Tag / linchpin

by Nathan Coumbe

Remember your founder’s roots

It amazes me how many companies still require their prospective employees to hold college degrees before they’ll even CONSIDER talking to them about work…

Especially because so many companies are founded by college dropouts, straight-D students, and vocal critics of modern education.

With so much information and easily accessible methods to build the skills necessary to do competitive work, college is quickly becoming a handicap more than anything else.

It’s four years spent in a classroom accumulating information rather than developing skills, building projects, and doing actual work. (And yes, I’m a college graduate who’s criticizing EXACTLY what I went through).

Never will you be required to sit through hours of lecture and regurgitate information on tests in your working career. But that’s what I’d estimate 90% of college is.

How does that help a company looking to hire for a role? Obviously it doesn’t.

I’d like to see more companies embrace what Apple, Google, Amazon, and other big tech companies are doing:

Value competence and proven skills over accreditation and papers.

Show you can do the work and forget what your “education” was all about.

Hopefully more companies will remember their founders’ roots and get out of this antiquated industrial mindset.

by Nathan Coumbe

Is your work artistic?

Do you have to be skilled with words, a paintbrush, or a musical instrument before you can call yourself an artist?

What about our work in the business world? Can marketing, sales, or leadership be artistic endeavors? It depends on your definition of art. 

Art is the act of creation. What you create doesn’t determine whether or not you’re artistic. 

Seth Godin defines art as “creating change in another person for the better.” 

If that’s our definition of art, then marketing, sales, leadership, customer service, and every other potential job we have is artistic…

But only if we take the leap and use our work to make people better.  

You are already an artist. Focus on creating change rather than your medium. 

by Nathan Coumbe

Getting paid for what’s easy

It doesn’t happen. At least, not in the ways or amounts we want it to.

People don’t want to have to think for a living. They want to make money for easy work…

And thinking, making decisions, being creative—none of that is easy.

But those are precisely the things that people get paid the most for. They’re the only things that’ll help us survive in the modern economy.

The easy work is disappearing… We must embrace the hard work—the work that isn’t easy to measure.