Today, I’m finally ready to talk about a project I’ve been working on for a very long time!

I’m coauthor, with Reid Hoffman, of a new book titled The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, which comes out February 14, 2012.

What’s the book about? New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in his column last summer previewing the book, captured some of the key themes:

Its subtitle could easily be: “Hey, recent graduates! Hey, 35-year-old midcareer professional! Here’s how you build your career today.”

Hoffman argues that professionals need an entirely new mind-set and skill set to compete. “The old paradigm of climb up a stable career ladder is dead and gone,” he said to me. “No career is a sure thing anymore. The uncertain, rapidly changing conditions in which entrepreneurs start companies is what it’s now like for all of us fashioning a career. Therefore you should approach career strategy the same way an entrepreneur approaches starting a business.”

The strategies in this book will help you survive and thrive and achieve your boldest professional ambitions. The Start-Up of You empowers you to become the CEO of your career and take control of your future…no matter your profession or stage of career.

Intrigued? You should pre-order now on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com.

 

To nudge you to pre-order now instead of waiting, we’re running a special promotion that expires in three weeks. Order the book before February 14th and you’ll get a free bookplate / sticker in the mail with Reid’s signature and my signature that you can adhere to your hardcover book.

Plus, we’re giving away 20 different books to one person (selected at random) who pre-orders our book now. It’s not random reading list; we’ve curated a list of 20 outstanding books on entrepreneurial career strategy, adaptation, network building, and opportunity creation. Your library will be much richer because of them.

Simply forward your email receipt to [email protected], and you’ll get the autographs in the mail for free and a chance to win the 20 additional books–again, totally free. (Full legalese about the contest here.)

We will not be running this promotion again. Thanks for your support! More soon…

Generally, the harder it is to explain to someone you've just met at a cocktail party what it is you do on a day to day basis, the more interesting the work you're engaged in.

Arnold Kling applies a related rule of thumb to job security:

A job seeker is looking for… a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.

The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

In other words, how easy is it to outline exactly what you must do day to day at work? The easier this task, the more at risk it is to being offshored or automated.

Jeff Jarvis says the jobs that technology has eliminated are not coming back, and Paul Graham rightfully asks, "Why not this time?" Historically, technology eliminates jobs but also creates new ones. Eliezer Yudkowsky, in the Hacker News thread, posits five possible reasons why "this time it's different" (i.e., this time the jobs won't come back):

1) The amount of regulation and regulatory burden has increased sufficiently between then and now, that new business relationships have a much harder time replacing old destroyed business relationships. I.e., it's now more expensive to hire a new employee.

2) It's a novel change in the financial side of the economy. Like, capital-holders now try to make killings by investing in the right HFT funds instead of trying to go out and invest in new businesses. Implausible? Maybe, but finance has changed a lot recently, so the difference, if there is one, might be there.

3) The amount of re-education required to get a new job has increased enough to be a killer barrier to re-employment, whether because of employers having imposed an arbitrary demand for bachelors' degrees or because the jobs are actually more complex.

4) Ricardo's Law does allow individual regions to lose as a result of tech improvements, because if someone else beats your comparative advantage, people will want to trade with them instead of you. There's nothing ahistorical about the Rust Belt having a persistent recession within the US. This is now happening to the whole US; people no longer want to trade with us, but China is growing plenty.

5) The Thiel hypothesis: Recent technological developments are intrinsically more boring than past technological developments; people are trying to build web apps that will sell to Google for $10 million instead of trying to invent the next "microchip" or "electricity". It's not that the 21st century poses a novel obstacle to forming new business relationships to replace old ones; rather, 21st-century technologies that obsolete jobs are missing a wow factor or wealth-generating factor that previously increased demand or increased total wealth at the same time as obsoleting jobs.

Here's a useful Paul Krugman post about how technology "hollows out" the middle of job market — low-skill (janitors) and high-skill (chemists) people are okay but middle-skill workers suffer. He notes the hollowing out is now creeping into higher and higher skilled professions.

Here's a Boston Globe piece on how manufacturing in America is alive and well — we make way, way more "stuff" than China — it's just that there are fewer manufacturing jobs because of huge productivity gains.

Here's Nick Schulz and Arnold Kling on creating jobs in the New Commanding Heights of the American economy: healthcare and education. They happen to be the two most regulated and government controlled sectors. "To revitalize these sectors and revive the American job market," Nick and Arnold say, "we must open up these industries to competition and entrepreneurial reform."

Thomas Friedman writes about the changing job market in America:

The rise in the unemployment rate last month to 9.2 percent has Democrats and Republicans reliably falling back on their respective cure-alls. It is evidence for liberals that we need more stimulus and for conservatives that we need more tax cuts to increase demand. I am sure there is truth in both, but I do not believe they are the whole story. I think something else, something new — something that will require our kids not so much to find their next job as to invent their next job — is also influencing today’s job market more than people realize.

And later in his column:

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyperconnected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria.

But you would never know that from listening to the debate in Washington, where some Democrats still tend to talk about job creation as if it’s the 1960s and some Republicans as if it’s the 1980s. But this is not your parents’ job market.

This is precisely why LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Garrett Hoffman, one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley — besides co-founding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook and sits on the board of Mozilla — has a book coming out after New Year called “The Start-Up of You,” co-authored with Ben Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: “Hey, recent graduates! Hey, 35-year-old midcareer professional! Here’s how you build your career today.”

There'll be much more to say later in the year! But this sneak peek is relevant to the current moment, and Friedman nicely captures a few of the key ideas. If you want to pre-order the book (from an empty Amazon page), you can do so here.

If you're a new reader to this blog, here's the RSS link. You can also subscribe to my few-times-a-year email newsletter here.

I'm on a semi-hiatus from blogging this summer; daily posting will return in the fall. Below are some random posts from the archives on many different topics.

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• Farmers Didn't Invent Tractors. They Were Busy Farming. How innovation can come from outsiders.
• Culture Matters to Entrepreneurship. The best reason to be bullish on America.
• The Age of Early Self-Conception - The consequences of hundreds of millions of young teens writing their bios on social networks.
• In-Person Conversation Skills - What I've learned about the art of conversation.
• Career Lessons from Elena Kagan vs. Richard Posner - One pursued a safe careerist path; the other a riskier more exciting path.
• 30 Steps to Mastery. Keep. Fucking. Going.
• One Difference Btwn College and Real World - College is an information-rich environment that makes it easy to track progress. In the real world, you don't always know how well you're doing.
• Organizing the Rhetoric Around Why to Go to College - The reasons for college are always scattered. They fit in three main categories: knowledge, connections, and credential.
• Disrespecting Credentialism - If the importance of your credential does not decrease with age, you are not achieving very much in the real world.
• Who Should and Should Not Be Going to College? - Depends on which of three groups of students you fall into.
• Do Only Negative Emotions Count for Depth? – Does saddness stretch you more than happiness?
• Explain Your Opponent's Perspective - One of the easiest way to probe the depth of a person's understanding on an issue is to ask him to explain the opposing view
• Regret Aversion - When in doubt, say 'Yes.' Regret is painful.
• 14 Thoughts on Advice Giving and Receiving - Assorted wisdom on the tricky topic of giving and receiving advice.
• The "I'm Proud of You" Litmus Test - When someone tells you they're proud of you, it means they know you well and self-identify as higher status.
• Six Habits of Highly Effective Mentees - How to be a good mentee (protege).
• How Friendships Evolve Over Time and the Quest for Platonic Intimacy - What you're looking for in a friend changes as you get older
• The Capacity for Surprise - What to look for in a friend: the person's capacity to…surprise you.
• Intellectual Stimulation in Life and Romance - Should your romantic partner stimulate you intellectually? How?
• Regrets of the Dying - What do people on their deathbed regret not doing?
• Is Being in a Relationship a Time Sink? - No! At least compared to being single and looking.
• Who's Benefiting from National Service? - NPR commentary against forced national service.
• Why I Oppose Prop 8 (and Support Gay Marriage) - The case for gay marriage.
• A Rising Tide Lifts All (Nation-State) Boats - Why we should be supporting China's economic growth.
• What I learned from 1.5 weeks in Colombia - Including notes from meeting President Uribe.
• Urban Nomadicism: Sources of Unhappiness for Serial Travelers - Rootlessness, shallow relationships, identity confusion.
• Guilt-free, Pain-free Solitude When Abroad - One of the benefits of international travel: solitude.
• Lessons and impressions from Indonesia - Two weeks of traveling there.
• Start-Up Town: How Boulder, CO Developed Its Entrepreneurial Culture (American Enterprise Institute)