“These are all byline occupations,” Charles Handy says of independent workers, “meaning that the individual is encouraged to put his or her name on the work.”

1999 study by economists David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick found that the self-employed have greater job satisfaction than any other group of U.S. workers. 23

Mihaly Csikzentmihaly, the legendary University of Chicago psychologist and author of Flow, has written that “work requiring great skills that is done freely refines the complexity of the self ”—but

Thirty or forty million people attempting to self-actualize is staggering, if not a bit scary. And it has broad economic consequences, because for reasons that Maslow himself discovered as far back as 1962, one of the best—perhaps the best—mechanism for achieving self-actualization is work. “All human beings prefer meaningful work to meaningless wo

in the traditional workplace, authenticity is often neither condoned nor rewarded. As free agents around the country told me their stories, they repeatedly used the language of disguise and concealment to describe their previous jobs. They spoke of putting on “masks” or “game faces” at work.

At the bottom level of the pyramid were basic physiological needs—food, sex, and oxygen, for example. One layer higher were safety needs—such as protection from illness, calamity, and danger. And still higher came love needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, and aesthetic needs, proceeding all the way to the apex of personal growth—self-actualization

Here’s the problem: Free agents, and ever more working people generally, do not nestle comfortably into the categories “employer” and “employee.” Free agents are neither employers nor employees; free agents are both employers and employees. That may sound like a Zen koan, but it’s a key feature of this new economy.

Johns Hopkins study found that workers with little autonomy are 70 percent more likely to die from heart disease than workers with significant control of their work. 7

for most free agents, money is neither the primary motivator nor the greatest source of satisfaction. Nor do other traditional workplace goals—getting promoted and growing an enterprise larger—matter much to them.