This article is from WeChat official account:Chaos University (ID: hundun-university)< span class="text-remarks">, the original title “Should I Do a Sideline? How to start a second career? “Author: Lv Shengwei (whom to learn, former vice president), Editor: Chaos Big Brother, from the title figure: Vision China

Hello everyone, I am Master Chaos.

In the workplace, it is the right thing to concentrate on doing the main job.

The second job we often say is not a side job, but your next main job. If you want to be a successful person, starting a second career is essential. When and under what circumstances should you start your second career?

Today, Chaos University invited Lu Shengwei, the former vice president of GSX, to teach you how to start your second career.

Quick overview of the structure of this article:

1. What is the second occupation

2. Why do you want to be a second job

3. How to be a second job

4. The enterprise opens the second “professional”

1. What is the second occupation

The second job is often confused with a side job.

Many people say that the main business does not make money, so you can do your side business by shooting videos, opening an online store, doing micro business, writing copywriting, and doing photos. But I don’t recommend you to do it. If you can’t even do one job in your main business, how can you do another job well? You spend your time and effort to fight other people’s ability to eat, and you can learn the skills of a three-legged cat. The result is that others are doing it. If your side business is really better than your main business, then you should boldly give up your main business and switch to a side business decisively.

No matter how much side business you learn, it’s not as good asConcentrate on the main business.

The second career curve we are talking about is different from the side job. The second job is the main job. You did this job while not doing another job, you just changed your job. You do A at the beginning and then B. Both A and B are your main business, but they are at different stages and there is no intersection between them.

It must be done to open the second career curve. If you don’t open it, you will only be a middle-class employee who has just graduated from an ordinary employee to achieve career advancement. If you want the freedom of wealth and achieve the top level in society, you need to start the second career curve.

Simply understand that the second career curve is to open a new career path.

Second, why do you want to be a second job

When starting a second career, there are active choices and passive development.

Let’s first look at an example of actively starting a second career.

1. Enter new fields and look for new opportunities

I will give you an example of Zeng Guofan.

Zeng Guofan has three important achievements in his life. The first is to calm the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the second is to organize the Westernization Movement, and the third is to cultivate talents. His first job was not to lead soldiers to fight, but to serve as a clerk as a Beijing official, with a scholarship background, advanced to the Imperial Academy, and a minister of ritual. Zeng Guofan’s going to war is the second career curve that he started actively.

In the more than ten years of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom War, before Zeng Guofan came out, no general of the Qing government had won the battle. Putting down the war is the right time for him to make contributions and serve the country. Zeng Guofan requested an order to go to war. Under the difficulties of no food, no salary and no experience, he recruited an army to lead his troops to win the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

If a scholar does not have field merits, it is difficult to be a national first-grade member. After starting the second career curve, Zeng Guofan became the governor of Liangjiang, the governor of Zhili, and the generals. The students he trained, including Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang, etc., have all been appointed to the important positions of minister, Shangshu and even the Minister of Military Aircraft.

Zeng Guofan focuses on knowledge, supplemented by talent. The key to success is to have knowledge, judgment, and strategic thinking. Talent is second. Instead, we often say that choice is more important than effort. For example, Jack Ma’s choice, Jack Ma is creating AlibabaPakistan has done three or four companies before, none of them succeeded. In 1998, he went to the United States and found that the Internet world in the United States was very good, so he returned to China to embrace the Internet.

Alibaba is the second career curve started by Jack Ma. After that, he also started Taobao, Alipay, Ant Financial, Cainiao Network, Alibaba Cloud, and later Hema fresh food business, all belong to the second curve. But these are the second curve of the enterprise, not just the second career curve of the individual.

Let’s look at Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan. Before founding Meituan, he worked on the school intranet and Fanfou. Some businesses were not very successful. Later, I took the initiative to look for changes, and after becoming a US group, I was soaring.

2. Enter a new location, curve for promotion

The way to take the initiative to create a second career curve, in addition to entering a new field, there is another method called entering a new location, curve for promotion. It turns out that you have done well in one place, but it is not enough to rise higher. What should I do?

Remember 9 words: carry performance, lead the team, and go to place.

Carrying performance

You have to do work related to performance, not necessarily sales work, but you must have clear performance indicators that can be measured by numbers. Such as product renewal rate, customer satisfaction. If your work cannot be measured by numbers, it means that doing good and bad does not make much difference, then it is difficult for you to get fair measurement and feedback, it is difficult to make progress, and it is difficult to get promoted.

I have been in contact with the cybersecurity industry, and the performance of this industry is relatively difficult to measure. It is very depressing to do network security. If nothing happens, everyone thinks you are not important. Once something goes wrong, everyone will say you are bad.

Bring a team

Leading a team is to do management, and management is the channel for all careers. For example, model athletes have a decline in physical fitness after the age of 30. At this time, the second career curve is opened for management. Leading the team allows you to learn more compromises, sharing, tolerance, decision-making, empathy thinking, leading the team to face goals and making decisions, and ultimately the entire team to victory. This is the benefits that bringing the team brings to you.

Next place

Some people say that they shouldn’t leave the headquarters. The headquarters has a broad vision and can reach more people. That’s true, but if you stay in the headquarters for 3 or 5 years and haven’t risen up yet, you might as well try to go somewhere.

Previously, I worked in one of the largest listed education companies in the country. At that time, I had a colleague, Mr. A, who was the department director of the Shanghai branch. The headquarters plans to go to Nanchang to establish a new school. Employees in Shanghai are not willing to go. Only Mr. A goes. He went to Nanchang New School as the principal and did a good job. Two years later, he went to Chengdu to be the principal, and later went to Xi’an. A school is bigger than the other, and the city has changed from a small city to a big city. Now Mr. A has returned to Shanghai to be the principal, and he is the principal of the Shanghai branch, which is equivalent to the vice president level of the group. He left Shanghai for 7 years and returned after moving to the local area, completing the leap and promotion from department director to group vice president. The directors who were at the same level as Jun A in Shanghai, or higher levels, are now his subordinates.

The next place is a curved promotion path, which belongs to the second career curve. You are still doing the same thing, but the path is different and the promotion is better.

3. Start a new business and be your own boss

The third case of active transformation is to start a business in a field that has done well.

You will find that many people have several routes coexisting. For example, he enters a new location and a new field, and at the same time he starts a new business and becomes his own boss. These routes all coexist, including The last one is called learning and excellent. An entrepreneur may have several routes coexist, and finally merge into one route.

I have planned the career growth of syllogism for everyone.

The first paragraph is promoted from ordinary employees to senior professional managers.

The second paragraph starts with high-level professional managers starting a partnership entrepreneurship, blending entrepreneurship, and joint entrepreneurship.

The third paragraph changes from partnership entrepreneurship, joint entrepreneurship, blending entrepreneurship to independent entrepreneurship.

I walked this way myself. I am at the last companyAfter working for 12 years, he came out to start a business and founded an educational Internet company called GSX. A few of our like-minded friends, following a very powerful boss, jointly start a joint venture. There is no experience in starting a business for the first time, and many practices are wrong. If you do it yourself, you will be dead. Fortunately, it is a partnership business, so after gaining experience, if you go to start a business alone, the probability of success will be much higher.

I have not experienced a partnership entrepreneurship, and there are successful examples of direct independent entrepreneurship, such as Kazuo Inamori. Inamori Kazuo’s first job after graduating from University was as a technician at Matsukaze Industry. Well done, old friends, old leaders, and old customers are willing to support him, so he brought a few people out and founded Kyocera. Kazuo Inamori did a good job in the field of expertise, and a small ecosystem gathered around him, and he came out to be his own boss.

There are many examples of the same.

Zhang Bangxin, chairman of the Good Future Group, was originally an ordinary teacher. He has done a good job as a teacher, and more and more parents and students come to him. He said that I can’t teach you well, so let’s find a teacher for you, so he went to Peking University to find his junior. One teacher was not enough, and then I looked for 2, 3, 4, 5 teachers, and gradually discovered that I had to register for a school permit and have a fixed place for teaching. With more and more employees, management training has to be carried out. Step by step, we have established a good future.

Li Shanyou, the founder of Chaos University, turned out to be a professor. Later, I started the second career curve and founded Chaos University, which I think is the best in China Internet Business School.

The third example is Fan Deng. Fan Deng was originally a professional reporter, host, and producer, and later established a platform for Fan Deng to read. He wrote a book called “Low Risk Entrepreneurship”. The core point is that when you start a new business and become your own boss, don’t choose a risky thing to do, but first try a small range. At a unit point within the minimum range (also called MVP), after the unit point is successfully verified, expand.

Fan Deng didn’t raise funds directly at the beginning. He first said that I wanted to talk about the book. He posted a circle of advertisements in the WeChat group, pulled a group, and started speaking. Later, the group of 500 people was full, and everyone was willing to listen to him, then pay 365 yuan a year, and then pull a paying group. Then there was a second group, a third group. Later, more and more people are willing to pay and renew, without spending too much advertising fees, to achieve user growth.

This model worked well, and then Fan Deng began to really raise financing and build a team. His process risk was indeed relatively small.

Also, Wang Xing, which we mentioned earlier, started as Meituan, a group-buying website, and later became Meituan takeaway, which is a different business. Then do Meituan bicycles, which belong to the second career curve of a company or individual.

4. Start to be a team, transform to management

The fourth situation for proactively opening a second career is to start leading a team and do management.

The models, athletes and actors we mentioned earlier, these youthful occupations, as well as teachers, have the strength to teach when they are young, earning hundreds of thousands a year, and they are too old for their physical strength and cannot fight for young people. In this case, when you become a manager, you don’t have to worry about age pressure. Don’t be afraid that the waves behind the Yangtze River will push the waves forward. You have to lead the waves behind, inspire them, train them, support them, and achieve them. You lead a group of people to achieve a big goal.

A typical example of leading a team to transform into management is: learning to make good works. Zeng Guofan was originally a Jinshi, but he was later admitted to the Hanlin and became a high official. This is a typical example of a scholar who is excellent and an official. In our education industry, it is called teaching and excellent. The teacher taught well and gradually transformed into management. First of all, you have to do your job well before you have the opportunity to do the second career curve.

When transforming management, find a balance. When you first started to manage, the income was not as high as before, but the risks and responsibilities were greater than before. Before, I worked as a teacher in a training organization, earning hundreds of thousands a year. Later, when I became a manager, I was a novice at the beginning, and his salary was not high, with a monthly salary of 8,000 yuan. If I did not do well, there would be no one like me in the arena, and I took a lot of risks at that time. In addition, my work is more tiring than before. I used to be a teacher and work 2 days a week. I am now in management, working 5 days a week, and continue to attend classes and supervise on weekends.

Income decreases, risks increase, and there is more work. Most people are actually unwilling to make the transition, so many people are still first-line teachers by the age of 35. The results of it? The cost is getting higher and higher, the mentality is getting worse and worse, the young people come up and kill him directly.

If you do sales, if you don’t change to do management, you will still be first-line sales at the age of 35. If one day your performance is not up to the standard and you are killed, you will find a job again. If someone asks you why you are still doing first-line sales at this age, it is difficult for you to answer him. Any profession, after reaching a certain age, it is very dangerous if you fail to achieve a management position.

Before we talked about the active opening of the second profession, now let’s look at the passive opening example.

1. The original business has been impacted

Most people who passively started their second career have failed, but a few of them have succeeded, such as Shi Yuzhu.

Shi Yuzhu is from Anhui. After graduating from the University of Science and Technology of China, he went south to Zhuhai to start a business. At that time, he made a computer Hanka network and became a billionaire when he was less than 30 years old. China’s youngest billionaire is really super outstanding. After he was young, he began various expansions. Building a building, from the first tallest building in Zhuhai, to the tallest building in Asia. Originally, there was only a budget of 200 million yuan. Later, the budget was increased to three to four billion to seven to eight billion. In the end, it was discovered that there was not so much money to fill in, and it became an unfinished building. Because a building dragged down a very promising company.

At that time, Shi Yuzhu could completely say that I was bankrupt, insolvent, and there was no need to compensate for the remaining money. But he did not choose to go bankrupt. He said that I had to pay back the money, so he tried to start a business again and became a new business of melatonin. Melatonin is the second career curve that Shi Yuzhu passively chooses. Doing one thing passively is not easy to succeed. Although it is a ruin, it is very dangerous if you can’t find a good project and act rashly.

Another example is Zhang Jixue who lectures at Chaos University. He used to be a traditional media company, his old business was hit, and he was forced to launch a new business and founded a company called Xinchao Media. Now he has become one of the largest new media groups in China.

2. People are forced to be helpless in middle age

My old leader, Yu Minhong, belongs to the second situation. People are forced to start a business helplessly in their middle age. He used to be a teacher at Peking University. At that time, it was popular to study abroad. Many of his classmates studied abroad and made a lot of money in foreign companies. Yu Minhong is just an ordinary English teacher, earning less, and his wife has opinions on him. Under the pressure of supporting his family, he came out to run training courses and used small advertisements, and later founded New Oriental.

To be honest, there are not many people who are forced to succeed, but Yu Minhong is very outstanding. To this day, we still miss the passion when we were with Teacher Yu. But I hope that everyone will try to avoid situations where people are forced to be helpless in their middle age. The pressure of a middle-age crisis is very high.

Many people around me have a salary of tens of thousands of yuan a month. They spend tens of thousands of dollars on training classes for children without blinking, but they are reluctant to buy ice cream. It is difficult to find a job again after being laid off in middle age. You must not wait until that day.

3. Entering a new field by mistake

The third situation of passive entrepreneurship is that it is unintentional.

It is not a coincidence or good luck to succeed in one thing by accident. All success is the result of long-planned plans. Luck is only a factor, but notIt is a decisive factor. Success includes many factors such as effort, determination, opportunity, and luck.

You have a friend who does this. You haven’t done it. My friend said that you should come and do this with me. It happened that your work was not going well recently, and you started a new business with your friend, but you did very well and set up a listed company. Is this situation very likely? Very small, the high probability is that you will find it impossible.

It turned out that when I was the principal, many people asked me if the teacher could advise me on how to do education. I asked him why he wanted education. He said that I used to make wine, building materials, catering, and decoration. Our business is not easy to make money. I think you can make good money in education. I want to try it. The ignorant is fearless. People who have been in the education industry for more than 10 or 20 years are still losing money. If you don’t know how deep the water in this industry is, how can it be possible that a layman can make money if he comes in.

There are 5 entrepreneurs in this era that are the most ridiculous, the saddest, and the most difficult to succeed. They include opening milk tea shops, opening flower shops, opening homestays, acting as n-level agents for micro-businesses, and doing webcast delivery of goods. You see that others are doing quite well, you come in and try.

My suggestion is that when you are passively starting a business, you must not make mistakes. You must go through serious research, fully understand, and make careful decisions before entering a new field.

Three, how to do a second job

How to do a second job, share the following four principles with you.

1. There are principles and not chaos

A plan is not busy. You have plans and arrangements and know what time to do. When others ask you to help, you will not easily disturb your plan.

There is a lot of budget. You know how much money is left to spend, and how much it will cost in total. If you can calculate the account clearly, you won’t be poor.

There are principles and not chaos. If we have our own principles, we will not be easily disrupted by others, and will not be stepped on by others.

Your principle is to focus on doing the work at hand, things that have nothing to do with your job, and you should never do it if you make money. For example, at Huawei, someone told Ren Zhengfei a long time ago that if you want to do real estate, your company is so successful, and so much cash, you have already issued real estate. However, if Ren Zhengfei is determined not to do real estate, I will focus on doing a good job in the main business of communications. Persistence leads to greater success.

2. Line break without changing guard, and changing guard without changing line

If you change the industry, don’t change positions. If you change positions, don’t change the industry.

You used to do sales. You can do sales in education companies, or in Internet companies, or in the financial industry, automobile companies, and catering industries. No matter where you go, you do sales, which means changing jobs without changing jobs.

You are in an industry, and you used to do sales. You can replace it with marketing, research and development, administration, and public relations. This is called changing jobs without changing jobs.

Industry and position, you can’t change both. I used to do sales in educational companies, and then switched to the automotive industry to make products. This way you will have no career curve. When applying for a new job, others don’t know what your career line is. Every time you change an industry, not only will all your resources and contacts be cleared, but others will also think that you are inconstant, unable to work steadily and continuously, do nothing well, and do not last long.

There is an example of a successful second career curve. Li Xiang, born in 1981, has already established two listed companies at a very young age. The first is the car home, and the second is the ideal car. Li started working on a car website when he wanted to go to college, and now he is doing the second career curve and establishing a new company. It used to be the Internet industry, and now it is the electric vehicle and smart car industry. You can say that it is a cross-industry, but these two industries are completely related. First, Li Xiang didn’t change his profession or position, and he became CEO and founder. Second, his industry is all related to automobiles.

Another example is Ji Qi, who has ringed the bell four times in his life. Hanting, Homeinn, Ctrip, and Huazhu. Although Ji Qi has four different companies, each of them is very successful. The four companies all belong to the hotel and tourism industry, with continuity and relevance.

The Kazuo Inamori, whom we said before, started with ceramics, then telecommunications, and then JAL. Although the three industries are irrelevant, his position is the same as CEO.

Everyone must insist on changing lines without changing posts, and changing posts without changing lines.

3. Enter the right line, follow the right person

If you ask me what are the most important principles and experiences for career success, I will tell you without hesitation: Get into the right line and follow the right person. This is an important reason for my small achievements today.

Incoming line

First you have to choose an industry you really love to do. When you enter this industry, you will find that so many people who entered the industry earlier than you are lunatics who love their industry infinitely. They put in unlimited enthusiasm, energy, time and resources to do this. You can only succeed if you love your industry madly and work harder than your predecessors.

If you don’t love your industry, and when you encounter difficulties, you think, why should I choose this profession? I should do something else. Then you give up easily.

Follow the right person

Being with the right person is very important. Following a good boss can save yourself 10 years and 20 years of detours. If you find that there is no noble person around me, no one to support me, one reason may be that you are not good enough. Seniors are willing to help young people who are loyal, hard-working, brave, and motivated. You must make yourself better and let the nobles discover you.

In addition, you have to manage your contacts in time. The nobles are also waiting for the opportunity, waiting to find someone they trust and help him. You have to take the initiative to seize this opportunity. The first situation is to serve as an assistant to a particularly powerful leader, who can advance and retreat and defend, which can often make you a prince in the future. The second situation is to burn a cold stove, and give a person who used to be very powerful to burn the cold stove. When the top leader used to call the wind and the rain, he couldn’t find you at all and didn’t take you seriously. Now that you have lost your power and entered a trough, you can support him, ask him, and he will think that the young man is good. When he comes back out of the world in the future, you will be his true confidant.

4. Personal preparation

No matter what kind of second career curve you plan to start, you must be fully prepared. Opportunities are only for those who are prepared.

When your company wants to promote a vice president, you are the director with the best performance, strongest team, highest loyalty, and best eloquence among all directorsThat one? When your company wants to promote a department head, are you the person who has the best performance and the highest loyalty among all sales, the most willing to solve the company’s problems, never lose the chain at critical moments, and will never make terms with the boss?

Be prepared is that you have to be the top level in this field. If you can’t be number one in the country, then you should be number one in the province, number one in the city, number one in the company, at least you must be number one in your department and number one in your team. How many people who do number one can’t make money, can’t wait for the opportunity, if you can’t even be the first in the group, why are you the successful person? The key is to become the number one in the field, and the opportunity will naturally come.

I think a really good person can succeed in everything. He has the motivation to do everything from the heart. I don’t really believe in the kind of people who can’t do well in one job but can do well in another job.

There are four steps to personal preparation:

First of all, you have to temper your core skills to be the best in the field.

The second is to accumulate strength, accumulate character, and meet your nobles after you have accumulated enough skills.

The third is to understand yourself, understand the future, and be sensitive at all times.

The fourth is in the final stage, use your accumulated potential energy, plus a certain amount of leverage to take risks to achieve success. Leverage risk means that in the previous stage, you have to delay gratification, accumulate potential energy, and finally add a lever to amplify the previous accumulation and explode exponentially. Sufficient quantitative changes have been accumulated before, and after leveraging risks, qualitative changes have been achieved. Increased leverage is risky, so you have to learn to control the risk.

If you are very confused and feel that your current job is not doing well, it is boring if you have no money or opportunities, what should you do?

I don’t recommend that you change jobs from side to side. You are now confused. The most likely reason is that you are not doing well. Although your job is boring and the boss doesn’t appreciate it, you work hard to learn and accumulate experience to make yourself better and better. Your grades are getting better and better. Only when you become the number one in the department, you are qualified to change jobs, change jobs, and start a business.

A word for everyone: If you don’t see the future, do the present.

Four. Enterprises open the second curve

Enterprises start the second curve, and the principles are the same as when individuals make second career transformation.

When enterprises are transforming, they should pay more attention to it, and they should not blindly diversify. Let’s look at the example of Jack Welch. After he took over GE, in just over 20 years, he developed GE from a small company of second- and third-rate to the first large company with a market value of more than US$500 billion, becoming the number one in the world. CEO.

Jack Welch’s development method is not to make a business bigger and stronger, but to cut off those businesses that cannot be made bigger and stronger through frantic mergers and acquisitions. What is the end of this? GE, which became a Big Mac, is in a huge crisis. When Jack Welch retired, the new leader was unwilling to cover up for him. After the lid was lifted, everyone found that because of blind diversification expansion, a lot of business was not done well, and a lot of money was wasted. Today, the market value of General Electric is more than 60 billion U.S. dollars, only one-tenth of the original value.

There are many companies that have broken their capital chain due to blind expansion. Among them is the Giant Group we just mentioned. There is also a company called Chunlan Air Conditioning. If you know Chunlan Air Conditioning, you will be exposed to your age. People born in the 70s and 85s do not know Chunlan Air Conditioning. In the early 1990s, Chunlan air-conditioning achieved the number one in China, with an annual turnover of more than 30 billion. At that time, Gree air-conditioning had only 500 million.

In the following ten years, Chunlan air-conditioning has blindly expanded into many fields such as solar energy, heavy industry, automobiles, batteries, and motorcycles. As a result, none of them did well, which consumed a large amount of capital, technology, and contacts in the original main business. And confidence. The new business was doing poorly, and the old business was delayed. In contrast, Gree has been focusing on air-conditioning, and now has an annual turnover of one to two hundred billion, and it is already the number one air-conditioning company in the world.

If a business has not yet become the industry leader and will encounter a bottleneck in the next three years, do not blindly develop a second business.

When will the second curve start? The first is that you have become the number one in a field, and the second is that you will encounter a bottleneck in the next three years, then you must follow the second curve. BAT giants like Tencent and Ali are developing very well today because their second curve has risen. Tencent later had WeChat, and Alibaba later had Taobao, Alipay, Ant Financial, Cainiao, and Alibaba Cloud. But Baidu has not been there. Baidu has started several businesses and has not done very well. It has never had a second curve in the true sense. Now Baidu has become a second-tier company after Tencent Ali.

For individuals and enterprises, the second curve is very important, but it must be crawled forward gradually, or the s-curve rises. Be principled, focus, not blindly expand, and do not carry out multiple businesses at the same time.

Finally, to sum up, the second career curve is not the same as the sideline. Don’t do the sideline, but the second career curve must be done. The second career curve has two different situations: active and passive. It is recommended that you take the initiative to develop the second career curve after taking your current job to the extreme. No matter if you start a business or work, work in the same company, or change jobs, you will have better career and career development prospects.


This article is from WeChat official account:Chaos University (ID: hundun-university), author: Lv Shengwei (whom to learn, former vice president), editor: Chaos big Brother