Several people pointed me to this article in the Boston Sunday Globe about the future of the workplace. And I’m glad they did.
You should absolutely read the piece in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt that summarizes it nicely:
The middle of the 20th century was the age of the great employer: Mainstream success was a stable job at a single company, steadily ascending from middle to upper management. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, for reasons that were social as well as economic: American conglomerates began to face stiff foreign competition, and the country accustomed itself to – and even began to celebrate – a more mercurial, less cosseted brand of capitalism. The Organization Man was replaced by the worker as free agent, one who might with little regret leave a job when a competitor gave a better offer, or who might be left jobless when his company merged with another. The arc of the average career trajectory grew more fractured.
What we’re seeing today, says Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of the 2004 book “The Future of Work,” is a further shift. The growing freelance workforce, he argues, is made up of people who see themselves not as having a single job so much as having several at once.
This has been my life for the past 15 months. I’ve taken on lots of little jobs to cobble together a living. Freelance here, DVD sales there, throw in a couple of teaching gigs. Write a book? Sure! Learn how to become a public speaker? Why the hell not? I’m exploring any and all ways to thrive, and I’m having a blast.
I’ve been asked quite a few times about the biggest difference between someone who can work for themselves vs. someone who has to work for an employer. My reply? A high tolerance for fear. As the Globe article articulates:
One of the most basic benefits of a steady job, of course, is a measure of job security. Full-time jobs can always be terminated, as millions of Americans have been recently reminded, but with freelance work, potential unemployment lurks at the end of every short-term contract.
The Globe piece goes on to talk about organizations like The Freelancers Union and elance that are easing some of those fears for independent workers. (Incidentally, I wish The Freelancers Union offered health insurance in MA. I reached out to them on Twitter to see how I can help them bring it here. You never know.)
It’s hard to “trust the universe” when it comes to money. When you can’t see the path 30 days in front of you, it’s pretty easy to jump at the first full-time gig you’re offered. It’s even easier to stay in a job you hate.
To work for yourself is to trust yourself. To work for someone else is to trust them.
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The Boston Globe photographers that were laid-off by the paper will appreciate the advice and will cringe at the illustration of the feature with a cheap stock photo.
A HIGH TOLERANCE FOR FEAR — ain’t it the truth! Excellent article and highly relevant to me, as someone laid off from an IT job in 2009. I am learning to do some job cobbling myself as I gear up with a career consulting/coaching biz.
I’ll check out the Boston Globe article right now.
(BTW, thanks for the great Lemonade movie. Loved it!)
You said it best with “exploring any and all ways to thrive.” Amen!
To work for yourself is to trust yourself. To work for someone else is to trust them.
Unless you are the think ahead type – then to work for someone else allows you to build your resources and plan for your future freedom. The hard part is to remember to do that during the times when it seems the paychecks will never end and employment is plentiful.
It is a scary work world out there when you a regular job or a freelance job can be outsourced or underbid by another more desperate worker. Being willing and able to abandon the “expert” skill set path and turn “jack of all trades” is one way to cope. But for longer term security figuring out ways to diversify income (and keep all expenses to about 1/3 or less of all income) is really the best safety net.
Focusing on executing that for a few decades during good and bad times is the individuals best course of action.
great post !
I saw lemonade at the Dublin job club recently, we say ‘we are looking for work, not jobs’, and it seems the way to go. I think technology has changed things, we are moving towards a point where ‘economies of scale’ no longer exist and hence one person or more small firms can compete in the market at a higher level. Plus things like elance and odesk ( check em out, freelance work across the web ) have shifted national boundaries. Adapt and survive eh
here is the link to the dublin job club
http://dublinjobclub.blogspot.com/
perhaps the future is comunity living, helps share living costs !
http://brithdirmawr.co.uk/
When I decided to leave my old career for one in advertising around 2 years ago, I had just heard a quote, not originated my Noam Chomsky but spoken by him: “If a man creates great work under external direction, we may admire what he does, but we abhor what he is.” To me that meant the best way to make a living is to get paid for what you produce, not to get paid to produce something. At the time, advertising better met this ideal than what I had been doing. In the time between when I lost my job in Oct. and when I got a new one in Dec., I freelanced. In my experience, it was a bit of a step backward. Suddenly I felt like I was writing anything that someone would pay me for. I wrote for an online content mill. I wouldn’t fight changes, because getting paid meant producing what they wanted. I don’t think I have the threshold for fear that it takes to be a successful freelancer. But I do know that trusting my agency to pay me to think frees me up to produce what I believe in, whether the client buys it or not.
Barrett, very well said. There’s no one answer for everyone here. But you make a fantastic case for staying employed full time. The majority of freelance work isn’t glamorous. Then again, neither is the alternative.
A high tolerance for fear coupled with a huge dose of faith (in oneself, the universe, the cosmos….) I’d take it over trust in my employer all day long.
I had earned a [rather good]living “freelancing” for the past 12 years. Up until very recently, all was well. Now things are quite different and I find myself cobbling together all sorts of part-time work just to pay the bills. IT IS NOT FUN. It is downright scary sometimes. It is hardly ever challenging or creative. Most times it is humiliating. And the pay? I have direct -deposit because looking at the actual “paycheck” is too depressing. I can’t wait to wake up from this nightmare.
Jazzer – hanging on by a thread sucks. I know this intimately. But it’s all part of a bigger picture that I can see unfolding in front of me. Is your part-time work a means to an end, or is it mostly just surviving?
Unfortunately for now, it’s mostly just surviving. I do have a little “means-to-an- end” thing going too, but there are only 24 hrs in a day, and grunt work is physically exhausting. I try to remain positive, but quite frankly, it’s really difficult. In fact, true story: Jan. 1, 2010. New Decade. New “Positive” Attitude. Phone rings. “Hey jazzer, it’s me” (your team leader), “sorry about next week. We don’t have the budget to put you on the schedule.”
Great article.
I think it depends if you want to be freelancing or not, some people want to mix work and leisure, have more control, others are used to the big firm system.
One fundamental problem in the USA is the house price boom locked many people into repayments that are far higher than people in other parts of the world have to pay.
You get many paradoxes, networking and social skills are now more important, freelancers are often better trained than employees as they have the time to learn new things when not working.
For a lot of people it is just ‘something I do while applying for a job’.
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