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learn how to do this if you want to.

If You Want . . .

If you want a job where it's okay to follow the rules, don't be surprised if you get a job

where following the rules is all you get to do.

If you want a job where the people who work for you do exactly what they're told, don't

be surprised if your boss expects precisely the same thing from you.

If you want a job where you don't need to be creative because the company's cost

structure is so aggressive that customers just materialize, don't be surprised if the low cost

structure costs you your job.

If you want a job where you get to do more than follow instructions, don't be surprised if

you get asked to do things they never taught you in school.

If you want a job where you take intellectual risks all day long, don't be surprised if your

insights get you promoted.

Limited or Unlimited?

You can see your marketplace as being limited, a zero-sum game, a place where in order

for one person to win, another must lose.

Or you can see it as unlimited. A place where talent creates growth and the market

increases in size.

Consider Kim Berry, who runs the Programmers Guild, a nonprofit that lobbies Congress

to limit or ban H-1B visas for talented computer programmers from overseas. He has said

that for every person from India or China who gets a job programming in the United

States, someone who was born here loses a job. It's win/lose, in his view, not win/win.

It's very difficult to be generous if you have this point of view. In a zero-sum game, the

generous among us are fools, easily taken advantage of.

On the other hand, if you believe that great talent leads to more innovation and more

productivity, which then lead to more demand, generosity is the very best strategy. If

every great programmer were given the best tools, the best marketing, and the best

technology, imagine how much more work that would create for the members of the

Programmers Guild. If we enlarged the pie by bringing in the best programmers from

around the world, it's inevitable that tons of jobs would be created for local talent as well.

It seems to me that your outlook is completely due to your worldview. If you believe that

all programmers are fairly average, then the pie is limited. If you believe that your job is

to do your job (follow the map) and go home, then of course it's a zero-sum game.

The linchpin sees the world very differently. Exceptional insight, productivity, and

generosity make markets bigger and more efficient. This situation leads to more

opportunities and ultimately a payoff for everyone involved. The more you give, the

more the market gives back.

Abundance is possible, but only if we can imagine it and then embrace it.

Will You Still Be Loved?

This is a more powerful question, and a difficult one. It's entirely possible that once you

choose to become indispensable, you will no longer be loved. Not by the same people

who love you now, perhaps, nor for the same reasons.

But (and I know it's a big but) either those people will come around, or they never loved

you in the first place, did they?

Special Circumstances

It's easy to argue that this genius stuff is for other people, not you. Those other people

have gifts, or genes, or education or background or connections. It's easy to fool yourself

into believing that genius works for them, but it won't work for you.

Of course. Except Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were raised by adoptive parents, and Nelson

Mandela changed the world from a jail cell. Except that Jill Sobule struggled just as much

as every other acoustic singersongwriter but didn't give up. Except that Cathy Hughes

dropped out of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and ended up as the first black

woman running a public company in the United States. I don't have room to list all the

less famous people who had the same resources you do, but were willing to accept the

genius label and make a choice.

You Can't?

At the age of four,