We are becoming a world of gunslingers.

Well, there is this dream that little boys grow up with that one day they are going to be a Fireman or a Superhero or a Space Cowboy or something.

The core of the wish is that they will be free to roam the plains bringing joy and light to a world in need. Information technology and the web are bringing us one geeky step closer. It’s bringing into being a world where traditional career paths are shifting wildly and may, dare I say it, become extinct.

It’s stunning when you think about how many thousands of job descriptions won’t exist at the close of the next decade. There are just the jobs that will be automated and oursourced away. Much worse, many more jobs that once took a half-dozen people will may be able to be done part-time by a single person with the right combination of off the shelf technology and savvy.

Where does that leave the legions of information workers who will find themselves on their butts in a few ears? Well, since it’s work or starve the most clever of these folks will take up their guns and spurs and put themselves up for hire. We are seeing it already in Social Media. It’s the rise of the Consultant Culture, people who in any other time would have found themselves inside firms are blazing their own trails and creating new styles of work.

It’s a world so far removed from anything that we have seen previously that the question isn’t what effect a herd of wild consultants will have on a particular industry, it’s what in the world could a cult of knowledge workers all with slightly different jobs mean for a society and an economy.

Two more from Twitter, while I have it open:

Do you ever notice how the really interesting stuff always comes from, “Out of nowhere?”

Disruptive change is exclusively about bending and breaking forms.

How to be Good at Anything!

Step one – Try a lot.

Step two – Bleed a lot.

Step three – Get very lucky.

Not necessarily in that order.

The Internet has given us access to more information than we’ll ever know what to do with. While this is great news for anyone who has ever stayed up late wondering how many seconds have really passed since the beginning of the Universe. Unfortunately despite all the gifts the web has doled out, and the high-minded talk about Social Media Revolution, we have a greater and greater tendency to see each other as statistics rather than people.

Trust me, it’s really easy to do, especially when the only access you have to the people visiting whatever slapdash piece of content you’ve put together is from the comments, which are often poorly concealed spam and from analytics packages which can barely differentiate between people and bots let along tell you anything useful about them.

Despite the ease of viewing the Internet as a nameless, faceless playground, this is dangerous. Not because abstracting things doesn’t have a practical benefit, but because it makes it far to easy to think you can succeed by following trends lines rather than thinking about what actually makes sense to do.

Reducing people to data points makes us far too comfortable ignoring common sense, which is a bad thing – always.