The key question stops being: “Are you good enough to belong here?” Instead, it becomes: “Is there a chance you could become spectacular?”
Self-reliance rounds out the list. The farther people advance in life, the less guidance anyone else can provide about what to do next.
People who can set their own agenda, wisely and productively, are invaluable. How do you find them?
George Anders, The Rare Find

crack the whip
to use your authority to make someone work harder, usually by threatening or punishing them

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In the search for “talent,” there is one trait that has definitely risen to the top.  It is the trait of being a self-starter.

If you are waiting for someone to tell you what to do next, you will have a hard time thriving in this era of the human work epoch.  We have just about left the days of time clocks, set routines, repeating tasks, with someone “behind you, cracking the whip to make you work faster.”

It is a self-starter world out there… and becoming more so by the day.  So, of all the traits needed to flourish in this self-starter, intrinsically motivated era, the ability to keep getting better, and keep getting the next new thing done well, on your own, with no one driving you to get it done, may be as critical as any.

Call it what you will.  Taking initiative; leaning in; finding the next thing to do on your own.  But the number of minutes that you sit around waiting for someone to tell you what to do next are minutes that you fall further behind.

Here’s another way to think about this – there used to be an army of folks who could “crack the whip,” to move workers to work faster.  That job – the job of “cracking the whip” – is one of many that seems to have hit the endangered species list.  You’ve go to crack your own whip…

So, get out there, work it, get to it, just do it.  Start yourself, and re-start yourself, over and over again.  It’s a self-starter world out there.

Or, as Daniel Pink put it in Drive:

In today’s environment, people have to be self-directed.
“If you need me to motivate you, I probably won’t hire you.”