Our professional lives are not a sequence of equally important jobs. There are always breakout projects, connections, specific experiences and, yes, strokes of luck that lead to unusually rapid career growth. Here are some tips for finding and generating those kinds of breakout opportunities. These work equally well for a startup as they do for an individual’s career.So write Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha in this excerpt from their book, The Start-Up of You.
As the headline says, they give five tips:
1. Brim with curiosity.
For you in your career, curiosity (with or without frustration) about industries, people and jobs will make you alert to professional opportunities.2. Court serendipity.
You create accidental good fortune by being open to potential opportunities and acting on them.3. Cultivate randomness.
[R]aise the likelihood that you stumble upon something valuable by stirring the pot to introduce the possibility that seemingly random ideas, people and places will collide and form new opportunities.4. Connect to human networks.
[I]dentify the people in your network who always seem to have their hands in interesting pots. Try to understand what makes them hubs of opportunity, and resolve to meet more people with those characteristics.5. Take intelligent risks.
Make a list of risks that are acceptable to you but that others tend to avoid, and go for them.
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