The Epidemic of Wasted Talent - by Alex McCann

I was listening to Ryan Holiday interview Rutger Bregman. They were talking about bullshit jobs, wasted lives, the peculiar tragedy of talented people doing meaningless work. Then Bregman said something that stopped me cold: “You’re a set of DNA that’s never existed before in human history and will never exist again.” I had to pause the podcast, run to my computer and write this down immediately. The conversation kept circling back to one idea. If you stopped doing your job tomorrow, would you be replaced? Would someone else step in and the work would continue exactly the same? Or would something specific be lost? Most of us are doing work that any reasonably competent person could do. We’re components. Interchangeable parts in a machine that doesn’t need us specifically, just someone with the right qualifications. I spent a year as a creative director doing exactly this. Good salary. Decent title. Work that needed doing. But nothing that required me specifically. Nothing that used the

I was listening to Ryan Holiday interview Rutger Bregman. They were talking about bullshit jobs, wasted lives, the peculiar tragedy of talented people doing meaningless work. Then Bregman said something that stopped me cold: “You’re a set of DNA that’s never existed before in human history and will never exist again.” I had to pause the podcast, run to my computer and write this down immediately. The conversation kept circling back to one idea. If you stopped doing your job tomorrow, would you be replaced? Would someone else step in and the work would continue exactly the same? Or would someth