Pivot Yourself! (Career Lessons from Startups)

Why can't people pivot like startups do? YouTube started as a video dating site called Tune In Hook Up. PayPal was a way to exchange funds on Palm Pilots. What, I wondered, can actual human beings learn from the lessons of great startups?

To find some answers, I turned to The Startup Owner's Manual, written by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. In a previous life, I invested in Steve's startup and partnered with Bob in another; both were among my wisest decisions ever. What follows is my own very liberal repositioning of some of the startup gems Steve and Bob offer in their book:

1.) Get Out of Your Routine

To move beyond the vision in their heads, startup founders have to get out of the building and actually find and listen to potential customers. If you are dissatisfied with the course of your life, you have to break out of your routine and meet an entirely different collection of people. Hanging out with your old college friends is not the path to a successful personal pivot; to find new ideas, you have to meet new people, have different conversations, and gather new facts.

2.) Help Others

Startups crash because they fall in love with their new solution, and fail to see that no one cares about the problem they are trying to solve. Likewise, individuals get caught up in what they want, and fail to understand that success means helping others more than you help yourself. To succeed, a startup must find a problem that is driving someone crazy, and then solve it.

If you are an individual seeking to make a personal pivot, you need to be more obsessed with helping others than you are creating the ideal life for yourself. Who are you going to help, and how? The ideal life will follow; it is the end result of helping people you really want to help.

3.) Test Quickly

Keep your nose to the grindstone in pursuit of the wrong goals, and all you'll end up with is a short nose. Startups need to test new ideas quickly, and so do you. For example, don't quit your job to enroll in a master's program. Instead, test the idea first. Enroll in an online, self-paced course and see if you have the interest and discipline to speed through it in a week. Then try another. Reach out to professionals on alternate career paths and get 20 minutes of their time to test your potential moves. Test as quickly as you can.

4.) Failure Is Part of the Process

Steve and Bob write...

One of the key differences between a startup and an existing company is the one that's never explicitly stated: startups go from failure to failure to failure."

Established firms have learned what works, and they fall into a pattern that enables them to avoid a constant succession of failures. But startups, and anyone searching for a new path in life, needs to run dozens of "pass/fail tests". Every time you fail, you should learn something. This is why it is so essential to test ideas quickly; most ideas won't pan out. But every failure increases the odds that you will eventually succeed. Here's another gem from the book:

If you are afraid to fail in a startup, you're destined to do so."

If you are afraid to fail in a personal pivot, get used to the life you already have; it won't change until someone else changes it for you, and that usually happens in a bad way, not a good way.

5.) Make Continuous Changes and Pivots

You can't lie in bed at 2 a.m. and decide the path of your life. Even when you make a big change, you can't head in that direction for the next 20 years. Along the way, you will need to make many minor corrections. Learning to pivot isn't a one-time thing; it is a new way of life that looks like this:

6.) Establish Metrics

As someone once said, you can go a day without sex, but try going a day without rationalizations. Human beings are very good at using rationalizations to avoid confronting the toughest challenges and truths. It's all too easy to convince yourself that your life is pretty good, that your job isn't so bad, that there are good reasons to avoid the effort of making a big change.

To avoid this quagmire of inaction and self-doubt, create specific metrics to track the success - or failure - of your pivots. To use the above example, if you take an online course to test a potential return to grad school, require that you earn an "A" in the course to demonstrate the wisdom of that path. If you think you can survive as an independent consultant, set specific income goals and if you miss them, admit failure and pivot again.

Have you pivoted successfully?

I'm interested in connecting with professionals who have pivoted. If this describes you, please leave a bit of your story in the Comments section and I'll reach out privately to the people whose stories fit best with my forthcoming posts on this topic.

Bruce Kasanoff is a ghostwriter for entrepreneurs, executives and social innovators. Learn more at Kasanoff.com. He is the author of How to Self-Promote without Being a Jerk.

Image: Bruce Kasanoff, inspired by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf