I didn't read anything about giving anyone a PhD? I could be wrong, but he's talking less about "shifting" average to include a PhD, to shifting how average pe

I didn't read anything about giving anyone a PhD? I could be wrong, but he's talking less about "shifting" average to include a PhD, to shifting how average people are going to have to fend for themselves - which is to fight to be above average. As another commenter pointed out, this is impossible (if everyone's special, no one is), but it's also good to mention that you get to choose whether or not you want to be average. Sure, you can rely on being a cog in a machine, but if you do that, you just jumped into a super-competitive market dominated by machines and cheap overseas labor. So, you can either relegate yourself to that fate or choose something different. I believe his point was that there's a shift in the past could escape with being average because it was localized and there was less overall competition for jobs because of geographic limitations. The math is that the market for average has been commoditized over 7 billion people + machines, rather than the 300 million people we used to. That brings the level of average much, much lower for certain types of works. So, the solution isn't to try and raise your qualifications level in a pool of average people, but rather jump in a different pool altogether, where your value as a worker is not so easily commoditized (knowledge workers, developing fields & emerging tech). For anyone familiar with Seth Godin, this talk isn't very new at all - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_average.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_averag...