Last weekend I went back to College for a alumni meet where I was a student over five years ago. As I travelled to the campus I remembered a single question that haunted my last few months of college: now what?
I had no good answer. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have a plan.
Which, as it turns out, might have been a pretty good plan after all.
Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host over 400 million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg’s strategy in 2004.
And when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996 they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money either. But that didn’t stop them from starting. It wasn’t until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company’s money-making platform.
what if you have no plan?
That’s the situation so many of us face — not just when we graduate — but throughout our lives. Even those who grew up in the generation when people stayed with a company 30 years are now, thankfully, living long enough to have second and third careers. And the younger generation is switching jobs every few years, often changing careers entirely. Yesterday’s plan may not work today.
The limitless options we encounter make it difficult to create a plan.It’s easy to become paralyzed when so many choices exist. We can’t decide among them so we end up not choosing.
But life goes on, and no choice becomes the de facto choice, and suddenly we look back and feel like our talents have been wasted. We need a way to get started now, to move in the right direction, even when we don’t have a plan.
So what makes people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin so successful? Some of it is opportunity. Some if it is persistence. And some is sheer luck. But there’s another set of ingredients that encourages opportunity, persistence, and luck. I call them the four elements. Success will favor you if you:
1.Leverage your strengths
2.Use your weaknesses
3.Pursue your passions
4.Assert your differences
Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin loved technology and were great at it. None of them operated alone — they partnered with people to offset their weaknesses. And, in style as well as substance, they offered unique approaches that differentiated them and their companies from anything else out there.
The entire path need not be clear. Most successful people and businesses have meandered their way to success by being willing to exercise their talents in ways they never would have imagined at the onset.
Here’s what’s fortunate: you’re already doing something — whether it’s a job, a hobby, or an occasional recreational pastime — that exploits your strengths, allows for your weaknesses, gives you pleasure, and uses your uniqueness.
Start experimenting where you are.
