指尖阅读——我的生涯我做主（二十九）

书籍是人类数百年来无数聪明才智的载体，它记录着人类记几十年的知识教训。在书籍中品味知识的博大精神。在书籍中培养修养的文雅得体，在书籍中开拓视野看大千世界，在书籍中学做人处事的方法道理。对喜欢阅读的人来说，看书是一种享受。书卷中的意念像一股无形的动力，影响你的思想和心态。

今天我们继续和大家一起阅读《the start-up of you》的下一章。

Adaptive Start-Ups, Adaptive Careers

Flickr is one the most widely used photo hostingand sharing websites, with an estimated five billion - plus images on its servers. But the company wasn't started by photography pros. In fact, its founders, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield (who teamed up with JasonClasson), didn't set out to start a photo-sharing service at all.

Their original product, rolled out in 2002, was amultiplayer online game called Game Neverending. Most gaming platforms at that time allowed one or at most a few people to plan the same game together at the same time. But Caterina and Stewart wanted to create a game that hundreds of people could play at the same time. To this end, the plan was to build something they saw less as a game and are as a "social space designed to facilitate and enable play." To attract and retain players to this social space, they pumped out social features like groups and instant messaging, including one add-on to the instant messenger application that allowed players to share photographs with one another. As with most features of the game, the photo-sharing add-on was developed very quickly - it only took eight weeks from idea to implementation.

When photo sharing was first added to Game Neverendingin 2004, it was no big deal - photographs were just another thing players could trade with one another, like the objects they would collect during the course of the game. However, it didn't take long for the photo-sharing capability to eclipse the game itself in popularity. As this became increasingly apparent to the leadership team, they were faced with a decision: Should they try to expand their new photo-sharing platform while sticking to their long - term plan and continuing to develop Game Neverending, or should they put the game (and its twenty thousand avidusers) on hold to devote the majority of their previous resources to photo sharing? They decided to divide from the original plan and focus exclusively on building the photo application and the photo-sharing community that went along with it. They called it Flickr. ( I invested just asit became the photo service.)

Flickr soon became the photo-sharing service of choice for millions of Internet users. Its social features - tagging and sharing - grew naturally out of the social DNA that defined the original online game, even as they differentiated the service in response to market feedback.In 2005 Yahoo! acquired the company, making it a Web 2.0 poster child. But more than just a Silicon Valley success story, the evolution of Flickr is a casestudy in smart adapting: its founders were in constant motion early on, tried many things to see what would work, and nimbly shifted their plans based on what they learned.

These are the very same strategies that define some of the most inspiring careers. Take, for example, Sheryl Sandberg. Today,Sheryl is chief operation officer of Facebook, where she is in charge of the company's business operations. She serves on the boards of Disney and Starbucks. Fortune named her one of the most powerful women in business.

You might think some on successful knew her goalsand aspirations from day one, and followed a rigorous and ambitious career planto achieve them. But, you'd be wrong. Sheryl hasn't stuck to a conventional career plan. In fact, as an idealistic undergraduate majoring in economics she never imagined that she would one day be working in the private sector, muchless as a top executive for one of the world's most valuable companies. Sheryl began her career in India, about as far as one could gee from Silicon Valley. There she went to work on a public health projects from the World Bank. It wasa first job consistent with deeply embedded values: to give back to those less fortunate and to make a difference in the world. Sheryl had grown up in a home where political activism was as normal as eating or breathing. Her father was a doctor who regularly took his family on vacations to Third World destinations,where he would provide surgical services for free to the poor. Sheryl's mother was involved in a   movement to support Soviet dissidents by helping them smuggle into the USSR contraband white chocolate disguised as soap - which could then be sold on the black market for much-needed cash. Sheryl knew that she was lucky to have been born in the United States, with its freedom and wealth of opportunities,and she was driven by an intense desire to give back in some way.

Yet after a couple of years with the World Bank,Sheryl shifted course and left the public sector to enroll at Harvard Business School, where she earned an MBA. From academia, her next stop was the business world. But after a one-year stint at management consulting from McKinsey, she realized the corporate career track wasn't for her; so she shifted yet again,this tie to Washington, DC, where she served as then U.S. Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers's chief of staff from 1996 through 2001. It wasn't providing health care to the impoverished of India, but she was helping to shape policy in ways that would have a meaningful effect on the lives of many Americans. (It should be noted that working for Summers wasn't an accident: he had been her economics professor in college and had also hired her at the World Bank. Asalways, Sheryl was thoughtfully tapping her connections to find the nextopportunity, something we talk more about later.)

创业，是一种职业活动，更是一种复杂的职业行为。虽然创也可以给我带来另一个职业生涯，但是也要充分的做好规划。不仅需要明确自己是否适合创业，是否具备创业者应该具备的基本素养，还要知道创业这种复杂的职业活动，更需要准确的定位、清晰的目标和合理的通道，创业才能在既定的轨道上有序发展。没有规划的创业，只会为杂乱的信息所惑，导致严重的风险，这种风险来自于无形，却有非常强大的毁灭力。