127on the government, our relatives, or our own savings
that we accumulated in our “useful” years.
Now, with the technological explosion and entry into
the Information Age, employers are no longer as inter-
ested in our job histories as they used to be. They are
now more interested in our current capabilities.
One of the romantic appeals of the early Daniel
Boone and Davy Crockett frontier days in our nation
was the usefulness of individuals. If you were living out
on the frontier, farming, cooking, and hunting, and you
turned 65, it would never occur to anyone to ask you to
“retire.”
We have finally come back to those days of honoring
usefulness over age and status. For example, if my com-
pany is trying to enter the Chinese market to sell its
software and you, at age 70, can speak fluent Chinese,
know all about software, and have energy and a zest for
success, how can I afford to ignore you?
Bill Gates of Microsoft has said, “Our company has
only one asset—human imagination.” If you took all of
Microsoft’s buildings, real estate, office hardware,
physical assets—anything you can touch—away from the
company, where would it be? Almost exactly where it is
now. Because in today’s world a company’s value is in
it’s thinking, not in its possessions.
This is great news for the individual—because use-
fulness is back in style. If you can cultivate your skills,
keep learning new things, study computers, learn a for-
eign language, or become expert in a foreign culture and
market—you can make yourself useful.
The great basketball coach John Wooden recom-
mended that we live by this credo—especially apt for
the new technological frontier: “Learn as if you were to
live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow.”
Embrace the new frontier