Yesterday I was daydreaming about Tom Peters inviting me to take over his next TED talk, announcing his retirement and introducing me as his successor.

I daydream a lot.

It's interesting that the speech I gave in my daydream (which sorta drifted into a nap) was very much about exactly what I was doing. Here's the speech I gave, which requires imagining me (or you) in front of a huge crowd who just heard that one of the great business minds of our day is going home to Vermont and not coming out again.

In the end, even if it's all about me, it's all about you. Daydream this for yourself and see.

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What are you waiting for?

I heard what was in your head just now. "Wow; Tom is retiring. Wow." Okay, that part wasn't brilliant, but what about the next thought you had: "Maybe someday that'll be me."

That doesn't have to be you, and it doesn't have to be someday. I'm not the next anybody. I'm me, right now. You do not have to be the next anybody. You are you, right now.

You can't be the next Tom Peters. There's only one. Wanna know why there's only one?

Because that's all we need.

We don't need a whole raft of Toms or Druckers or Seths. Was Tom the next Pete Drucker? They'd both laugh at that. Is Seth the new Tom? Not unless one of 'em changes their hair style.

We don't need another Tom Peters, any more than we need another Seth Godin or another me or another you. We sure as shootin' need the ones we've got, though.

[Must have nodded off briefly; the next bit is about how having a job does not equal security, but I have no idea how I got there. Note to self: stay awake during your own speeches.]

You don't need anyone's permission to be brilliant. Well, unless you have a job; in that case, you need your manager's permission, and he needs his manager's permission to give you his permission.

What you really don't need is a job.

Smart people have been going to jobs for decades, over a century in fact, and it's all wrong.

"But I need the security of a regular paycheck!" I heard you think. Let me tell you about the security of a regular paycheck, and how my father got hit by a truck because of it.

Dad moved from Wisconsin to Beverly Hills to preserve his job security and provide for his family. He worked for 17 more years for this company, moving once again to San Diego so he could work in Tijuana, Mexico, just across the border.

And one day they said to him "Wes, we still need you, but we don't want to pay you as much. So we're going to fire you, but you can work for us as an independent contractor. The nice thing is you'll be paying all your own expenses, so we get the same work for a lot less money."

He spent the last 18 months of his life wondering why his loyalty and hard work had been so betrayed. Then one day, riding his bike to work (he would have been riding his bike no matter where he was going, it just happened to be work) he was, literally, hit by a truck. He was dead before we found out he hadn't made it to work that morning.

Charles Handy realised over 30 years ago that jobs were obsolete. He quit his job at BP and, as Handy calls it, went portfolio. Had my father had the same insight, he might not have died shortly after Handy made this change in his own life. (Yes, I hear you thinking something about fate; fate is for the lazy and the stupid; the rest of us have to make our own choices in life.) He might have gone portfolio himself, and instead of making significantly less money, made significantly more, for less work. He might still have been in the same place on the same day, but somehow, I don't think so, and I knew him better than you did.

[Fairly sure there was another 12 minutes of brilliance here, but I seem to have nodded off and forgotten it. Hopefully the summing up comes to me . . . ah, yes; here we go . . .]

We're all on this rampage to duplicate someone else's success—instead of creating our own.

Creating your own success is hard. It's scary. It's a bumpy road with potholes and cul-de-sacs [what, you actually want me to write 'culs-de-sac' ? I don't speak French, let alone write it] and plenty of wrong turns available.

It also has rest stops, where you can park, and nobody will ever make you get back on the road again. And then you die. Well, at least metaphorically.

If you spend your life trying to duplicate or support someone else's success, if you spend the rest of your life doing a job, if you spend the rest of your life trying to be the next anybody, you might not end up dead in a ditch. Might not.

But you're not the next anybody. You're you, right now.

What are you waiting for?