指尖阅读 — 我的生涯我做主（三十）

烦恼时拿起一本书，它会告诉我开心是多么重要；愤怒时拿起一本书，它会告诉我理解是多么的宝贵；无聊时拿起一本书，它会告诉我充实的生活是多么的难求。对喜欢阅读的人来说，看书时一种享受。书卷中的意念像一股无形的动力，影响你的思想和心态。书乡浸淫日久，则心胸玲珑，见识广阔，自然语言有味，气质高雅，此书卷气也。

大家好，阔别已久，今天我们将继续和大家阅读《the start-up of you》。

After President Clinton left office, Sheryl asked the Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom she had met at Treasury, for advice on her next career move. She recalls Schmidt's reaction as she made a detailed presentation of the pros and cons of her various options: "No, no! Get ou tof the weeds. Go where there's fast growth, because fast growth creates all opportunities,"he told her. It was outstanding advice: Work in a market with natural momentum. Ride the big waves.

As it turned out, in 2002 Google was that place. Schmidt made Sheryl an offer. She accepted and became Google's vice president of global online sales and operations. She grew the company's online sales and operations group for four individuals in California to a global team of thousands of people and played crucial roles in developing and growing both of Google's online advertising programs, Adwords and Adsense, still the sources of the majority of Google's revenues.

Shifing from the public to the private sector,from the high-powered corridors of Washington, DC, to the organized chaos of Silicon Valley, might strike you as abrupt, or even random. But in fact, each move made sense given the interplay of her assets, aspirations, and the market realities. Her honed management skills would be useful for a fast-growing company; her economics background would help develop a sales model for a new type of online advertising; and Google's mission was rooted in making the world a better place. After six years at Google, Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl to be COO at Facebook, where she remains today.

What Flickr and Sheryl have in common is that they each challenge common assumptions about the path to success. Flickr contradicts the idea that winning start-ups come out of nowhere and ride the founders' brilliant idea to take over the world. In reality, most companies don't execute a single brilliant master plan. They go through stops and starts,a couple near-death experiences, and a great deal of adaptation. Pixer started as a company that sold a special computer for doing digital animation; it took a while till they got into the movie making business. Similarly, Starbucks originally sold only coffee beans and coffee equipment; they hadn't planned to sell coffee by the cup.

Sheryl's story contradicts the analogous assumption that missively successful people find their calling at an early age,devise a bullet proof life plan, and then follow it unwaveringly until attainment. Sheryl's career plan wasn't something she crafted once in her early twenties and then followed blindly. She didn't assemble a bunch of dominos,knock over the first piece, and then sit back and watch the rest fall into place over time. Instead of locking herself in to a single career path, she evaluated new opportnities as they presented themselves, taking intoconsideration her (ever-growing) set of intellectual and experiential assets.She pivoted to new professional tracks without ever losing sight of what really mattered to her. "The reason I don't have a plan in because if I have a plan I'm limited to today’s options," she says.

Among some of the most notable professionals, she is the rule, not the exception. Sure, Bill Clinton decided on politics at age sixteen, and set his sights on the presidency almost as young. But most of us zig and zag our way through life. Tony Blair spent a year trying to make a goof it as a rock music promoter before entering politics. Jerry Springer was mayor of Cincinnati before attaining daytime television fame. Andrea Bocelli practiced law before he became a world-famous singer. Winning careers, like winning start-ups, are in permanent beta: always a work in progress.

It's important to understand, though, that while entrepreneurial companies and people are always evolving, the choices they'remaking are disciplined, not random. There is real planning going on, even if there are no firm plans. We call this kind of disciplined, adaptive planning ABZ Planning, and it's what we'll cover in the balance of the chapter.

我们的生涯、生活需要自己去创造，需要自己去规划人生，与时俱进，我们作为人生的“作家”既要倾听时代的呼声，又要心有笃守，不逾矩。就像作家创作时心中要装着读者，倾听时代的呼声，又要坚持自己的思想，不为读者所左右。

米兰·昆德拉说：“生活是一张永远无法完成的草图，是一次永远无法正式上演的彩排，人们在面对抉择时完全没有判断的依据。我们既不能把它们与我们以前的生活相比，也无法使其完美之后再来度过。”

在我们选择职业生涯的道路上也是一样的，我们要跟上时代的脚步，时刻准备着做最好的自己。