Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.
One characteristic of personal meaning is irreplaceability. If you’re the only one who can do what you’re doing, your actions suddenly seem a lot more important.
We’re familiar with this principle in our personal relationships — perhaps a friend needs a piece of advice, or a child needs parenting, that only we can give.
But larger systems are designed to make most people replaceable.
If you are replaceable, the system will equilibrate without you. If you aren’t replaceable, it won’t.
This is good for you but bad for the system. So your manager’s job is to make sure that the company will survive you being hit by a bus.
Replaceability is a spur to the ambitious. Every law school grad applying for a Supreme Court clerkship; every Ivy League grad interviewing at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, knows that ten other people want the job, and can do it.
But replaceability is existentially demotivating. “Just a cog in the machine” has been an epithet for employment since Charlie Chaplin filmed Modern Times.
If a system will achieve roughly the same outcome no matter who’s inside it, these people are by definition replaceable.
And so in seeking irreplaceability, we must ask: what systems are capable of achieving genuinely different equilibrium outcomes?