Reid Hoffman realized by month four at Oxford that academia wasn't for him, but finished his degree anyway. He missed the early internet boom because of it, watching AOL and Prodigy take off without him. The hidden risk in career planning is not recognizing when you're out of sync with emerging opportunities.
Chapters
I figured out by month 4 at Oxford that I didn't want to be an academic. Now, there's a lot of good reasons that I finished my degree. I'd signed up for it, you know, I— you complete what you start, you know, these sorts of things. But like one of the things that I only realized years later that if I had said, okay, this is what I want to do and I'm going to take the lumps of saying this isn't it, that's it, I'm moving back now, I'm starting to do that, I would have been here at a time where the internet was being formulated from moving from the academic confines into the rest of the world as opposed to kind of catching up when AOL and Prodigy and eWorld were kind of big things, but the internet was starting. And what it points out is frequently one of the very big risks is the risk that you don't know that you're taking. Is in fact one of the ones that can be serious. And so simply saying, well, I'll finish the degree and then I'll, in 2 years I'll go figure out what it is. Well, that means that you're not in that game and you may lose key breakout opportunities for playing that game. And so that was actually one of the risks that I most substantially took. Now again, no complaints, but it's illustrative in terms of thinking about how you think through what does this pattern of activity mean for your own career.
