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or get something for someone. In a coffee shop!

I asked him about his attitude. He smiled, stopped for a second, and told me, "I work for

blessings."

Almost anyone else would have seen this job as a grind, a dead end, a mind-numbing way

to spend six years. David saw it as an opportunity to give gifts. He had emotional labor to

contribute, and his compensation was the blessings he got from the customers (his

customers). His art was the engagement with each person, a chance to change her outlook

or brighten his day. Not everyone can do this, and many who can, choose not to. David

refused to wait for instructions. He led with his art.

The Work Whisperer

Monty Roberts is a horse whisperer. He listens to racehorses and then sets them free to be

horses, to do what comes naturally, not what they were forced to do.

For generations, we've been pushing workers to do something inherently unnatural.

We've been teaching, cajoling, and yes, forcing people to hide their empathy and their

creativity and to pretend that they are fast-moving automatons, machines designed to do

the company's bidding.

It's not necessary. No, I'll go further than that: it's damaging. It's damaging to have to put

on a new face for work, the place we spend our days. It's damaging to build organizations

around repetitive faceless work that brings no connection and no joy.

As our economy has matured and mechanized, seeking out and adhering to the norm has

become unprofitable. It's unprofitable to establish a career around the idea of doing what

the manual says.

So, consider this your whispered call to freedom. The world wants you (needs you) to

bring your genius self to work.

Do You Need a Resume?

This is controversial, but here goes: if you're remarkable, amazing, or just plain

spectacular, you probably shouldn't have a resume at all.

If you've got experience in doing the things that make you a linchpin, a resume hides that

fact.

A resume gives the employer everything she needs to reject you. Once you send me your

resume, I can say, "Oh, they're missing this or they're missing that," and boom, you're

out.

Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant

keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. More fodder for the

corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but

is that what you deserve?

The very system that produced standardized tests and the command-and-control model

that chokes us also invented the resume. The system, the industrialists, the factory . . .

they want us to be cogs in their machine--easily replaceable, hopeless, cheap cogs.

If you don't have a resume, what do you have?

How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer

knows or respects?

Or a sophisticated project an employer can see or touch?

Or a reputation that precedes you?

Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?

Some say, "Well, that's fine, but I don't have those."

Yeah, that's my point. If you don't have these things, what leads you to believe that you

are remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don't have

more than a resume, you've been brainwashed into compliance.

Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for--those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes.

Google You

Google "Jay Parkinson" and you will discover a doctor who is changing the U.S. health

care system, virtually single-handedly.

Google "Sasha Dichter" and you will discover a visionary who is remaking philanthropy

for the developing world.

Google "Louis Monier" and you will find a search engine guru whom you might be

desperate to hire for your next start-up.

There are tens of thousands of linchpins like these, people who have the work, not just a

resume. And the work is exactly what the linchpin's resume looks like. Two of the three

people listed above aren't entrepreneurs. They