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Every American worker today should think of himself as a new immigrant. What does it mean to think like an immigrant? It means approaching the world with the view that nothing is owed you, nothing is given, you have to make it on your own. There is no “legacy” slot waiting for you at Harvard or the family firm or anywhere else. You have to go out and earn or create your place in the world. And you have to pay very close attention to the world you are living in. As with immigrants throughout history, Americans now find themselves in new and in many ways unfamiliar circumstances. In important ways, in this hyper-connected world of the twenty-first century we are all immigrants.

Everyone should also think like an artisan, argues Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist. “Artisan” was the term used before the advent of mass manufacturing to describe people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch and flair in which they took personal pride. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, this included just about everyone: the shoemaker, the doctor, the dressmaker, the saddler. Artisans gave a personal touch to whatever they did, and they often carved their initials into their work. It’s a good mind-set to have for whatever job you are doing: Would you want to put your initials on it when it’s done?

Finally, it would not hurt for all of us at times to think like a waiter or waitress. In late August 2010, Tom was in his hometown of Minneapolis, having breakfast with his friend Ken Greer at the Perkins pancake house. Ken ordered three buttermilk pancakes and fruit. When the waitress came back with the breakfast plates, she put them down in front of each of them, and as she put Ken’s plate down she simply said, “I gave you extra fruit.” “We gave her a 50 percent tip for that,” Tom recalled. That waitress didn’t control much in her work environment, but she did control the fruit ladle and her way of trying to do that little extra thing was to give Ken extra fruit. In many ways, we all need to think like that waitress and ask: What is it about how I do my job that is going to differentiate me? More than ever now, we are all waiters and waitresses trying to do that something extra that a machine, a computer, a robot, or a foreign worker.

This kind of “extra” is what “better” education has to achieve and to inspire. For the last 235 years, America expanded and upgraded its educational system again and again in line with advances in technology. When we were an agrarian society, that meant introducing universal primary education; as we became an industrial society, that meant promoting universal high school education; as we became a knowledge economy, that meant at least aspiring to universal postsecondary education. Now the hyper-connected world is demanding another leap. Mark Rosenberg, the president of Florida International University, which has 42,000 students, summed up what it is: “It is imperative that we become much better in educating students not just to take good jobs but to create good jobs.” The countries that educate and enable their workers to do that the best will surely thrive the most.

Indeed, as globalization and the IT revolution continue to merge, expand, and advance, the more they will destroy the old categories of “developed” and “developing” countries. Going forward, we are convinced, the world increasingly will be divided between high-imagination-enabling countries, which encourage and enable the imagination and extras of their people, and low-imagination-enabling countries, which suppress or simply fail to develop their peoples’ creative capacities and abilities to spark new ideas, start up new industries, and nurture their own “extra.” America has been the world’s leading high-imagination-enabling country and now it needs to become a hyper-high-imagination-enabling society. That is the only way we can hope to have companies that are increasingly productive and many workers with