you have. (Location 1451)
Tags: orange
If someone offers to introduce you to a person you really want to meet or offers to share assorted wisdom on an important topic, accept the help and express due gratitude. Everyone will feel good—and you’ll actually get closer to the person. (Location 1456)
Tags: orange
Can you develop skill sets, interests, and experiences in two or more domains and then act as a bridge for your connections in one circle who want to access the other? If so, you will be enormously helpful. (Location 1465)
Tags: pink
One lunch is worth dozens of emails. A one-hour lunch with a person creates a bond that would take dozens of electronic communications. When you can, meet in person. (Location 1489)
Tags: pink
What he failed to recognize was how his personal talents might make his boss look diminished in the eyes of others. He failed to navigate the status dynamics around him; failed to account for the insecurities, status anxieties, and egos of everyone else. He failed to build relationships with the people above him and below him on the totem pole. And ultimately, he paid the price with his job. (Location 1553)
Tags: pink
You and your coworker are both marketing assistants at your company. He mentions he’s working on a sales proposal. You proactively say, “I’d be more than happy to take a look and tell you how it could be improved.” Sounds harmless? Usually it is harmless. But be careful. When you make the unsolicited offer to tell someone how they can improve, you’re implying that you are able to see flaws in his work that he cannot see, and that he ought to be happy to accept your feedback. If the other person sees himself as your peer, he may not view you as someone who should be telling him how to improve, and may be resentful rather than appreciative. (Location 1573)
Tags: pink
The social terrain at the highest levels of power and influence can be treacherous. If you wish to cultivate and strengthen ties with your boss, boss’s boss, top officials, or other people in high places, think about how the power imbalance affects your expected social behavior. A little bit of conscientiousness in this department goes a long way. (Location 1585)
Tags: pink
For you in your career, curiosity (with or without frustration) about industries, people, and jobs will make you alert to professional opportunities. (Location 1690)
Tags: pink
When your eyes are open and your mind is curious, you can do things that dramatically increase your opportunity flow, such as tap networks of people, court selective randomness, and see opportunity amid hardship. (Location 1692)
To recap some of the qualities of the PayPal mafia: high-quality people, a common bond, an ethos of sharing and cooperation, concentrated in a region and industry. These make it rich in opportunity flow, and the same factors make any network and association worth your while. Finally, the only thing better than joining groups is starting your own. (Location 1849)
When you have no resources, you create them. When you have no choice but to fight, you fight hard. When you have no choice but to create, you create. (Location 1922)
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The lesson is that great opportunities almost never fit your schedule. It would be nice if you came upon that killer job opportunity right when you were thinking about leaving your current job. It would be nice if that exclusive conference coincided with the week your boss happens to be away. Usually, the timing is imperfect and difficult. Most often, you’ll be in the middle of a different plan—like about to set off on an around-the-world trip. (Location 1960)
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making a decision reduces opportunities in the short run, but increases opportunities in the long run. (Location 1968)
Tags: blue
If you don’t have to seriously think about the risk involved in a career opportunity, it’s probably not the breakout opportunity you’re looking for. (Location 2006)
Tags: blue
“To keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain that routinely tricked them into making three mistakes: overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities).” The result is that we’re programmed to overestimate the risk in any given situation. (Location 2033)
Tags: blue
Warren Buffett has a mantra: “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” (Location 2085)
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the short run, low volatility means stability. In the long run, though, low volatility leads to increased vulnerability, because it renders the system less resilient to unthinkable external shocks. (Location 2139)
Tags: pink
Without frequent, contained risk taking, you are setting yourself up for a major dislocation at some point in the future. Inoculating yourself to big risks is like inoculating yourself against the flu virus. By injecting a small bit of flu into your body in the form of a vaccination, you make a big flu outbreak survivable. By introducing regular volatility into your career, you make surprise survivable. You gain the “ability to absorb shocks gracefully.” (Location 2162)
Tags: pink
You get it by talking to people in your network. It’s people who help you understand your assets, aspirations, and the market realities; it’s people who help you vet and get introduced to possible allies and trust connections; it’s people who help you track the risk attached to a given opportunity. IWe is the formula for gathering the kind of information that will help you navigate professional challenges. (Location 2210)
Tags: pink
Acquiring good network intelligence is hard. Anyone can read a book or blog. Anybody can talk to random people around the office or neighborhood. It’s harder to identify the right people to talk to on different issues, ask these people questions that invite maximally useful answers, and synthesize points into something meaningful. Network intelligence is the advanced game: if you do it well, it’ll give you a competitive edge. (Location 2460)
Tags: pink
Think carefully about where you choose to live and work. Then commit to improving whatever community you do live in. You don’t have to be Mother Teresa. Investing in society can be as simple as doing something once a year that’s not directly for you. Do something that’s in line with your values and aspirations and that preferably leverages your unique soft and hard assets—in other words, make use of your competitive advantages. (Location 2512)
Tags: pink
Invest in yourself, invest in your network, and invest in society. When you invest in all three, you have the best shot at reaching your highest professional potential. As important, you also have the best shot at changing the world. (Location 2522)
Tags: pink