Mark Andreessen, a software engineer and founder of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz penned a series of essays on the guide to career planning back in 2007, incidentally just as I was getting started with university.
His advice centres on the key skills to acquire during your lifetime, mostly targeted at college grads, but also those seeking to have an impact on the world, and those looking for reinvention mid-career.
The idea is to develop concrete skills that will be useful in the real world, as a precursor to “following your passion”.
Undergraduate degrees with a technical element such as engineering, physics, maths, are viewed more favourably than more general liberal arts degrees. Technical degrees teach you how to do something difficult and useful that matters in the real world, and will help with overcoming complexity and difficulty in life. They teach you how to use reason, logic, and data, and they have a strong signalling effect to future employers.
A graduate degree such as an MBA is useful for someone with a more general undergraduate degree such as liberal arts, but is doubly effective for someone with a strong undergrad degree such as engineering. Engineering + MBA = strong candidate.
Try to go to one of the best colleges or universities in the world for your chosen field. Don’t worry about being a small fish in a big pond, you just want to be in the best pond possible, since you then get exposed to the best people and opportunities in that field.
Aggressively pursue internship programmes, to get real-world working experience at companies in your field, target the best companies in your field, and go after the opportunities early and often.
One of the best ways to maximize the impact on the world and career success is by continuously developing and broadening your base of skills. This includes his concept of:
Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat. The idea comes from Scott Adams, create of Dilbert whose advice for someone seeking to become extraordinary is:
- Become the best at one specific thing
- Become very good (top 25% at two or more things)
Number 1 is very difficult. Number 2 is much more attainable. Adams was top 25% in drawing and being funny, and this was a very rare combination which made him valuable.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more top skills until no one else has your mix.
Most CEOs are almost never the best in a particular field, but they are the top 25% in some set of skills. The combination of an MBA plus a law degree is much more valuable than either one of the degrees individually.
He then goes on to talk about five skills to develop once you leave school, that can help maximize your potential:
- Communication
Public speaking is an invaluable skill. Communication is how you convey information and concepts to lots of people to cause them to change their behaviour. You can learn communication by taking classes and reading a lot.
2. Management
Learn how to manage people, and the best way is to learn from a great manager. Try to work for a great manager, as them to teach you how to manage, then ask for responsibility to manage a team of people.
3. Sales
Learn how to convince people that something is in their best interest to do, even when they don’t realize it up front. The art of being able to interact with people so they will do what you want, predictably and repeatedly.
Knowing how to sell can help you recruit, raise money, talk to investors, create business partnerships, deal with reports and analysts and more. Spending a year in a salesforce is a great idea.
4. Finance
A strong level of financial literacy is a boost for any career. Read the FT and Wall Street Journal daily.
5. International
Spend time in other countries and cultures, ideally faster growing market economies like China, India, South Korea, or Argentina, over slower growing market economies. With the obvious experience working on the ground, you will know how to think more broadly than the average person from your country.
Final thoughts on education
He recommends reading an essay by David Brooks called “the Organization Kid”. The idea is that the typical upper middle-class students lead highly structured, supervised and enriched lives. AS a group, they are better educated, trained, motivated and serious that their predecessors.
But, the risk is you are in danger of entering the real world, being smacked hard across the face by reality, and never recovering.
You are entering the workforce without ever really having challenged yourself. You’ve never yet made tough decisions by yourself, in the absence of good information, and had to live with the consequences of screwing up.
His advice is that it is critically important to get into the real world and really challenge yourself: expose yourself to work, put yourself in situations where you will succeed or fail by your own decisions and actions, and where that success or failure will be highly visible.
There will be times in lie where you are quickly making decisions in the presence of incomplete or incorrect information, under intense time pressure and often political pressure. You will screw up frequently, causing serious consequences. It cant faze you, you have to just get right back up and keep going.
This article really resonated with me, having made a decision at the beginning of 2024, to resign from my role, and take a big risk by moving to a new country, without a job, and to keep going. You can do only so much planning and preparation, reality soon hits, and you have to take life’s punches, and keep moving forward. The article also made me reflect on the skills I have built up to date, and which skills I need to work on going forward.