Step 2: Identify Your Capital Type

Once you’ve identified your market, you must then identify the specific type of capital to pursue. If you’re in a winner-take-all market, this is trivial: By definition, there’s only one type of capital that matters. For an auction market, however, you have flexibility. A useful heuristic in this situation is to seek open gates—opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. For example, Mike Jackson’s next step after his degree was to work with a Stanford professor on his environmental-policy research. This decision helped Mike acquire a key type of career capital—a nuanced understanding of international energy markets. At the same time, however, keep in mind that this was also an opportunity that was open to Mike because he was already a Stanford student earning a degree in the field. This made it relatively easy for him to jump into this new role. For someone outside of Stanford, by contrast, being put in charge of such an important project would have been a much less likely proposition.

The advantage of open gates is that they get you farther faster, in terms of career capital acquisition, than starting from scratch. It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. In other words, it’s hard to start from scratch in a new field. If, for example, Mike had decided to leave Stanford to go work for a private sustainability non-profit, he would have been starting at the ground floor with no particular leg up. By instead leveraging his Stanford education to gain a position with a Stanford professor, he was acquiring valuable capital much sooner.