What is the best way to take advantage of the FAST LANE to catch up or surpass your competition?    Understanding this is a matter of survival.

The advice of Wayne Gretsky, undoubtedly "The Greatest" to play the game of ice hockey, is "Go where the puck will be. Don't chase after it."

So the question is, "What is your destination when you move into the fast lane?  What on-ramps and off-ramps of the information super highway are you planning to take?  Here is a quick, high level set of skills you need to get to where the puck will be in the future.  We need to prepare ourselves for a very different world.  As manufacturing jobs, and other labor intensive work declines, here is what will take the place of life in the SLOW LANE.

When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won't be returning - but new jobs will take their place.  A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They're composers, writers and producers. They're lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants. This is called "symbolic analytic" work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas. 

Is this the type of work you are prepared to do, or are preparing to do -- as a student, worker, professional, or entrepreneur?  If not, when you get to where you are going, the puck will be somewhere else.  And you will be out of luck.

An old African proverb may help to put this into context.

The Essence of Survival

• Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.  It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
• Every morning a lion wakes up.  It knows that it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
• It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.

Roger Madison
www.izania.com