Every one of you has worked with somebody brilliant and unbearable.
You know the type. Sharp. Fast. Right most of the time and happy to say so. Impossible in a meeting. And nobody ever did anything about it.
Ask yourself why. It wasn't kindness.
I ran a software company. We had an architect. He designed the application, he handed work to the front end people and the back end people and the testers, and he'd lived inside that codebase for two years. He was cocky. Genuinely difficult.
I did nothing about it. If I replace him, I need to find another one, and what am I going to do? Somebody has to understand that code base. There was nothing I could do.
That was the trade. Companies swallowed the behavior because the expertise was scarce, and scarce expertise sets the terms. Every difficult expert you've ever met was standing on that same floor.
Then the scarcity went.
Not the expertise. The scarcity. When knowledge that used to live in one head can be reached by anybody who knows what to ask for, the person holding it stops being irreplaceable. And the moment they stop being irreplaceable, nobody has to swallow anything.
So the trade is dead. Gone. That's done. The competence is no longer the hard part to buy, and what's left is the part you can't buy that way. Can people work beside you. Do they want you in the room. Are you kind when it costs you something.
If you remember one thing from this book, make it this. Nice people are going to be very successful. Kind people are going to be very successful. Not nice instead of skilled. Nice on top of skilled, in a market where skilled just became ordinary.
Think of the one thing at your work, or your last work, that only you know how to do. Two years from now, will you still be the only one who knows it?
If your answer was yes, hold on to it for a minute. The thing that makes somebody hard to replace is almost never the thing they're proud of. It's usually an accident of who happened to be in the room when something got built. And an accident is not a position.