President Obama made it official on Thursday. He nominated chief of staff Jack Lew as Treasury Secretary to replace Tim Geithner, who is expected to leave the administration on Jan. 25.

If confirmed by the Senate, Lew will start the job with years of experience working in Washington as well as stints in academia and Wall Street.

He is a former budget director for the Obama White House as well as the Clinton Administration and a former deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton.

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Lew was a key player in the 2011 bitter negotiations between the White House and House Republicans to raise the debt limit. The debt limit was eventually increased but not until after the U.S. lost its triple-A credit rating from ratings agency Standard & Poor's. As Treasury Secretary Lew could play an even greater role in this year’s upcoming budget negotiations.

Jack Lew's Early Years

Lew has a reputation as a New York liberal who started

In his latest book, The Icarus Deception, Seth Godin argues that most of us have been “brainwashed” and need to “do something ridiculous” in order to succeed in the new economy.

"For 100 years the way the whole world got rich was industrialization -- we figured out how to take a nickel and make it into a dime and then a dollar,” Godin explains. “In order to do that we had to build schools and systems and expectations to get you to go to work and do what you were told.”

For several generations, doing what your told was a ticket to an improved quality of life, a better job and the opportunity for upward mobility. But globalization and ever-efficient mass production have brought that cycle to its endgame; as many Americans have learned, there are no “safe” jobs anymore, especially in manufacturing, and no guarantees of employment, even at the biggest companies.

“The challenge today is we can’t make it any faster or cheaper…and most of those jobs have gone overseas,” says Godin, a