Ambition and Survival Genes Become Interchangeable

Scared into Stardom

Overall the labor market has bifurcated into two.

One part are the stars. They’re not only perceived as irreplaceable, enjoying employment security. They also often receive nosebleed compensation as we’re bearing witness at large law firms such as Kirkland & Ellis and Paul Weiss.

The other part are employees and contract workers who are perceived as totally replaceable. Too often they are blown off with the crude expression “You are a dime a dozen.” There’s no employment security. With serial layoffs standard, as they struggle to keep finding work, their compensation tends to plummet.

One client, who came to be classified as a dime a dozen, wound up at $40,000, down from $300,000. He was scared. That made him smart about what it takes to survive. Although he never had an ambition gene - the kind that creates mega stars - he always had a survival one. For what he needed to achieve, that was good enough.

As that survival gene manifested itself this client observed what the ambitious do and how they do it. Then he experimented with some of those behaviors.

For example, he shifted his energy, creativity and social skills only to what “counted.” What matters is what moves the dial in a visible way on helping superiors - but only those superiors who counted - succeed. Other kinds of work he got through without attachment.

He did make it to stardom. Not a blazing twinkler. But he was in the firmament.

More survivalists are mutating into stars. Fear is the motivating force field for veering out of compliance with job descriptions that make you a dependable cog in the machine, to be tossed in the dumpster when the task is completed. You emerge feeling less-than.

In O’Dwyer’s Public Relations I published an article on how to break the rules.