Is It Time to Earn or Time to Learn?
The best career opportunities have you doing both — earning and learning. Every career plan should have you doing at least one. You know you're in the wrong job if you're doing either.
p.33
Random Quote
The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha.
Reid Hoffman co-founded the business networking website LinkedIn, and is a venture capitalist, author and podcaster from America. Having engaged with Reid’s work through his podcast Masters of Scale some years ago, I found his work both insightful and relevant to many situations I found myself in, main-gig related and for side-hustles. It has sometimes proven difficult to fully embrace and implement his advice for building a start-up/scale-up business while working inside a large corporate entity, especially when working with people who don't share the same perspective or who don't have the baseline knowledge of lean/agile development practices and their benefits.
His main idea seems to be to move fast on an ambitious number of things, and in a large, established organisation, fast is sometimes not that fast.
I discovered his latest book on the Amazon infinite bookshelf, and I was compelled to buy it by its promise to outline the ‘startup mindset’ for individuals, and to provide advice for people to:
manage [their] career as if it were a startup business: a living, breathing, growing startup of you.
It sounded like a fun, potentially insightful read, and at 230 pages, a good return on the investment of around ten hours of reading time. I also assumed that if it was good, then I might need to invest five times that in reflection and change implementation time, a relatively large amount when compared with other reads I take on.
Well written and brought to life with examples from both the author’s real-world experience and from academic research, each of the six chapters gave practical advice and prompted much reflection, as well as clear steps to follow to implement change where needed. While I found myself underlining around five things each chapter, and as is often the case with business books, it’s much faster to read and commonplace than it is to set up and run most of the experiments suggested, and longer still to implement habitual change.
When something sets your hair on fire, it takes much less time to burn away than it does to grow back.
After getting only a few pages in, I realised I was receiving some fantastic advice and practical direction from a skilled and generous mentor in an area I have already been exploring deeply for several years, and therefore, committed to doing a full review of each chapter, and actively testing the advice of the authors, tailoring it to my needs and blind spots and career trajectory today.
When written like that, it sounds easy.
In reality, I know it’s going to take months and years to realise the benefits of some of this activity, but I'm excited by the work. As Rick Rubin said in The Creative Act:
The best work is the work you are excited about.
I've already invested thirty to forty hours in commonplacing, writing, and in building the MV.com platform, an idea I had while reflecting on chapter three. Instead of building my network on someone else's flawed platform (such as LinkedIn, ironically) where I'm their product and the functionality is limited, I decided that I would create my own, with some special features of content management and access that would be useful for my own purposes. I researched and considered other apps like Medium and SubStack, but nothing seemed to offer what I was looking for, which is really a commonplace book that I can access from any device, anywhere, to centralise and store quotes and ideas from others, and to write and can share if valuable.