In recent blog posts I have argued that the wide toolbox skill-set provides students a broad intellectual perspective from which to perceive and interpret real world problems, and a skill-set to innovate solutions to human needs and pressing global challenges. In addition, the wide toolbox empowers students to be innovators for the knowledge economy. A student who is developing a wide toolbox articulated the flexibility that he is afforded by pursuing this path: “I work hard and fill my days with interesting experiences. I’m not working toward any career specifically. I think that career opportunities, at least as a graduate from Yale, come as a side-effect from staying curious and working on interesting problems.” Now that I have outlined the argument for pursuing the wide toolbox for intellectual advancement, this post will make the argument for pursuing the wide toolbox for financial prosperity.

My own thesis is that the wide toolbox is the antidote to capital which over at least the last half century has been pulling the levers of the global economy and the American economy. I am trying to create an awareness that Millennials who make a conscious choice can create their own jobs by controlling their intellectual capital and the intellectual property they produce. Alternatively, if they are not inclined to being owners of their enterprise, they at least have a mind-set that enables them to excel as forward thinking 21^st century employees who have had experience implementing original insights and ideas. The theory is that the wide toolbox empowers students to push back against the power and leverage of capital.

“The real winners of the future will not be the providers of cheap labor or the owners of ordinary capital, both of whom will be increasingly squeezed by automation,” stated Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence, the authors of “New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy,” which was published in Foreign Affairs. The authors continue, “Fortune will instead favor a third group, those who can innovate and create new products, services and business models.” This group, arguably, will include wide tool boxers. The authors posit the following economic rationale for acquiring this skill-set: “In a free market, the biggest premiums go to the scarcest inputs needed for productions.”

In an era driven by digital technologies and their associated economic characteristics, increasingly ordinary labor and ordinary capital are commodities. People with ideas and innovations, not workers nor investors, will be the scarcest resource. This week I saw how an investor can distinguish itself as a scarce resource. I participated in the Y Combinator Startup School New York 2014. The consistent message from the speakers, heads of ventures that had come out of the Y Combinator accelerator, was that Paul Graham and the other principals of Y Combinator had provided them with much more than seed capital. (Admittedly, this was a hand-picked group of Y Combinator success stories.) The Y Combinator partners regularly interacted with these company founders, helping them hone their business concepts and models, as well as offering encouragement. And these founders were given direct and, at times, brutally honest feedback. Such as a partner’s comment to Zach Sims, CEO and co-founder of Codeacademy that he and his partner had the “worst ratio of intelligence to ideas; so smart but such stupid ideas.”

Codecacademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in six different programming languages. As of January 2014, the site had over 24 million users who had completed over 100 million exercises. The message of speakers, such as Zach Sims, is that Y Combinator is not ordinary capital; it provides an extraordinary level of added value through mentorship and access to its vast network of alums and high-quality investors.

Because of the network effect of digital technology a product or service becomes more valuable the more people use it; this phenomenon results in a winner-take-all economic structure. If this proposition is true, then the advantage goes to first movers, and those people who understand how to create the best customer experience. Digital technology amplifies these advantages and the associated financial results. For example, a startup can instantly become a global company: in 2014 Facebook acquired WhatsApp, a 55 person company for $19 billion; Facebook, a 3,000 person company, at the time of its initial public offering in 2012 was valued at approximately $100 billion and today it has 1.23 billion monthly active users worldwide; its market cap is $165 billion.

People who have the ability to combine an understanding of product feasibility, focus on human intention or need, and financial viability and sustainability create the potential to achieve an outstanding advantage in their pursuit of success. This is true whether you define success as producing a profitable company or finding solutions to intractable global challenges.