I did a special All-Star Series Interview with futurist and technology pundit Jim Pinto. The topic: “How do you stay employed, much less thrive, when Amazon is turning everything on earth into a commodity?”

“If it can be delivered in the form of 1’s and 0’s, or put in a box, Amazon can deliver it. How do you compete with that?”

Well the first thing this means is the means of delivery is NOT going to be your USP.

Honestly I really didn’t know what Jim would say. If I did, I wouldn’t have invited him on. I would’ve just told you myself.

Jim said two things that leaped out at me:

1) You can’t determine the future from the past. The days of doing that are past. The age of deciding what you’re going to do based on what your father did is over.

The future is going to be surprising. It will be discontinuous. It will be unfamiliar. It will shove you out of your cozy comfort zone. It will challenge your every assumption. It will not be like you thought. You can listen to my interview with Jim in the member’s area.

2) How do you find your NEW job in the world? Get rid of your OLD job. Like, NOW. If the future has to come and shove the present out of the way, you will be the victim. Only if you do the shoving out of the way first and make room for the future by sweeping away the present, will you be the victor.

This means that channeling the future, actively bringing the future into the present, is an act of faith and risk. There are no two ways about it. You see, outsourcing is not merely a means of shaving time, managing time, offloading $10 per hour work so you can do $100 work. That’s a freshman understanding of 80/20 time but that’s not what it’s really about. What it’s really about is creating SPACE for the new to come.

Seth Godin’s book The Icarus Deception basically makes the case that making a nice comfortable six figure income in the commodity world is now impossible and every person who wants to be really successful must BE the artist that they already are.

You must be the artist that you already are. Your Inner Artist will find the future. Your Inner Artist has a sixth sense for what you can uniquely do that Amazon will never be able to do. But you have to create space for him or her. Otherwise you’ll be a wage slave.

Your Inner Artist cannot function, however, if you think that your job is to be busy or have your shoulder to the wheel or work at least as hard as everybody else or be certain that you have really “earned” it. You see, art is a gift, and to receive its rewards you must be open to receiving it as a gift.

I have a love/hate relationship with my Midwestern protestant work ethic. On one hand I’m proudly capable of busting my ass as hard as anyone. On the other hand, as the century progresses (the century of machines doing 95% of our work for us, the century where you really can work one hour a day if you do the right kind of thinking and refuse to do what machines or others can do for you), I realize that my Midwestern work ethic cripples me more than it serves me.

Now if you’re in the midst of a true blue startup you may have to work 16 hours a day for a while. You may not have a single extra penny to hire more people. In rare circumstances, this will be the case. Most of us will spend one or two or three years of our lives in that mode at some time or another. However it is the exception, not the norm, and if you’ve been in that mode for five years and counting (or 20 years and counting) you are absolutely doing something wrong.

Listen up: We are long past the era where everyone has to walk behind a plow on a farm somewhere from sunup to sundown. We are now in the era where the politicians feed the people bread and circuses so they won’t revolt. You know what Facebook really is? It’s active entertainment for the masses, where everyone gets their own TV show and everyone has at least 19 people who will “LIKE” their little picture or cat video. Now the Vikings don’t have to take out their angst by invading an island and capturing the women and children and sticking them on a galley ship and hauling them back to Norway. They can play Angry Birds instead.

Just because everybody else is doing $0 per hour work most of the time and $20 an hour work the rest of the time doesn’t mean YOU have to do $20 hour work most of the time and $200/hour work once in awhile. You can do $2000 per hour work for an hour a day and leave the rest of the day for SPACE that allows you to THINK and EXPLORE.

Today you can live a Jet Set lifestyle on $250,000 a year. Wanna be in Bangkok by 6pm tomorrow night? Buy a plane ticket and go. Heck, the plane ticket might even be cheap. I bet you can have an interesting conversation with an interesting person in Bangkok. I bet you can strike up a business deal that you’d never find in O’Fallon Missouri.

But you have to get rid of that job.

Photo by Internet Archive Book Images cc by-sa

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.