The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5

The second rule of career planning: Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.67

We live in a society defined by what venture capitalist Peter Thiel calls indefinite optimism. While we all sense on some level the expanding amount of possibility and opportunity available to us, you must step up to seize it. While many feel destined for something more, something bigger, few of us have taken actions to seize it. We

We tend to overestimate our ability to get things done in the short term, but underestimate our ability to get things done in the long term.

Never before in human history has an individual staring at his world had a greater ability to craft that story into one that now exists only in your imagination. You have the opportunity, right now, to design the future. Your future. Our future. To write a story where you have more control over your reality, more freedom, more money, and more meani

Democracy expanded the power to choose our leader. Corporations expanded our power to choose our employers. Entrepreneurship expands your power to design your life. You are a part of the first generation that has radical access to the tools of production. Rather than choosing from a set of options, you can design your own.

The average middle class worker in liberal democracies of the West today is freer in how and where they spend their best energy and time than John D. Rockefeller was one hundred years ago when he was among the ten richest men on Earth. The guy in his mid-30s that lives in the apartment next door is freer than John D., the industrial titan, was a ce

The development of the frontal lobe in humans means that, unlike apes, humans are not driven wholly by instinct. We evolved the ability to process and make decisions. This is no trivial or marginal change. It’s that ability to make decisions that have led to our dominance on Earth. Unlike any other species, we must make choices.

This natural desire for increasing amounts of freedom has been one of the main drivers in the advancement of civilization. We’ve gone from one man, Luther; to a small group of men, the Founding Fathers; to a whole segment of society, the middle class Baby Boomer generation. And in each case, not only has the size of the group increased, but so too

Happiness, he explains, isn’t just something that happens. We can’t buy it with money or command it to happen no matter how much power we have. It doesn’t depend on outside events, but our interpretation of them. Happiness is a condition which can be prepared for and cultivated. It’s that ability to control our own inner experience that will determ