You’ve Got Mad Skills

An excerpt from Fire Your Boss: A Manifesto to Rethink How You Think About Work.

The World Needs You

I’m going to assume that you’re reading this manifesto because something is amiss in your career. There is a growing chasm between what you always envisioned you would do for work and what you found yourself doing for ten hours today.

I believe life is short. I believe life is precious. I believe you are the only version of “you” that will ever occupy this earth. I believe that you are especially equipped with a unique quiver of qualifications, gifts, talents, passions and experiences. Our family calls the stuff that comes naturally or easy to you “your mad skills.”

I heard Bono, lead singer for the band U2 say, “I’m good at writing songs and I don’t know why or how. I just am.”

You’ve Got Mad Skills

Your ”mad skills” enable only you to bring forth solutions to problems, cure disease, create melody from cacophony, teach the next generation of humanity, disrupt your industry, and invent solutions to desperate circumstances. All of this happens in and through the context of work.

Therefore, my friend, we cannot view work as a burden. Work must not be about survival. Work is the place in which we alter the white space before us for good. We must reclaim our place as pioneers of new outcomes, inventors of new solutions, designers of new products, dreamers of new possibilities, and architects of a better tomorrow. We must re-infuse our work with challenge, reward, zest, zeal, fun, laughter, creativity, and unapologetic hope.