“Our work ethic? Work where and when it makes the most sense, doing the things you do better than anyone else.

Freedom—the ability to exercise one’s will—has become essential for making meaning in work.

For free agents, work is often like virtue—it becomes its own reward.

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.

Full-time independent contractors earn an average of 15 percent more than their employee counterparts.

A prevailing belief in the West, articulated by John Calvin, another seventeenth-century theologian, held that God chose certain people for salvation, and consigned the rest to eternal damnation. Free will? According to Calvinism and its doctrine of predestination, it didn’t exist.

in the 1950s, due to the rise of television and a U.S. Supreme Court anti-trust decision that forced studios to divest themselves of their theaters, the studio-centered system crumbled and power shifted. The individual became preeminent, and the industry adapted itself to the individual’s rise. Today, the movie business works on a different model.

The free agent gives talent in exchange for opportunity.

In fact, when Thomas Stanley and William Danko studied one thousand millionaires for their best-seller, The Millionaire Next Door, they discovered that two thirds of their sample worked for themselves. Self-employed people were four times more likely to be millionaires than those who worked for others. 19