As a corollary, I would imagine that “attention management” would be a very important personal habit to manage

I agree on “probably a largely manual job”, but definitely not waiter: they make a pittance and are interchangeable. Chefs are getting obsolete: an increasing proportion of the food in restaurants’ menu is actually combined from specialist, pre-cooked convenience products for the catering industry (heat in warm water, unpack, mix, arrange on dish, serve).

And not exclusively “entrepreneur/wealth creator” either; they always have been a minority, the successful ones an even smaller one.

A better guideline: anything that (a) deals with repair or maintenance — preferably of long-living items (hence reduced need to keep frantically abreast of new technology), and (b) requires face-to-face or on-site work. Think all professions concerned with renovating building (from architects to carpenters —
but not designing or constructing new ones); repairing cars (mechanics); maintaining and refurbishing industrial networks (water, electricity, etc) and equipment (mechanics, engineers); reclamation and restoration of polluted/dilapidated/disused lands (agronomists); nurses and physiotherapists. And so on.

This means we can have about double the number of clients per accountant compared to a traditional firm.
That said, we do get plenty of people signing up saying they chose us over our software-only competitors because we offer human support. There’s still a real value to personal support, so while I don’t disagree with what you’re saying in this article I think it’s still a while away.

Witness Facebook’s $1b acquisition of Instagram –  a company only a few years old with a dozen employees, and it’s clear software technology in particular is only at it’s Frontier stage. And as advances in mobile accelerate, so too will professions. Applications for the phone and pad are already displacing paper shuffling (my cable repair guy arrived the other day with a fully functonal iPad app to record and bill his service call).

My advice to teens — don’t shrink from the change, thrive on it. Get internships, stay in tune to what is happening at street level. Embrace the fact that Higher Ed will not be able to keep pace with the change. Sure, curricula will advance, but not at the pace of industry. You won’t learn all you need to know from school, so don’t kid yourself. More than ever, advanced degrees are only a ticket to board the fast moving job market.

So, think like and be an entrepreneur. We are all now a work force of one. Know it, feel it, and be it.