Remember when you were a kid and said to your mom,
“That’s not fair” and without missing a beat, she’d snap back, “Life is never fair”?
Well, to banish any doubt that this may not be the case, look no further than Price’s Law.
Derek de Solla Price discovered something unsettling about how value gets created. In any organization, the square root of the total number of people create HALF the value for the company.
Company of 100? Ten people carry the water.
Company of 10,000? One hundred do.
The bigger the pond, the more invisible the vital few become.
Notice how the bigger the company gets, the smaller the relative size of the “Square Root” slice becomes.
Sobering, right?
Obviously you’d want to be a Square Rooter- that’s your best chance of getting ahead and staying there.
Most people spend their careers trying to get picked for the square root club. They wait for permission. They polish their credentials. They play politics.
But the real square rooters? They pick themselves.
They don’t just see a job description – they see an opportunity. They don’t manage tasks—they create value where none existed before.
They’re not employees with an entrepreneurial mindset. They’re creatives disguised as employees.
Jony Ive didn’t wait for someone to tell him to reimagine what a computer could be. He just did it. With a salary.
You know if you’re in the square root. Not because of your title or your reviews, but because things break when you’re gone. Because you’ve made yourself the person who turns problems into projects and projects into movements.
The equation is simple: Stop waiting to be essential. Start creating work that only you can do.
The unfair truth isn’t that only some people matter more. It’s that mattering is a choice, and most people choose not to make it.
