You were born an entrepreneur.
However, that doesn’t guarantee you will live like one. Instincts need nurturing. Potential needs realizing. You can take control of your life and apply entrepreneurial skills to whatever work you do—the question is, will you?
The modern world demands it. We live in an interconnected, fast-moving, and competitive economy. Constant change and uncertainty make any traditional career strategy ineffective. The career escalator is permanently jammed. The employer-employee pact is dissolving. Competition for opportunity is fierce.
Remember that the “You” in Start-Up of You is both singular and plural. While we’ve offered a number of individual strategies for navigating the new realities, your network amplifies them: the power of IWe is what allows you to survive and thrive. Globally competitive professionals work within strong networks. As we discussed, allies help you develop a competitive advantage, do ABZ planning, pursue breakout opportunities, take intelligent risks, and tap network intelligence. You absolutely need to take control of your career, but you also need to invest in the careers of others in your network who will help you and whom you will help in turn.
In addition to you and the network around you, there’s a broader environment that shapes your career potential: the nature of the society you live in. If the local culture, institutions, and population do not engender an entrepreneurial life, the Start-Up of You strategies yield only a small portion of their real potential.
An entrepreneur who is trying to build a business in an unhealthy society is like a seed in a pot that never gets watered: no matter how talented that entrepreneur, his business cannot flourish. As Warren Buffett says, “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.” Berkshire Hathaway was founded in America because there’s greater business opportunity in a country with effective institutions, rule of law, trust, and a culture that accepts risk-taking, among other intangible qualities. And, when a Warren Buffett has the opportunity to flourish, everyone in society benefits. The soil gains nutrients to nourish the seeds of other people’s creativity. This is why enlightened for-profit companies align their for-profit business objectives with desirable social outcomes. It’s also why they allocate time and money to directly help the communities in which they operate. At LinkedIn, employees get paid days off to volunteer at local not-for-profits. These charitable endeavors do good and help the bottom line. They strengthen the company’s connection both with current or prospective customers and with its employees.
The health of a society shapes the outcomes for individual professionals in a similar fashion. It’s difficult to build a remarkable career if the society you live in features extreme poverty, poor services and infrastructure, or low levels of trust. For one thing, there are fewer good jobs in a place with disrepair like Detroit. But this goes beyond where there are the most job openings. In healthy societies, people are more likely to share information, join groups, and collaborate on projects together—all activities that eventually magnify career opportunities, both for you and for the people who come after you.
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. Better still, involve yourself in organizations that try to systemically improve society at a massive scale. Kiva.org enables global micro-lending to alleviate poverty; Endeavor.org promotes entrepreneur ship in developing markets; Start-Up America helps support entrepreneurs across the U.S. I’m on the boards of all three.
For Ben and me, this book is one of our gifts back to society. We think the tools in this book can improve both your life and society. Sometimes giving back can be simply spreading ideas that matter.
Along the way, of course, the praise from others may make you feel good about yourself, just like companies enjoy press for their philanthropy. But giving back means much more: you enrich the soil for future generations, as prior generations did for you. It’s the right thing to do.
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.
One final point. Books and speeches and articles on entrepreneurship proclaim to impart the top rules of the trade. The irony is that the extraordinary entrepreneurs tend to challenge the rules and partially ignore the “experts”—they come up with their own principles, their own rules of thumb. After all, the way you achieve differentiation in the market is by not doing what everyone else is doing.
There’s a similar bulge of career books filled with “expert” rules. Of course, we believe the vast majority of professionals do not grasp what it means to run a career like a start-up venture; we believe implementing the strategies discussed in these pages will give you an edge. But think of them as guidelines, not rules of nature. Sometimes in order to make something work, you will drive over the guardrail of one of these rules. Sometimes you evolve new rules in order to stay ahead of the competition. One of the key messages we hope you’ve taken away from this book is that you are changing, the people around you are changing, and the broader world is changing—so it’s inevitable the playbook will evolve and adapt.
So start tapping into your network. Start investing in skills. Start taking intelligent risks. Start pursuing breakout opportunities. But most of all, start forging your own differentiated career plans; start adapting these rules to your own adaptive life.
For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.
The start-up is you.
—Reid and Ben
www.startupofyou.com/start