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

More Money, More Freedom, and More Meaning

“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.” Christopher Morley

Expected Value is the sum of all possible values for a random variable, each value multiplied by its probability of occurrence. It’s what poker players use to make betting decisions and it’s how entrepreneurs think about their businesses and decisions.

In much the same way that the average middle class individual today is freer than John D. Rockefeller was a century ago, a self-described middle-of-the-road entrepreneur is freer to actually do Philosophy than a tenured Philosophy professor and create a bigger impact in the process.

Credentialism emerged as the path to invest in knowledge over the course of the twentieth century. It was a social script, a clear path that many of us have followed: go to school, get good grades and extracurriculars, go to college, get a degree, apply for jobs.

Entrepreneurship is becoming more accessible just as jobs are becoming more competitive. Even as more corporations shed full time positions to hire temps or contractors, there are more businesses, and they’re doing better with every passing year.

But the most powerful are those who design both their own realities and the realities of others. They write the TV shows and design the products that the masses consume. The entrepreneur defines reality, he is not defined by it. He is engaged in a dialogue with his reality asking “why” and “why not” instead of “how” or “what.”52

According to a 2015 report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers based on data from the US Census Bureau, from 1948–2000, jobs grew 1.7× faster than population. Since 2000, the population has grown 2.4× faster than jobs.3

It is in seeking a path with no risk, no mistakes, and no variation (stable income, clear promotion path) that Max has in fact exposed himself to a massive downside—getting fired at forty without a skillset for creating new systems or operating in complex environments, the metaphorical car falling on his head.