Your personal brand is a promise to your clients… a promise of quality, consistency, competency, and reliability.
Jason Hartman – Singer & Song Writer
Startups are the new vision and mission for VUCANs almost regardless of age. Startups offer the dream of working long hours, creating, being your own boss, making money on your terms, and changing the world. This is the ultimate dream in self management.
A new genre of gurus urge VUCANs to postpone or even forgo an education to do startups. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, is the no-education leader. Thiel offers a fellowship to young founders who want to do and make a difference. The kicker of the Fellowship is that a VUCAN has to skip or quit college to work with Thiel’s network of founders, investors, and engineers. Thiel Fellowship “gives $100K to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”[i]
The Silicon Valley attitude is to ideate, learn, apply, test, and do again until you succeed. This is counter intuitive in many parts of the world that shames or demonizes failure. The startup movement way is to try new things, test them, and fail fast through incremental exploration.
Think hustle RBPS and RBDM. The idea is you can limit the damage by placing small bets on opportunities, where you think there’s incremental or even substantial upside thus limiting the consequences of downside risk and failure. So the idea is not to bet the company but develop marketable ideas that can be replicated, scaled, and monetized. Through these little hits, you gain insight into how to ideate a profitable venture.
Work Lesson Earned: In hustle culture, VUCANs must be flexible, entrepreneurial, agile, and lean. Hustle VUCANs are focused on being their own bosses and making a difference. VUCANs use RBPS and RBDM to self manage. They focus on smart opportunities, take intelligent risks, and use disruption to their advantage. They want to design their glass and fill it with their choice of beverage or weed (in places where it’s legal).
[i] ‘Thiel Fellowship’, Website Thielfellowship.org, 2019.