One of Steve Jobs' many key insights:

On the difference between entrepreneurship and a job:

On the difference between the past and present situation with jobs:

This means we have reached peak jobs and approaching the end of jobs entirely. There are a few reasons for this:

2001 — the dotcom bubble — is when a lot of white collar jobs started being outsourced and it’s been increasing ever since.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of management, took years to articulate improvements to the workforce — using the scientific method to measure and apply insight — where rapidly growing countries like China, India, etc. were able to bootstrap and bypass all of that work by simply reading a book on Taylor’s learnings. The lesson is that is takes a long time to formulate new ideas whereas very little time is required to read, learn, and gain established knowledge. Same is true when it comes to global communication.

Knowing the above — and with caution to not let any power gained go to your head — the following is the right way to wield the leverage you build:

Examples of exponential growth:

The downside of being human is that we evolved to think linearly but completely fail to think exponentially. Knowing this means you need work at thinking more in the latter mindset.

A degree isn’t as valuable anymore due to saturation and so many people being highly educated. Same goes for following directions and implementing best practices (blindly, that is). What is required now, is the ability to operate in complex and chaotic systems (a.k.a. entrepreneurship).

Interestingly, what isn’t explained very well in the book is sidelining best practices or even the knowledge of good design in general. Blindly following rote instruction is definitely not encouraged but the lumping of not knowing best practices and antipatterns should not be so easily dismissed because if you don’t know what they are then you don’t know how to bend them in new and interesting ways.

In the book The Fourth Economy by Ron Davison, he organizes recent history into the following economic periods:

The above is an oversimplification but does provide an interesting categorization to the evolution of work and the era we are in now.

Globalization means you are competing against everyone in the world instead of someone in your your city. Knowledge is no longer enough, especially considering the number of college graduates has gone from 90,000,000 to 130,000,000, globally, between 2000 - 2010 and continues to rise.

There is no accurate measure of entrepreneurship but you can think of it as a series of steps (first = lowest, last = highest):

Since access to knowledge is more abundant than ever — including the availability of cheap technology and global communication — jobs have become more competitive and less profitable. While this is bad for knowledge workers, it is great for entrepreneurs because you can now:

Negative visualization — a term borrowed from Stoicism — is when you imagine the worst outcome in order to help make difficult decisions. A few examples:

All of this is to say that the perceived negative effect pails to the potential gain.

Extremistan is living in the Pareto distribution of an 80/20 curve where 20% of individuals are in the highest part of the curve while those in Mediocristan are living in the Bell curve where 10% are failing, 80% is the average majority, and 10% are the top elite.

Life in this Extremistan is sudden, often violent, and mostly unforeseen because technology and globalization continues to rise as the middle class continues to die.

In this new world, you don’t want to be mislead into remaining a turkey because, right up to the point of death (i.e. Thanksgiving Day), you are led to believe:

You can lead a mediocre life where you go to work, collect a pay check for 10 years, and then end up being fired because technology or new talent replaced you. What you didn’t see during this time — much like the turkey — is all of the hidden risk the company absorbed that you weren’t privy too. On the other hand, you could live an extreme life where you take on all risk of starting a business by knowing all of what’s in front of you. Each day you don’t make money, or make less money, is new information learned so you can pivot or stay the course. Slowly, you’ll build strength with getting comfortable in dealing with risk and uncertainty which makes you more adaptable than those who are too rigid and stuck in the past.

What’s making entrepreneurship more accessible is through the democratization of:

💡 A book that might be worth checking out is The 7 Day Startup by Dan Norris.

A few examples:

In all of the cases above (except maybe Digital Ocean), existing supply was used instead of creating new supply to service others with very little investment in building infrastructure. This leads to dramatic reductions in:

Stewart Brand once told Steve Wozniak that information wants to be free. The internet, plus searchability, is the answer. It’s now easier than ever to learn all that you want, freely (except time), and level up at a fraction of the cost it would take to go to college.

Products are easier to make and markets are easier to reach. Because of the internet and social media, anyone can advertise, market, and spread the word.

Rob Walling — of Startups For The Rest of Us notoriety — started with small one-time products/services and then scaled them up through SEO, fixing bugs, and improving the overall experiences of customers. Afterwards he started focusing on his personal brand and podcasts. All of this is to say that each step of the way inched towards something greater which provided more money and time to generate more opportunities.

Apprenticeship is when you take a job at a lower income to provide skills that a company needs while also learning new skillsets in a specialized field of interest at the same time. A personal example of this was when I worked for a company at a lower wage because I wanted to learn and use Elm in production. At the time, I had little Elm knowledge. While I earned less, I also didn’t spend any money on tuition. It was one of the greatest opportunities because now I can build reliable frontends without dealing with the unreliable and overly complicated quagmire that is JavaScript.

There is additional value in this approach which echoes what’s been written in How To Keep Your Best Programmers by having companies abandon the outdated model of thinking you’ll hire someone for years, even decades, only to find they leave after a year or two due hitting a growth ceiling where there is no more to learn. It would be better to be more realistic by allowing talented folks to work for you at a lower price point while gaining new skills in areas they are desire while providing the skills the company needs while it grows. The company wins because it has young, hungry, and talented folks who can quickly solve immediate problems while the apprentices grow in learning tools of the trade, how the business domain works, and/or new skills knowledge to run their own company.

There is another win here which is the network effect of building relationships during this time. As the apprentices grow and become more affluent in their own skin they will be able to provide experience and wisdom to similar problems you are solving not to mention being able to bring in additional talent and firepower you couldn’t get elsewhere.

In order to make this successful, you need a standard operating procedure:

Keep in mind that a high quality hire will still take three to six months to get up to speed within your business domain.

Research collected over the past few decades comes down to three core motivators: money, freedom, and meaning.

You won’t make it by being a lackey and trying to work your way up the corporate later. A typical job limits you in terms of direction which is a severe hindrance if you want to grow your wealth and improve intrinsic value. Jobs also consume time — which is the most precious of all resources — which limits you further. As an entrepreneur, you have both time and money.

Here’s another consideration:

The assets you build are more valuable than cash because as more people take interest in them, word spreads. Even better, existing and new visitors might be interested in related products or higher services which compounds further growth.

With the abundance of freedom, we have more leveraging power to create bigger and better things but also the time in which to do it. Vast amounts of time and deep thought is where the greatest of ideas and inventions stem from.

Mention of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book on Flow along with the works of Edward Deci, Frederick Herzberg, and W. Edwards Deming can be summarized as follows:

This echoes what Dan Pink wrote about in Drive. It’s disappointing that Pearson doesn’t reference Drive in this section of the book directly but is only mentioned in the Notes section at the back of the book.

This is the era where power is moving from corporations to the individual in terms of readily available technological solutions that are cheap, powerful, and constantly enhancing at a profound rate. Carpe diem!