Guide to Career Planning

Two rules:

1. Don’t plan your career “You’ll change, industries will change, the world will change, and you can’t possibly predict any of it.” - Given the accelerating rate of change we’re experiencing, this seems more true than ever.
2. Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

On opportunities: Andreessen argues that opportunities fall into two buckets: they present themselves or you create them. In both cases, people don’t go after them enough, bc they are too afraid of the risks. They don’t jump on an opportunity that presents itself, nor go and create what they know they want.

One should see his career as a portfolio of opportunities over its 50+ year lifespan (similar to investment portfolio where you can take different bets with different risk profiles): early in life, just optimize for the job that will help you best develop your skills and give you the most valuable experiences. Working for a big company is an underestimated risk bc you can be subject of layoffs anytime and you likely don’t learn as fast as you could at a smaller company, but instead develop skills that bound you to large companies for the rest of your life.

Without taking risk, you can never achieve what you want in life.

On skills:

In school:

Andreessen rants on how useless humanity degrees are. Actually, it’s rather a declaration of how useful technical degrees are. After 4 years at Stanford I must say I wholeheartedly agree. It is saddening how little I have learned in the humanity classes I took here. It was around 40% of my course load and likely represents less than 5% of my learnings. The reason for this isn’t that I believe the humanities and arts aren’t valuable. That is ludicrous.

However, by now, I’m convinced that they can’t be taught in a classroom setting. All my humanities courses consisted of someone rattling on about something they had spent the last 20 years studying and then researching. It consisted of anecdotes and case studies. But in no way did you learn how to think and reason structurally. Unfortunately, I realized this quite late. I’m a big believer in engaging with the humanities on your own. Reading Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity and Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea teaches you how to reason, and think like no professor rambling at you for 90 minutes will be able to. Reading Call Me by Your Name and Giovanni’s Room shows you what great taste looks like and might give you the aspiration of developing some yourself. Definitely more so than most professors (technical or not) I have encountered at Stanford.

On skill development after school:

Become very good at two or more things bc that combination will make you invaluable. Some advice on the types of skills he advises you to become good at:

1. communicating: oral or written communication is the foundational skill for everything else (you just need to practice it)
2. management: this kind of gave me an ick bc of most managers I’ve met in my life but he argues to learn from a great manager and the majority obviously doesn’t fall under that category
3. sales: fully agree - actually just texted my dad that he needs to unload more of his knowledge on me. He is one of the best salesmen I know. Importantly, this isn’t the skill of selling people sth they don’t need. It’s convincing them of sth they should want (and sth that you wholeheartedly believe in).
4. finance: don’t need to say much to this one - if you don’t know how to spend, it doesn’t matter how much you earn
5. spend time in other countries to learn how other people think

Lastly, some notes on what industry to choose:

• pick an industry that is still growing rapidly or is ready for a revolution (tech, finance vs oil, entertainment). In a stale industry, you can’t have the impact you strive for.
• get to the center of your industry (both the city and the company where all the action is happening)
• every job will be a tactical and a strategical opportunity
  • tactical: kick ass and get people to sing praise of you for decades to come
  • strategical: learn everything about the industry you’re in (how did things work 10 years ago, now, and 10 years from now; what should be done differently; if the creators of this industry were starting out today, what would they be doing now)
• learn from the greats by osmosis, don’t try to figure them out (“you’ll never change her but she’ll change you”)