Dead Weight, GoTo Guys & The Conspiracy Against Competence...

Wanna see how thin this thread we're hanging by REALLY is?

Start with about 300 million people in the United States.

Consider that half of 'em are retired or in school or on welfare, a fourth of 'em are taking care of the retired ones and the ones in school, you've got 75 million left.

But 29 million work for the federal government which means there's only 46 million left to bring home the bacon.

Ah, but then there's the 15 million who work for the local government, so they're only marginally more worthwhile than the feds.

We're down to 31 million now.

80% of the 31 million are either lazy, apathetic and mostly unproductive, or they're busy undoing the damage done by the dufuses every day.

So in fact there's only six million people doing real, actual, productive, innovative hard work.

Those 6 million people are not only feeding 300 million, but providing them with warm homes in the winter and quality television programming. The comfort food and Seinfeld reruns keep the unproductive, roiling masses from rioting.

(Karl Marx was wrong: Religion is not the opiate of the people, television is.)

That explains why you feel like, in any room full of 20 people, you're the only one getting anything done. It's because you ARE the only one getting anything done. The rest are mostly dead weight, playing a zero sum game.

That's a fact. Get used to it. Always been that way, always will be that way. What matters is that you understand this is your role as an actually productive person in the world.

But there's still another part of this that most people don't perceive.

Of the six million people who do the actual work, 1 million are company presidents and big-time managers.

The other 5 million are the Worker Bees.

Most company presidents and big-time managers, truth be told, are pretty productive people. They are worker-bees too.

But the biggest part of their job is to keep the other worker-bees with heads down, working. Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground. (Uncomfortable position, that.)

The stability of the modern world rests on the loyalty and commitment of those 5 million worker-bees.

They need to NOT LOOK UP.

I'm wicked serious.

You take a company like General Motors, with hundreds of thousands of employees, all that company's real productivity and competitive edge rests on the shoulders of about 5% of them, people who take complete ownership of their jobs.

These people are the Go-To guys (and gals). The real ones.

When you're a Go-To guy, you come early, stay late, skip lunch when necessary (about half the time).

You know the password to the server.

You happen to have a backup copy when the hard drive crashes—yes, it's three weeks old and unfortunately the data's a little stale. But you happened to make a backup one day... well, just in case, and... because you were too smart to count on the IT guy.

You do things like spending your own money to join Mastermind Club or take personal vacation days to go get yourself educated so you can catch the balls your incompetent colleagues drop.

You know Karen at the chrome supplier who can occasionally work a miracle if FEDEX loses a shipment.

You take everything about your job very, very personally. Very seriously.

Everybody else is interchangeable. But not you. If all the Go-To guys suddenly left, GM would be in big, big trouble.

The whole company would tank and the stock market and the prognosticators wouldn't have the slightest clue why.

If any of this sounds familiar, then you should know just how much time and effort the Big Boss Bees invest to keep you right where you are.

Losing a Go-To guy is very, very costly.

So most of their time is spent slapping bars on the windows and reinforcing the doors...

In fact, when you see the lengths they go to it almost starts to look like a conspiracy...

(More on this soon.)

Carpe Diem,

Perry Marshall

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