Benjamin Todd

Have backup options.

The ABZ plan.

Startup founders have a broad vision for the company but face enormous uncertainties in the details of their product and strategy.

To overcome this, they test lots of approaches and gradually improve their plan over time.

You face similarly large uncertainties in your career, so we might be able to borrow some of the best practices in entrepreneurship and apply them to career strategy.

This is the premise of The Startup of You, a book by the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman.

One of his tips is making an A-B-Z plan, which we've also found useful while giving one-on-one advice to our readers.

Writing an A-B-Z plan helps you think about specific alternatives and backup plans, putting you in a better position to adapt when the situation changes.

Your plan A is your best guess at the route you'd most like to pursue.

This could be a particular vision you're going to bet on and the next step that would imply.

For example, try to become an academic economist who works on global priorities research or AI policy, vision, by studying these extra maths courses at undergrad, next step.

If you're more unsure about your vision, you could also plan to try out several longer-term paths by taking a couple of carefully ordered next steps, as we covered in the chapter on personal fit.

Or your plan A could just be to build some valuable transferable career capital, for example, learn people management or get a degree in statistics, and then re-evaluate your plan later.

Two, plan B, nearby alternatives.

These are promising alternatives that you could switch to if your plan A doesn't work out.

Writing them out ahead of time helps you stay ready for new opportunities.

To figure out your plan B, ask yourself, what are the most likely ways your plan A wouldn't work out?

If that happens, what will you do?

And what other good options are there?

List any promising nearby alternatives to plan A, which may be other promising longer-term paths or different entry routes to the same paths.