False Choices

In today's world, the rules change — fast. Unexpected things happen: Strange shifts you couldn’t have imagined. Competition comes out of nowhere. Technologies disrupt the playing field. Jobs, even entire industries, disappear. The very fabric of the game changes, and whole new careers are born. In the early 2000s, if you told people that in a few years creators would be making a good living by posting video makeup tutorials, would they have believed you? Of course not! It would’ve sounded absurd.

Some people succeed in this rapidly changing world. Others don’t. To carve out a career in this environment, should you follow a plan or stay flexible? Should you listen to your heart or listen to the market? The answer is both. To think you have to choose one or the other is a false choice.

Entrepreneurs are often dealt many of these same false choices. They’re told they must be relentlessly persistent in fulfilling their vision, but also be ready to change their business based on market feedback. They are told to create a company they’re passionate about, but also to adapt to customer needs.

Successful startups do both. They are flexibly persistent: Their founders start companies that are true to their values and vision, yet they remain flexible enough to adapt. They are obsessed with customer feedback, yet they also determine when not to listen to their customers. They draw up plans, but they’re also nimble enough to stray from those plans when appropriate. And they are always driving toward true competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Here’s an example: In 2009, founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson started a company called Tiny Speck to create a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) called Glitch. A hallucinatory virtual fantasy in which players crafted worlds inside the minds of eleven dreaming giants, it was described as “Monty Python crossed with Dr. Seuss on acid.” The creativity was there in spades, but how about demand?

One element set the game apart from its competition: It was primarily collaborative rather than combat-focused. This, however, turned out to be a competitive disadvantage. Most people, it seems, want carnage in their MMORPGs. Glitch’s devoted fan base was way too small to generate a return for the over $15 million of venture capital investment they’d raised. A mere year after launching the game, Glitch folded.

Devastated yet hoping something could be salvaged, the founders and their remaining team looked to see if there was anything worth trying to repurpose. Sure enough, there was an intriguing by-product left over from the process of creating Glitch. To make internal communication between employees in scattered locations more fluid, developers had improvised an internal channel-based messaging tool that included file sharing, an archival search tool, and many other ad hoc fixes to internal communications problems that arose. Butterfield realized lots of other companies needed these solutions, too. So, in 2014, he sought a new funding round based on their innovative communication tool. It was called Slack (Searchable Log of All Communications and Knowledge).

New users and companies of all sizes flocked to Slack. It became one of the fastest-growing startups in history. In 2020, Salesforce bought the company for an impressive $27 billion, and today it has over 12 million daily active users. Glitch was not such a glitch after all.

The evolution of Slack is a case study in smart adapting. Its founders were in constant motion, trying new things when confronted with the market reality, and nimbly shifting their plans based on what they learned. Startups pivot. So must careers. Last week’s post on ABZ Planning explains some practical steps you can take to effectively adapt and change.

A few more examples of false choices:

• Should you prioritize learning or earning? The best career opportunities have you doing both learning and earning. Every career plan should have you doing at least one. You know you’re in the wrong job if you’re doing neither. 
• What's more important: the individual or the team? Both. Your career success depends on both your personal capabilities and your network’s ability to magnify them. These are inseparable. Think of it as "I-to-the-We." An individual’s power is raised exponentially with the help of a team (a network).

When presented with two compelling options, consider whether it's a choice at all. Sometimes, the answer is both.

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Please share in the comments section: What false choices have you faced and overcome in your career journey?

Some text adapted from my book with Ben Casnocha: The Startup of You: Adapt, Take Risks, Grow Your Network, and Transform Your Career (Currency, an imprint of Random House, 2022).