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at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously. Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too. “Hardware is becoming much more like software,” as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it … We’ve seen this picture before: It’s what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.

But some people are not risk takers—not resilient or entrepreneurial enough to start a new company from scratch. That’s okay. In that case, though, they need to re-create themselves within their existing company or line of work by taking a routine creator job or routine server job and turning it into something special for which people will want to pay extra.

For some that will be providing something sophisticated that a creative creator would do—designing a building, writing an innovative legal brief, inventing a new business, composing an ad, redoing a kitchen, or writing an iPad application. But for many others it will mean becoming a creative server and bringing a special passion or human touch to a job in a way that truly enriches the experience for the person paying for it. We all know that when we see it. You see it when you visit a parent in a nursing home and watch as that one health-care worker sits patiently with your father and engages him in a way that so clearly brightens his day that you say to yourself, “I am speaking to the manager. I will pay extra just to have her be on duty with Dad every day.” You see it when you are waited on by a salesperson in the men’s suit department or the women’s shoe department who is so engaging, so up on the latest fashions and able to make you look your best, that you’ll come back and ask for that person by name. You see it in that trainer or Pilates instructor who seems to know exactly how to teach each exercise properly—the one everyone is standing in line for, even though he charges more than his colleagues. And you see it on Southwest Airlines, where they manage to take an economy airline seat and give it something extra. Southwest pilots, stewards, and stewardesses try to bring a little humor and a personal touch to everything they do.

The point of this chapter, and the whole education section, is this: For decades there has been a struggle between the American economy’s desire to constantly increase productivity and the desire to maintain blue-collar jobs. We watched as more and more machines and cheaper and cheaper foreign workers replaced American manual laborers. We compensated for this loss of blue-collar jobs by creating white-collar jobs. But how do we compensate for the loss of white-collar jobs, which are increasingly under threat in the hyper-connected world? We do it by inventing new kinds of white-collar jobs. But that requires more start-ups and better education and more investment in research and development to push out the boundaries of science and technology. Today, the Chinese can generate growth just by educating their people enough to do the jobs now done in rich countries. For us to grow, we have to educate people to do jobs that don’t yet exist, which means we have to invent them and train people to do them at the same time. That is harder, and it is why we need everyone to aspire to be a creative creator or creative server.

There are three mind-sets that are helpful in thinking about