指尖阅读 — 我的生涯我做主（二十三）

A good career plan accounts for the interplay of the three prices - your assets,aspirations, and the market realities. The pieces need to fit together. Developing a key skill, for example, doesn't automatically give you acompetitive edge. Just because you're good at something (assets) that you'rereally passionate about (aspirations) doesn't necessarily mean someone will pay you to do it (market realities). After all, what if someone else can do the same thing for lower pay or do it more reliably? Or what if there's no demand for the skill or begin with? Not much of a competitive advantage. Following your passions also doesn't automatically lead to career flourishing. What if you're passionate but not competent, relative to other? Finally, being a slave to market realities isn't sustainable. A shortage of nurses in hospitals -meaning there's demand for credentialed nurses - doesn't mean you should get on the nursing track. No matter what the demand, you're not going to be most competitive unless your own passions and strengthens are in play.

So evaluate each piece of the puzzlein the context of the others. And so regularly: the pieces of the puzzle change in shape and size over time. The way they fit together shifts over time.Building a competitive advantage in the market place involves combining the three pieces at the every career juncture.

For a long time, business was not among my assets, aspirations, or the reality that perceived around me. I attended the progressive Putney School in Vermont for high school, where if armed maple syrup, drove oxen, and debated practical topics like epistemology(the nature of knowledge) with my teachers. In college and graduate school, I studied cognitive science, philosophy, and polities. I formed a conviction thatI wanted to try to change the world for the better. Initially, my plan was to be an academic and public intellectual. At the time, I got bored easily (stilldo), which made me distractible and not great at making the trains run on time. Academia seemed like an environment that would keep me perpetually stimulatedas I would think and write on the value of compassion, self-development, and the pursuit of wisdom. I would hopefully inspire others to implement these ideas to form a nobler society.

But graduate school, while stimulatingturned out to be grounded in a culture and incentive scheme that promoted hyperspecialization; I discovered that academics end up writing for a scholarlyelite of typically about fifty people. It turned out there was not much support for academics who would attempt to spread ideas to the masses. So my aspiration to have a broad impact on potentially millions of people clashed with the market realities of academia.

I adapted my career orientation. My new aim was to try to promote the workings of a goo society via entrepreneurship and technology, the details of which we discuss in the nextchapter. When I adapted and first thought about going into industry, Iconducted informal informational interviews with friends from college who worked at companies like NeXT. I called them to figure out which skills I'd have to learn ( e.g., writing product requirement documents ) and the connections I'd have to build (e.g., working relationships with engineers). During my first technology job at Apple, one of the things I had to learn was Adobe Photoshop, for creating product mock-ups. Locking myself in a room for a weekend and becoming a Photoshop ninja was not an endeavor I thought was important while studying philosophy. However, being able to use Photoshop was anecessary to pursue a product development career and therefore I learned it in order to advance in the industry. Trade-offs are inevitable when you're balancing different considerations such as the market realities of employment and our own natural interests.

Even as I have developed a career inthe technology industry I have not relinquished my original aspirations. Infact, the issues of personal identity and community incentives that I researched in academia are relevant to my current entrepreneurial passion for the social Web, online networks, and marketplaces. My longstanding interests inthese themes have helped me develop industry skills and differentiation around the creation of massive Internet lat forms.

Recently, I made a career move to start doing venture investing Greylock. Again, I built on my assets and pursued my aspirations in the local environment in which I found myself. My significant operation experience at scale differentiates me from other VCs with finance backgrounds or limited operational backgrounds. This gives me ameaningful advantage in how I can partner with entrepreneurs and help themsucceed. And since I can work with entrepreneurs whose companies build and define massive human ecosystems, I can help improve society at large scale, whichmeets my aspirations as a public intellectual. The tree pieces fit.