Career Planning
I read a interesting couple of blogs by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame on career planning. I definitely recommend reading Marc’s blog posts in their entirety.
Here are a couple of my takeaways that I found:
Relentlessly expand your skills.
Try to work in growing companies, where you can quickly expand your skills.
Don’t neglect skills that seem orthogonal to your current job.
Some skills that are relevant for a lot of different jobs: communication skills, management skills, sales skills, finance skills.
Scott Adams (Dilbert fame) points out that there are 2 ways to be successful:
- Become the best at one specific thing.
- Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
Of these two things the first one is extremely difficult. The second is not that hard. Very few people take the initiative to be good at different things, they only focus on the one think that their job currently dictates.
Take (calculated) risks.
All substantial opportunities come with some risk.
Look at your job in the same way as buying stocks. Try to carefully calculate the risk and rewards of each job opportunity.
In general people underestimate opportunity cost, that is the cost of a missed opportunity because they are doing something else.
In general people overestimate the cost of failure. If you are good, and have developed a lot of marketable skills, then the cost of failure (especially early in your career) is not very high.
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This is such a good post. I have similar feelings about career growth. Another person to read would be Charlie Munger, check out his Latticework model.