• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Average is officially over.

In a hyper-connected world where so many talented non-Americans and smart machines that can do above-average work are now easily available to virtually every employer, what was “average” work ten years ago is below average today and will be further below average ten years from now. Think of the world as one big classroom being graded on a curve. Well, that curve is steadily rising as more brainpower and computing power and robotic power enters the classroom. As a result, everyone needs to raise his or her game just to stay in place, let alone get ahead of other workers. What was an average performance in the past will not earn an average grade, an average wage, or a middle-class standard of living.

Say you’re applying to college next year and you’d like to go to a small liberal arts college in central Iowa—say, for instance, Grinnell College. Well, at Grinnell, with 1,600 students in rural Iowa, “nearly one of every 10 applicants being considered for the class of 2015 is from China,” The New York Times reported (February 11, 2011). “Dozens of other American colleges and universities are seeing a surge in applications from students in China … following a 30 percent increase last year in the number of Chinese studying in the United States … [But this] has created a problem for admissions officers. At Grinnell, for example, how do they choose perhaps 15 students from the more than 200 applicants from China? … Consider, for example, that half of Grinnell’s applicants from China this year have perfect scores of 800 on the math portion of the SAT, making the performance of one largely indistinguishable from another.”

This is just one small reason that whatever your “extra” is—inventing a new product, reinventing an old product, or reinventing yourself to do a routine task in a new and better way—you need to fine-tune it, hone and promote it, to become a creative creator or creative server and keep your job from being outsourced, automated, digitized, or treated as an interchangeable commodity.

Everyone’s “extra” can and will be different. For some it literally will be starting a company to make people’s lives more comfortable, educated, entertained, productive, healthy, or secure. And the good news is that in the hyper-connected world, that has never been easier. If you have just the spark of a new idea today, you can get a company in Taiwan to design it; you can get Alibaba in China to find you a low-cost Chinese manufacturer to make it; you can get Amazon.com to do your delivery and fulfillment and provide technology services from its cloud; you can find a bookkeeper on Craigslist to do your accounting and an artist on Freelancer.com to do your logo. All you need is that first spark of extra imagination or creativity.

In Wired magazine (January 25, 2010), the technology writer Chris Anderson eloquently explained what the hyper-connecting of the world is doing for anyone with an itch to start something:

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world. This story is about the next 10 years. Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital—the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing … The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be