The Start-up of You
A blueprint for thriving in your job and building a career by applying the lessons of Silicon Valley's most innovative entrepreneurs. The career escalator is jammed. Unemployment is sky-high. Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. Traditional job security is a thing of the past. Here, LinkedIn cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman and author Ben Casnocha show how to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you. Start-ups--and the entrepreneurs who run them--are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. This book will teach you the best practices of Silicon Valley start-ups, and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
4people
2012–2017years
25% recommend75% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My favorite Jay-Z lyircs: "I'm not a businessman. I'm a Business, man!"
Or like that one book by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha - The Start Up of You....its interesting mindset to view your career as a start up.
- This was copied out of the book "The Start-up of You" by Reid Hoffman. They point this out on their website, but they should really point it out on this Google Doc as well since it's pretty much entirely unoriginal.
- My biggest takeaway from an amazing post:
> When there’s a complex list of pros and cons driving a potentially expensive action, Reid seeks a single decisive reason to go for it—not a blended reason. For example, we were once discussing whether it’d make sense for him to travel to China. There was the LinkedIn expansion activity in China; some fun intellectual events happening; the launch of The Start-Up of You in Chinese. A variety of possible good reasons to go, but none justified a trip in and of itself. He said, “There needs to be one decisive reason. And then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste a time.”
- This was after I was reading on HN last week about 12 year olds freelancing.
Bottom line, you have to learn how to hustle. You find a way, or you don't.
If you can't get employment as developer, then create your own job. Or don't.
As a freelancer, nobody knows my age. They don't ask. I work from the Philippines, but as long as I'm reasonably available, people don't care. I have friends doing the same thing who aren't nearly as technical or knowledgeable as I am making a good living in the most expensive cities in the world.
Reid Hoffman is co-author of a book called "The Start-up of You." I haven't read the book, but the title says it all. You have to treat yourself as a start-up and put in the same sorts of blood, sweat and tears that you read about other people doing here. Maybe you have a job that you can coast in and have work-life balance. Maybe you are nearly on the street and one notch above being completely fued. If you are the latter, then you probably need to be doing some serious disaster mode action. Really, what else do you have to do? Being a transient gives you a lot of time to think, but that gets old.
But it's all about people, really. A developer who is just okay at dealing with computers but great at selling to people is probably in a better position than someone who is the opposite.
