What happens when the sun sets on you

What happens when the sun sets on youWhat happens when the sun sets on youNewsweek, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post were sold for about 5% of what they were worth a decade ago.Old fame fades. Old treasures dull. Old values disappear.What happens when the sun sets on you, dear Reader?When the clever things you did in your twenties, and the book learning you picked up in school, and even the scars on your back from your thirties, lose their relevance to the modern corporation?What will you do then?Because I can tell you, youre not going to want to take a 95% haircut the way Newsweek and the newspapers did.All skills become commoditized over time. That means what welches hard to do yesterday, becomes easy today, and worthless tomorrow.J.P. Morgan - the man, not the bank - became Americas most prominent financier by doing what we would today call asset-backed lending. If youd told him that some day tens of thousands of kids right out of school would be doing the type of lendin g he did, he wouldve scoffed at you. Wouldve told you about the difficulty of assessing a company and its prospects, the importance of knowing the ins and outs of the resale market, the sharp eye and decisive gut needed to measure a mans creditworthiness over a handshake.He felt this skill was specialized and immortal.But it wasnt true. Skills pass from the brains of geniuses, to the efficiency of ordnungsprinzips, to the dull routine of forms and process.The entire prospect of the modern business is to create systems to replace this special in the head judgment with impersonal routine. It is much safer for companies to rely on a documentable system than the risky circumstance of specialized knowledge walking in and out the front door.All skills become commoditized, and all businesses pass from glory to goryRetailing, once a glamorous industry populated by the Saks and Bloomingdales and Marshall Fields of the world, has become a grind to eke out even a few points of profit in todays Internet-saturated landscape.Automobiles, which powered the US and Detroit to global manufacturing supremacy, now mostly make money for companies other than the manufacturers.Stereos, TVs and other consumer electronics now decline in price by a percent per weekAnd the list could go on for miles.The only way for companies to keep up on the treadmill is to run faster. And faster. And faster.All skills become commoditized, all positions of influence and domination decrease over time, all that profits fades away.All, said the Preacher, is vanity.So your plan must be that you will never let the sun set on your skills, never let your position of value - to your employer, to the market, to the customer - fade away.So how are you going to confront the almost certain fact that the you of the present - your skills, knowledge, insights and experience - will fade in value, and for you to keep up with the world, you must ensure that the you of 2015, of 2016, of 2026, is always becoming a ne wer, mora talented, professional?Ill be back next week with the steps you can take to keep ahead of the sun.In the meantimeIm rooting for you.