What wouldn’t many of us give to have the unshakeable confidence of a Harrison Ford? Asked about the future of the Indiana Jones movies, maybe with someone else in the title role, the grizzled film actor reacted badly: “Don’t you get it? I’m Indiana Jones. When I’m gone, he’s gone. It’s easy.” The line offers a nice mix of menace and derision — it’s very Indy, in fact. But just as it’s a really bad idea for ordinary mortals to try our hero’s onscreen stunts at home, nor should we adopt the screen star’s après moi le déluge schtick in the office.

Because making yourself, or seeing yourself as, indispensable is a terrible trap.

The internet teems with advice on how to become “the person no one can live without!” An example pinged into my inbox the same day I was chuckling over the Harrison Ford interview. Like much in the career guru genre, it was promoting a strategy to deal with insecurity, both emotional and economic — after all, there’s a lot of both about.