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Every opportunity is attached to a person. Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people. If you’re looking for an opportunity — including one that has a financial payoff — you’re really looking for a person.
Ben Casnocha
Every opportunity is attached to a person. Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people. If you’re looking for an opportunity — including one that has a financial payoff — you’re really looking for a person.
Entrepreneur and investor Ben Casnocha how to find opportunities
Every opportunity is attached to a person. Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people. If you’re looking for an opportunity — including one that has a financial payoff — you’re really looking for a person.
Ben Casnocha
The first thing you should do when a valuable employee tells you he is leaving is try to change his mind. The second is congratulate him on the new job and welcome him to your company’s alumni network.
Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact (Harvard Business Review, June 2013)
Review The Start-up Of You
Reid Hoffman, cofounder en chairman van Linkedin, en Ben Casnocha hebben in 2012 het boek, en bestseller volgens The New York Times, The Start-up of You gepubliceerd. Reid Hoffman is een 48-jarige Amerikaanse internet entrepreneur. In 2002 begon hij samen met twee voormalige collega’s het eerste zakelijke social-mediaplatform ter wereld, LinkedIn. Linkedin is vandaag de dag het grootste social-mediapatform op zakelijk gebied. Ben Casnocha is ook een entrepreneur, hij komt uit Silicon Valley. Hij omschrijft zichzelf als schrijver, entrepreneur, executive, reiziger en ‘learner’. Ook geeft Ben veel lezingen over onder andere ‘Entrepreneurial Thinking’.
Het boek van Reid en Ben gaat kort gezegd over hoe jij je plannen kan laten uitkomen en welke stappen hiervoor nodig zijn. Al met de eerste zin van het boek wordt duidelijk dat het geen boek is, waarmee je een bedrijf kunt opstarten. De auteurs zeggen ook; je kan wel als een entrepreneur geboren zijn, maar de meeste mensen starten geen eigen bedrijf op. De auteurs pakken het in de omgekeerde versie aan. Jij bent zelf je eigen bedrijf. Ook geldt dit niet voor maar een paar mensen, de auteurs stellen dat iedereen een entrepreneur is.
Het boek is geschreven aan de hand van ervaringen van Reid Hoffman en Ben Casnocha. Heel erg interessant omdat Reid cofounder is van een wereldwijd gebruikt platform. Nog interessanter zijn de voorbeelden geven uit het dagelijks leven en deze toelichten met hoe iets beter kan. Het boek is echt van de nieuwe tijd, de wereld is constant in beweging en dat moet jij zelf ook zijn om goed in de markt te staan. Het klinkt allemaal heel logisch, maar ik denk dat veel mensen van mijn generatie opgegroeid zijn met ouders die al jaren bij hetzelfde bedrijf werken. In dit boek lees je dat dit niet meer de tijd is, waarin je jaren voor één werkgever werkt. Omdat ik volgend jaar ga afstuderen is dit boek erg interessant, alvast een kijkje in het bedrijfsleven.
Voordat ik het boek ging lezen, dacht ik te weten waar het over ging. Ik had niet goed nagedacht over de titel. Ik nam aan dat de schrijvers een soort zelfhulpboek hadden bedacht om de lezer ook een bedrijf te laten opstarten en net zo succesvol te worden als zij. Wat natuurlijk voor bijna niemand haalbaar was. Daarom zag ik een beetje op om het boek te lezen, omdat ik nu geen ambities heb om een eigen bedrijf op te starten en ik al helemaal niet geloofde dat ik een succesvol bedrijf zoals LinkedIn kan opstarten. Echter, al in het eerste hoofdstuk werd duidelijk dat iedereen een geboren ondernemer is, maar dat dit niet betekent dat je je eigen bedrijf moet opstarten. Ik ben het hier niet helemaal mee eens, maar ik denk wel dat als iemand de juiste motivatie heeft, dit wel kan aanleren. Door het boek begreep nu ook de insteek van de lessen die we afgelopen weken hebben gehad op de hogeschool. Ik zag de samenhang.
Het boek was makkelijk te lezen, maar soms had ik moeite met de Engelse woorden. Ik vond het boek een logische opbouw hebben. Ik vond het leuk dat de auteurs hadden nagedacht over het einde van het hoofdstuk, het stukje Invest In Yourself. Hierin stonden concrete acties wat je kunt ondernemen op de volgende dag, de volgende week en de volgende maand. Een van de leukste tips en ook het meest nuttige voor mij is dat ik volgende maand iemand zou kunnen benaderen, waarvan ik denk dat hij of zij niet veel voor mij kan betekenen of heeft betekend. Met deze persoon moet ik dan uitzoeken wat wij wel voor elkaar kunnen betekenen, zodat we een sterkere connectie krijgen (p. 138). Ik denk dat ik deze tip zeker ga gebruiken. Hulp komt uit onverwachte hoeken. Als je op zoek bent naar een nieuwe baan, of je begint net op de arbeidsmarkt, dan is dit echt een ideaal boek met veel nuttige tips en inzichten.
Wil je dit boek nu ook lezen? Dit zijn de gegevens van het boek: The Start-uo of You, geschreven door Reid Hoffman en Ben Casnocha, Crown Business New York, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-88890-7
Het boek kost ongeveer 15 euro.
'Make people genuine partners and they’ll work harder'
Don’t be exclusive, include talented people as your genuine partners in your projects.
In the Start-up of You, we write about how life is a team sport and that anything great in your life will only happen with and through other people. Reid is a master at bringing people together to work on shared projects. And even though he often plays a uniquely pivotal role, whether as key convener or funder or original visionary or even shouldering some of the execution work, he shares credit generously.
This doesn’t mean he issues obligatory thank-yous at the end of a project; it means he makes his partners fully credited co-pilots. When people take note of times he does this, they call him generous, which he is. Or they call him ethical, because he makes sure people who do hard work get credited for it. Also true.
But what he really is is smart. He’s inclusive because he knows when people are personally invested in the public success of a project, they’ll work harder, they’ll care more, and the final product will likely benefit (which also benefits his reputation). I’ve seen Reid do this with partners at Greylock, executives at LinkedIn, and with me in the two books we co-authored. As a co-author instead of a ghostwriter I felt far more committed to the project than I would have otherwise and the quality improved accordingly.
Along these lines, I’m often surprised when founders of companies shy away from offering the co-founder title to early founding team members. Their egos get them wrapped up in what it really means to be a “founder” and they forget that so long as it’s directionally true, you gain a ton in the way of motivation and commitment from those who receive the title. Share credit. Make people genuine partners. You’ll go farther faster.
Source: link
Seeking Lightning
This post is about writing the book. Because writing about the book is much easier than actually writing the book.
How Ben Casnocha wrote a book
A friend sent me this post by Ben Casnocha about how he and Reid Hoffman wrote "The Start-Up of You". I've been googling "how to write a book" lately - because how do you write one, seriously?? - and have been trying to find good advice and reference points. That post is the best thing I've come across. Ben goes into great detail about all the phases, the tactical things, the psychology of writing a book. Plus, their book is also about careers. If you've ever thought about writing a non-fiction book, go read the post.
Structure drives your point
I was intimidated by many parts of his story, but was especially comforted by the parts where he explains how hard it is to structure the book. I've written enough blog posts to know how to structure a blog post. (Tip for beginners: drop your first and sometimes first two paragraphs. Cut out your warm-up writing and the post will be structurally tighter.) Writing a whole book is a totally differently beast.
Ben writes:
...we needed to upgrade the quality of the work in every way. It was not an issue of styling prose. We needed to deepen and better organize every part of every point.
YES. I've been going around telling people that I'm struggling with "style", when really my problem is (1) I need to know exactly what points I'm making and (2) structure. Specifically on structure, he writes:
Order is hard because order represents the logic of the point you’re trying to make. For a 60,000 word book, order and structure is one of the hardest challenges and “editing” for me was an exercise in re-ordering existing words as much as it was changing words.
Structure drives the point you make. (1) and (2) above need to be solved together. I hadn't thought about it quite that way before. It was a revelation to me that while I can write a perfectly decent sentence, it is surprisingly hard to manage the architecture of my book.
On the process of nailing down structure, Ben writes:
...we did not draft a detailed blueprint (outline) of the book and then put our heads down and execute. We had to figure out each point as we went. We started in the middle, then did the beginning, then the end, and then re-did everything. It was chaotic.
So it is supposed to be totally messy. My tactic so far has been, I'm just going to start writing a thing and see how it reads and iterate from there. It wasn't strategy so much as I just didn't know what else to do. But it is much easier for me to react to a piece and critique it, especially if it is a crappy thing. So I wrote 2000 words of a crappy thing. It's bad and I've felt stuck for the past week, but apparently this is how it's supposed to feel!
Driving in the fog
I love the quote from E. L. Doctorow:
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
So I just need to keep driving... which is easier said than done. But at least I'm in the right direction and arguably engaged in the right activity of, well, writing bad initial drafts.
Thinking too small - again
The other thought that I've been mulling over is this notion of thinking twice as big. I have been thinking of this book as a small personal project. Just something that I feel like doing, because I have this idea in my head, and why not. In doing Career Coffee, I shipped and did something really interesting but have fallen into the trap of thinking too small - again. I feel like it is something that has been too good to keep so small. There is that quote that I think is credited to Leonard Cohen, "If I knew where inspiration came from, I would go there more often." When I'm writing these Career Coffee responses, I feel like I have figured out how to go there just about every time. There is advice that has come out of me that makes me go, man, where did that come from. But spending 2 hours per response can't scale.
Aiming for the mountain top
Absorbing the scale at which Ben and Reid think has me asking myself, how can I take bigger, calculated risks in my work? Richard Hamming has this excellent speech on how to do Nobel-worthy research. The first step is to go after important problems. He says,
...even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don’t have to hide in the valley where you’re safe.
You need to aspire to something that big - get yourself to stand on the mountain top. I wrote a draft post about that Richard Hamming speech months ago, and every time I go back and read it, I get to the last line: "But what about doing truly transformative work on a scale that matters?" And I just don't know what that means to me.
So, what if. What if this book were not just a personal project to ship, but a significant effort at saying something original very loudly in screaming color?
I don't know if I can do it. My day job is not exactly a walk in the park. Then again, I think of how busy Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman must be, and whatever workload I have must pale in comparison to what they handle.
Maybe I need to design something so big that I will most probably fail at it. With all my side projects, my skills exceed the scale at which I've operated. I need to pick the goal without regard for feasibility. Tell myself, the failed bigger project trumps the successful smaller project. Since I know my problem is not shipping but in dreaming big, maybe that's what I need to do.
Write the book to shape the conversation around the role of passion in everyday careers.
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[This is Day 6 of the YourTurnChallenge, a post a day for 7 days, organized by Winnie Kao and Seth Godin. You can see previous days here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5.]
Image by Ian Sanderson.
If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.
Ben Casnocha
