Makin' it, Stein style

Ben Stein has a good piece on what it takes to get ahead... in anything. Probably the most overlooked point is the simplest:

To Serve Is to Rule

This was suggested to me by my friend Barron Thomas. If your work on behalf of the costume department head is so good that your boss looks great and can brag about her department, you gradually become not the servant but the master. If you're a beginning chanteuse and your agent wants you to sing Hava Negila at her son's Bar Mitzvah, do it -- and do it so that everyone in the room is on the floor dancing. Then you'll get nightclub gigs.

The agent serves the client. The writer serves the producer. The hairdresser serves the star. The producer serves the studio -- and most important of all, the studio serves the audience. "Everybody's got to serve somebody," as Bob Dylan, the greatest poetic genius of our era, sang. If you serve well, you eventually become the boss.