Tips for having a excellent career

If you want to have an excellent career, you should take risks and mine your networks for information, according to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The billionaire founder of professional networking site wrote advice book The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career with fellow entrepreneur Ben Casnocha.

News.com.au has highlighted seven of the book's key tips for having a remarkable career:

All humans are entrepreneurs, according to the authors.

No matter what your job is, your entrepreneurial venture is your own career, they said. Forge new sorts of careers, they suggested.

Chart a career path that sets you apart from other professionals and pick a market niche where you're better than the competition, stated Hoffman and Casnocha.

To be successful, your skills, aspirations and market value need to work together to make you better than other professionals in your work market, they noted.

Plan to adapt: Your identity emerges through experimentation, so always have an experimental plan A, and alternative plan B and a certain fall-back option plan Z for your career, they suggested.

"Every job boils down to interacting with people," Hoffman and Casnocha wrote.

Strengthen all your relationships, and leverage their connections as well as yours.

Create a networking fund with a percentage of your pay to cover coffee, lunches and other meetings, they added.

Remarkable careers are punctuated by breakout opportunities, not steady growth. Opportunities are linked to people, so make as many contacts as you can - join clubs and attend conferences, the authors said.

Take intelligent risks: If you take small risks every day, you're less likely to run in trouble when you take bigger career risks, according to them.

Last they suggest using your network to access information.

Find out who knows what, and use them as your bank of information, they said.

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