指尖阅读— 你的生涯你做主（十九）

本周我们将和大家继续阅读《the start-up of you》。

Your Assets

Assets are what you have right now. Before dreaming about the future or marking plans,you need to articulate what you already have going for you – as entrepreneurs do. The most brilliant business idea is often the one that builds on the founders’ existing assets in the most brilliant way. There are reasons Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google andDonald Trump started a real estate firm. Page and Brin were in a computer science doctoral program. Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate developer, and he had apprenticed in his father’s firm for five years. Their business goals emerged from their strengths, interests, and network of contacts.

You have two types of career assets to keep track of: soft and hard. Soft assets are things you can’t trade directly for money. They’re the intangible contributors to career success: the knowledge and informationin your brain; professional connections and the trust you’ve built up with them; skills you’ve mastered; your reputation and personal brand; your strengths(things that come easily to you).

Hard assets are what you’d typically list on a balance sheet: that cash in your wallet; the stocks you own; physical possessions like your desk and laptop. These matter because when you have an economic cushion, you can more aggressively make moves that entail downside financial risk. For example, you could take six months off to learn the Ruby programming language with no pay – i.e., ick up a new skill. Or you could shift to a lower-paying but more stimulating job opportunity.

During a career transition, someone who can go six to twelve months without earning money ahs different options – indeed, a significant advantage – over someone who can’t go more than a month or two without a paycheck.