make yourself useful

'MAKE YOURSELF USEFUL' is, IMO, the simplest advice for anything trying not to get eaten alive by the internet. to be more specific, 'make yourself useful to a world which has the internet'. why? because the internet is competition writ large: your competitors are no further away than you are.

making yourself useful means focusing on creating value for other people. the alternative, if you want to make money, is to focus on extracting value from people. most companies do a mix of both. to the extent that they do the latter we are willing to desert them in droves when something better comes along.