Marketing BS: Andreesen Career Planning

Adding risk to your career

I recently came across this 2007 career-advice post from Marc Andreesen. His has two rules:

1. Do not plan your career.

2. Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

He argues you should develop skills, while keeping your head up looking for opportunities. When you see one — even if it isn’t part of your “plan” — you need to identify it, and, potentially, jump at it. Jumping at a new opportunity can be risky, but ignoring opportunities will limit your upside.

The essay goes into more detail about how one should assess opportunities at different points in your career (younger people without families should be taking on more risk). The big point is that in order to have over-sized success you need to add turbulence to your career. The first step is getting comfortable with that.

Those less successful will often say about the more successful, “they just got lucky”. That is usually true, but first that person had to put themselves in a position where it was possible to get lucky.

Keep it simple,

Edward