Maybe Bob Dylan, and not Puff Daddy, holds the answer. “A man is a success,” Dylan sang, “if he gets up in the morning and does what he wants to do.”

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.

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

Increasingly, this is a common arrangement for producing new Web sites, new electronic goods, new magazines, new buildings, new ad campaigns, new pharmaceuticals, and just about any other product or service whose key ingredients are the brainpower, creativity, skill, and commitment of the people involved. To craft a new piece of software, high-tech

Appropriate Solutions’s philosophy: “It has to be good. It has to be fun. It has to be profitable. When it stops being fun, do something else.”

And since no position is permanent—but other positions are usually available and destitution is not around the bend—you might as well enjoy what you do. Produce quality work that’s a genuine reflection of who you are. Use your freedom to accept responsibility for your work. Decide for yourself what constitutes success. And if you’re not having

“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.”

the four values I’ve described in this chapter—having freedom, being authentic, putting yourself on the line, and defining success on your own terms—have combined to expand our notions of the work ethic.

Genuine trust flows in two directions—which leads to the essential feature of the Free Agent Operating System: reciprocity.