There will always be somebody better, smarter, stronger, more important than you. (Maybe not, if you’re Nastia Liukin or Michael Phelps) but there is always someone doing something more important than what you are doing.

The only thing that matters, really, is relative importance.

To the man in the desert, if you are distributing the water portions, you are the most important person to him right then. It doesn’t matter if someone, somewhere is out there curing AIDS because at that moment, the only thing that matters is the water.

That is the key to making yourself indispensable in an organization, in a relationship, in a friendship, in anything. You need to be the guy holding the water because there will always be someone smarter or better than you. You need to be what they need right now and to be what they need right now, you need to be thinking 10 steps ahead of where you are.