马克·安德森的职业规划指南：机遇

职业规划的第一条规则。

The first rule of career planning.

不要规划你的职业。

Do not plan your career.

世界是一个极其复杂的地方，一切都在不断变化。

The world is an incredibly complex place, and everything is changing all the time.

你无法规划你的职业，因为你根本不知道未来会发生什么。

You can't plan your career because you have no idea what's gonna happen in the future.

你不知道自己会进入哪些行业、会为哪些公司工作、会担任什么职位、会住在哪儿，或者最终会对世界做出什么贡献。

You have no idea what industries you'll enter, what companies you'll work for, what roles you'll have, where you'll live, or what you will ultimately contribute to the world.

你会改变。

You'll change.

行业会改变。

Industries will change.

世界会改变，而你根本无法预测这一切。

The world will change, and you can't possibly predict any of it.

试图规划职业生涯是一种徒劳的行为，只会让你感到沮丧，并让你忽视生活中真正重要的机遇。

Trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way.

职业规划，限制职业发展。

Career planning, career limiting.

你越早接受这一点，就越好。

The sooner you come to grips with that, the better.

职业生涯规划的第二条规则。

The second rule of career planning.

与其规划你的职业生涯，不如专注于培养技能和把握机遇。

Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

我将在下一篇文章中详细讨论技能发展，但在这篇文章的其余部分，我将重点关注机遇的本质。

I'll talk a lot about skills development in the next post, but for the rest of this post, I'm gonna focus in on the nature of opportunities.

机遇至关重要。

Opportunities are key.

我认为，机遇大致可以分为两类：一类是主动出现在你面前的，另一类是你自己主动创造的。

I would argue that opportunities fall loosely into two buckets, those that present themselves to you and those that you go out and create.

这两种机会对你的职业生涯都至关重要。

Both will be hugely important to your career.

那些主动找上门的机会，至少部分原因是你在正确的时间身处正确的地点。

Opportunities that present themselves to you are the consequence, at least partially, of being in the right place at the right time.

它们往往在你毫无预料时出现，而且常常发生在你正从事其他似乎与之无关的活动时。

They tend to present themselves when you're not expecting it and often when you are engaged in other activities that would seem to preclude you from pursuing them.

如果你不立即抓住机会，它通常会转瞬即逝，别人会抢走它。

And they come and go quickly if you don't jump all over an opportunity, someone else generally will, and it will vanish.

我认为，人们所谓的职业规划，很大一部分其实是持续保持警觉，留意那些在你恰好身处正确时间、正确地点时自发出现的机会。

I believe a huge part of what people would like to refer to as career planning is being continuously alert to opportunities that present themselves to you spontaneously when you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

你公司的一位资深人士正在寻找一位年轻有冲劲的人，来额外承担一个重要项目的基础工作，而你还要完成本职工作。

A senior person at your firm is looking for someone young and hungry to do the legwork on an important project in addition to your day job.

你之前的经理跳槽到一家高速增长的公司，三个月后给你打电话说：来加入我吧。

Your former manager has jumped ship to a hot growth company and calls you three months later and says, come join me.

或者，你最聪明的一群朋友在晚上11点打算去Denny's餐厅讨论一个创业点子。

Or a small group of your smartest friends are headed to Denny's at 11PM to discuss an idea for a start up.

你愿意一起来吗？

Would you like to come along?

我不断惊讶于如此多的人面对类似上述的机会时却选择错过。

I am continually amazed at the number of people who are presented with an opportunity like one of the above and pass.

这就是那些职业生涯一飞冲天的人和那些原地踏步的人之间的根本分水岭。

There's your basic dividing line between the people who shoot up in their careers like a rocket ship and those who don't right there.

第二类机会是你主动寻找并创造的。

The second bucket of opportunities are those you seek out and create.

本系列后续文章将讨论如何做到这一点。

A lot of what will follow in future posts in this series will discuss how to do that.

但我要提前说明，我也不断惊讶于那么多的人安于现状，即使内心清楚自己真正想做什么，也不去主动寻求机会。

However, let me say upfront that I am also continually amazed at the number of people who coast through life and don't go and seek out opportunities even when they know in their gut what they'd really like to do.

不要成为这样的人。

Don't be one of those people.

生命太短暂了。

Life is way too short.

世界是一个非常可塑的地方。

The world is a very malleable place.

如果你知道自己想要什么，并以最大的能量、动力和热情去追求，世界往往会比你想象的更快、更容易地围绕你重新调整。

If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.

我并不是建议你随机地从一个机会跳到另一个机会。

Now I'm not proposing that you simply ping pong from opportunity to opportunity randomly.

你可以制定一个策略，以下是我认为这个策略应该如何运作。

You can have a strategy, and here's how I think that strategy should work.

专业管理资金的人不会孤立地看待单个投资。

People who manage money professionally don't think about individual investments in isolation.

他们将这些投资视为整体投资组合的一部分。

They think of those investments as part of an overall portfolio.

每个投资都有其潜在回报——你拥有它所能获得的收益，以及潜在风险——可能发生的问题。

Each investment has its potential return, the benefit you get from owning it, and its potential risks, the things that can go wrong.

投资组合则是一组投资，其收益和风险特征是所有投资混合后的综合表现。

A portfolio then is a set of investments, and the portfolio assumes the return and risk characteristics of all of the investments blended together.

从这个角度来看，如果潜在回报足够高，那么在投资组合中包含一些比个人通常能接受的风险更高的投资，或者包含一些风险极低、回报潜力也极低的投资以保护下行风险，往往是合乎逻辑的。

Viewed in that context, it is often logical to have individual investments within a portfolio that are far more risky than one would normally find comfortable if the potential return is good enough, or investments that are far less risky and have far less return potential than one would normally want to protect one's downside.

任何单一投资的风险本身并不重要。

The risk of any individual investment is not important.

重要的是所有投资的风险和潜在回报在整体投资组合中的综合表现。

What is important is how the risks and the potential returns of all of the investments combine in the overall portfolio.

我认为，你应该把你的职业生涯看作一个由工作、角色和机会组成的投资组合，你所接受的每一份工作、选择承担的每一个角色、追求的每一个机会，都会带来一定的潜在回报。

I believe you should look at your career as a portfolio of jobs, roles, opportunities, each job that you take, each role that you choose to fill, each opportunity you pursue will have a certain potential return.

你从这些工作中能获得的收益，无论是收入、技能提升、经验积累、地理位置，还是其他方面。

The benefits you can get from taking it, whether those benefits come in the form of income, skill development, experience, geographic location, or something else.

每一份工作也都有其特定的风险特征，比如因无法胜任工作要求而被解雇、不得不搬到你不想去的地方、公司破产，或是错失其他更有吸引力的机会所带来的机会成本。

Each job will also have a certain risk profile, the things that could go wrong from getting fired for not being able to handle the job's demands, to having to move somewhere you don't want to, to the company going bankrupt, to the opportunity cost of not pursuing some other attractive opportunity.

一旦你开始这样思考，你就可以在职业生涯可能长达五十年以上的漫长周期中，战略性地规划你的发展。

Once you start thinking this way, you can think strategically about your career over its likely fifty plus year time span.

例如，当你刚毕业、开支较低且地理位置灵活时，你可以选择那些具有特定回报与风险特征的工作。

For example, when you are just out of school and have a low burn rate and geographic flexibility, you can take jobs with a certain return risk profile.

如果你结婚并有了孩子，你会选择具有不同收益风险特征的工作。

If you get married and have kids, you will take jobs with a different return risk profile.

后来，当孩子长大，你再次获得行动自由，不再需要担心学费和位于优质学区的大房子的房贷时，你已经有了比刚起步时丰富得多的经验，这时你可以选择具有第三种收益风险特征的工作。

Later, when your kids grow up and you are once again free to move about and you don't have to worry about tuition payments and a mortgage on a big house, in a great school district, but you now have far more experience than you did when you were first starting out, you can take jobs with a third return risk profile.

大多数人并不会这样思考。

Most people do not think this way.

他们或许偶尔会这样想，但不会系统性地这样做。

They might occasionally think this way, but they don't do it systematically.

因此，当一个机会出现时，他们会孤立地评估它。

So when an opportunity pops up, they evaluate it on a stand alone basis.

这看起来风险很大。

Boy, it looks risky.

我不确定我是否应该做这件事。

I'm not sure I should do it.

你真正应该自动做的，是将这个机会放在你整个职业生涯中可能承担的所有其他风险的背景下考量，判断这个新机会是否在战略上契合你的职业组合。

What you should automatically do instead is put it in context with all of the other risks you are likely to take throughout your entire career and decide whether this new opportunity fits strategically into your portfolio.

让我们更深入地探讨一下风险这个概念。

Let's dig into the concept of risk a little more.

我不是在说你想到横穿马路被一辆凯迪拉克撞到时所想到的那种风险。

I'm not talking about the form of risk that you think of when you think of stepping out into the crosswalk and getting run over by an Escalade.

我指的是金融专业人士所面对的那种风险。

I'm talking about the form of risk that financial professionals deal with.

想了解更多相关内容，可以阅读经典著作《反叛上帝》——风险的非凡故事，创业企业家和你在做任何决定时都会遇到这种风险。

See the classic book Against the Gods, the remarkable story of risk for more on this, and startup entrepreneurs deal with and that you deal with anytime you make any decision.

几乎每一个决定都可能带来一系列潜在的负面后果，但这些后果是可以分析、常常可以量化，并因此得到控制的，这一点很重要，因为在生活中，通常没有风险就没有机会。

There are a set of potential downsides to almost any decision, but they can be analyzed and often quantified and thereby brought under control, which is important because in life, there is generally no opportunity without risk.

为公司里的资深人士额外完成一个项目，你可能会耗尽精力，导致本职工作表现不佳。

Doing the legwork on that extra project for the senior person at your firm, you risk exhausting yourself and doing your day job poorly.

加入你前上司所在的那家高速增长公司，也许六个月后公司就垮了，那时你的现任雇主就不愿再雇用你了。

Joining your former manager at that hot growth company, maybe it tanks six months later and then your current employer won't rehire you.

和那些聪明的朋友一起去丹尼餐厅，和他们一起创办一家新公司。

Join those smart friends at Denny's and start a new company with them.

也许它彻底失败了，你不得不在余生的每一次求职面试中解释自己为何如此愚蠢。

Maybe it completely fails and you have to explain why you were so foolish at every job interview you do for the rest of your life.

人们常常错过机会，总是有真实而正当的理由。

There are always real and legitimate reasons why people often pass on opportunities.

他们看到了风险，希望避免这些风险。

They see the risks and they wish to avoid them.

问题是，如果不承担风险，你就无法把握任何机会。

The issue is that without taking risk, you can't exploit any opportunities.

你可以过上平静而相对幸福的生活，但你不太可能创造新事物，也不太可能在世界上留下自己的印记。

You can live a quiet and reasonably happy life, but you are unlikely to create something new, and you are unlikely to make your mark on the world.

引用传奇的摩根士丹利衍生品交易员、扑克专家亚伦·布朗的话，他在其卓越的著作《华尔街的扑克脸》中谈到为投资银行招聘交易员时说。

To quote Aaron Brown, a legendary Morgan Stanley derivatives trader and poker expert from his extraordinary book, The Poker Face of Wall Street, when talking about hiring traders at an investment bank.

我听的是，某人是否真的渴望某种只能通过承担风险才能获得的东西，无论这种风险是大是小。

What I listen for is someone who really wanted something that could be obtained only through taking the risk, whether that risk was big or small.

即使她不能娴熟地管理风险，这甚至都不重要。

It's not even important that she manage the risk skillfully.

重要的是，她知道风险存在，尊重它，但仍选择承担。

It's only important that she knew it was there, respected it, but took it anyway.

大多数人漫无目的地生活，随意接受路上出现的任何风险，却从不主动接受额外风险去获取周围唾手可得的财富和其他美好事物。

Most people wander through life carelessly taking whatever risk crosses their path without compensation, but never consciously accepting extra risk to pick up the money and other good things lying all around them.

另一些人则本能地回避所有风险，或不加谨慎地捡起每一块零钱。

Other people reflexively avoid every risk or grab every loose dollar without caution.

我无意贬低这些策略。

I don't mean to belittle these strategies.

我相信对那些实践它们的人来说，这些策略是有道理的。

I'm sure they make sense to the people who pursue them.

但我自己无法理解它们。

I just don't understand them myself.

我知道，这些人都不会成为成功的交易员，也不会在人生中任何重要的事情上取得成功。

I do know that none of these people will be successful traders or successful at anything important in life.

因此，当你面对一个机会时，要仔细分析其风险，但要在你一生中可能面临的风险组合背景下进行分析，并意识到，当风险能带来最佳机会时，承担风险可能是好事。

So when you are presented with an opportunity, carefully analyze its risks, but do so within the context if your likely lifetime portfolio of risks and do so realizing that taking risk can be a good thing when it leads to pursuing the best opportunities.

话虽如此，以下是我对你应该在何时承担何种风险的一些看法。

All that said, here are some of my opinions about the kinds of risks you should take and when.

当你刚毕业，假设自己相对自由、可移动且生活开销较低时，正是你应该优先考虑如何快速提升技能、积累对未来有益的经验的时期。

When you are just out of school and assuming that you are relatively free to move and have a low burn rate is when you should optimize for the rate at which you can develop skills and acquire experiences that will serve you well later.

为了做到这一点，你应当主动承担收入风险。

You should specifically take income risk in order to do that.

无论薪资高低，始终选择那份最能提升你技能、提供宝贵经验的工作。

Always take the job that will best develop your skills and give you valuable experiences regardless of its salary.

这并不是你职业生涯中应该求稳的阶段。

This is not the time in your career to play it safe.

当你有了家庭责任，比如配偶、两个半孩子、一只狗和一座栅栏围起来的房子时，显然就该减少收入风险，转而承担一些较小的风险——比如可能学不到太多、晋升较慢，或放弃加入热门初创公司。

When you have family obligations, a spouse, two and a half kids, a dog, and a picket fence, that's obviously the time to crank back on the income risk and instead take a little risk that you might not learn as much or advance as quickly or join that hot new startup.

然而，即使这样也不是非黑即白的。

However, even this is not black and white.

例如在硅谷，年轻父母依然可以冒险加入一家热门初创公司，因为如果公司失败，通常很容易找到另一份工作，尤其是如果你在过程中已经积累了更有用的技能和经验。

In Silicon Valley, for example, it can still make a lot of sense for a young parent to take a risk on a hot new start up because it will usually be easy to get another job if the start up fails, especially if one has developed more useful skills and experiences along the way.

有时你可能会意识到自己对当前领域感到不满。

There may be times when you realize that you are dissatisfied with your field.

例如，你正在从事企业软件工作，但你更希望投身绿色科技或消费互联网公司。

You are working in enterprise software, for example, but you'd really rather be working on green tech or in a consumer Internet company.

跨领域跳槽总是有风险的，因为你的专业技能和人脉都集中在旧领域，因此在新领域成功的确定性会更低。

Jumping from one field into another is always risky because your specific skills and contacts are in your old field, so you'll have less certainty of success in the new field.

但这几乎总是值得承担的风险。

This is almost always a risk worth taking.

原地不动却心怀不满，本身也有风险，尤其是对你的幸福感造成影响。

Standing pat and being unhappy about it has risks of its own, particularly to your happiness.

在一个你并不快乐的职位或领域里，要想取得卓越成就是非常困难的。

And it is awfully hard to be highly successful in a job or field in which one is unhappy.

同样地，关于地域风险，你最初在一个城市工作，比如在费城的一家软件公司，表现不错，这时你获得了跳槽到硅谷一家增长更快的软件公司的机会。

Likewise, with geography risk, you start out in one city, say, working at a software company in Philadelphia, and you're doing well, you get the opportunity to jump to a faster growing software company in Silicon Valley.

你是否应该冒风险迁移到一个你谁也不认识、生活成本更高的地方？

Should you take the risk of moving geographies to a place where you don't know anybody and where the cost of living is higher?

几乎可以肯定，缺乏广泛人脉以及在一段时间内忍受较低生活水平所带来的额外风险，远不及你加入一家更好的公司、迁至行业核心地带、并为未来几十年抓住更多绝佳机会所带来的收益。

Almost certainly, the additional risks of not having an extensive personal network and of tolerating a lower standard of living for some period of time are almost certainly overcome by the upside of being a better company, relocating yourself to the heart of your industry, and setting yourself up to exploit many more great opportunities over the next decades.

我认为，为大公司工作比表面上看起来要危险得多。

Working for a big company is, I believe, much riskier than it looks.

我将在下一篇文章中更详细地讨论这一点，但在大公司工作的人随时可能遭遇非个人化的裁员，并且常常错失了像在更小、增长更快的公司那样快速提升技能和积累经验的机会。

I'll talk about this more in the next post, but people who work at big companies are subject to impersonal layoffs at any time and often forego the opportunity to develop skills and gain experiences as rapidly as they would at some place smaller and faster growing.

然后五到十年过去了，你突然意识到自己的技能和经验只适用于其他大公司的职位，这时你就真的陷入困境了。

And then five or ten years pass, and you realize your skills and experiences are only relevant for jobs at other big companies, and then you have a real problem.

最后，时刻关注机会成本。

Finally, pay attention to opportunity cost at all times.

做一件事就意味着放弃其他事情。

Doing one thing means not doing other things.

这是一种很容易被忽视、却会对你造成损害的风险。

This is a form of risk that is very easy to ignore to your detriment.

这些只是几个例子。

Those are just a few examples.

你会遇到一些具体的回报风险情况，这些情况是任何人都无法提前预测的。

You will run into specific return risk situations that nobody can predict ahead of time.

当这种情况发生时，只需坐下来仔细分析这些风险，并认真思考：在你整个职业生涯的总体组合中，这些风险是否真的可怕到足以让你放弃一个绝佳机会的潜在回报。

When you do, just sit down and tease apart the risks and think hard about whether in the context of your overall career portfolio, they are really so scary that they justify passing on the return potential of a great opportunity.

通常并不会。

They often won't.

再引述一句话，这次来自纳西姆·尼古拉斯·塔勒布的《黑天鹅》：抓住任何机会，或任何看起来像机会的事物。

One more quote, this time from Nasim Nicholas Taleb in the Black Swan, seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity.

这些机会非常罕见，比你想象的要罕见得多。

They are rare, much rarer than you think.

许多人一旦遇到人生中的幸运契机，却根本意识不到自己正身处其中。

Many people do not realize they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it.

如果一家大型出版社、一位重要艺术经纪人、一位电影制片人、一位顶尖银行家或一位杰出思想家提议约见，立即取消你所有已安排的计划。

If a big publisher or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker suggest an appointment, cancel anything you have planned.

你可能再也等不到这样的机会之门再次打开。

You may not see such a window open up again.