[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
 

Hint: The old ones, the ones we imagine when we think about the placement office and the pension—the ones that school prepared us for—they’re gone.

In 1960, the top ten employers in the U.S. were: GM, AT&T, Ford, GE, U.S. Steel, Sears, A&P, Esso, Bethlehem Steel, and IT&T. Eight of these (not so much Sears and A&P) offered substantial pay and a long-term career to hard-working people who actually made something. It was easy to see how the promises of advancement and a social contract could be kept, particularly for the “good student” who had demonstrated an ability and willingness to be part of the system.

Today, the top ten employers are: Walmart, Kelly Services, IBM, UPS, McDonald’s, Yum (Taco Bell, KFC, et al), Target, Kroger, HP, and The Home Depot. Of these, only two (two!) offer a path similar to the one that the vast majority of major companies offered fifty years ago.

Burger flippers of the world, unite.

Here’s the alternative: what happens when there are fifty companies like Apple? What happens when there is an explosion in the number of new power technologies, new connection mechanisms, new medical approaches? The good jobs of the future aren’t going to involve working for giant companies on an assembly line. They all require individuals willing to chart their own path, whether or not they work for someone else.

The jobs of the future are in two categories: the downtrodden assemblers of cheap mass goods and the respected creators of the unexpected.

The increasing gap between those racing to the bottom and those working toward the top is going to make the 99 percent divide seem like nostalgia.

Virtually every company that isn’t forced to be local is shifting gears so it doesn’t have to be local. Which means that the call center and the packing center and the data center and the assembly line are quickly moving to places where there are cheaper workers. And more compliant workers.

Is that going to be you or your kids or the students in your town?

The other route—the road to the top—is for the few who figure out how to be linchpins and artists. People who are hired because they’re totally worth it, because they offer insight and creativity and innovation that just can’t be found easily. Scarce skills combined with even scarcer attitudes almost always lead to low unemployment and high wages.

An artist is someone who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better. An artist invents a new kind of insurance policy, diagnoses a disease that someone else might have missed, or envisions a future that’s not here yet.

And a linchpin is the worker we can’t live without, the one we’d miss if she was gone. The linchpin brings enough gravity, energy, and forward motion to work that she makes things happen.

Sadly, most artists and most linchpins learn their skills and attitudes despite school, not because of it.

The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give them a platform to do it.

The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.