The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5

The average middle class worker in liberal democracies of the West today is freer in how and where they spend their best energy and time than John D. Rockefeller was one hundred years ago when he was among the ten richest men on Earth. The guy in his mid-30s that lives in the apartment next door is freer than John D., the industrial titan, was a ce

Instead, they’re potentialities to be harnessed. If we can structure meaning and freedom into our work now, we see the Tom Sawyer Effect—work goes from being an obligation to a choice. It’s no longer something we’re obligated to do, but something we seek out.

Expected Value is the sum of all possible values for a random variable, each value multiplied by its probability of occurrence. It’s what poker players use to make betting decisions and it’s how entrepreneurs think about their businesses and decisions.

“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.” Christopher Morley

approximately $150,000 a month in 2000 to run a basic internet application. Running that same application today in Amazon’s cloud costs about $1,500 a month. If the same decrease had happened to cars and homes, a $50,000 luxury car would cost $500 today and a half million dollar home would cost $5,000. Because technology develops faster than biolog

The latent demand has always existed. There was always a demand for music from small independent artists before CD Baby, but the economics of retail didn’t allow it. There was always a market for niche movies before Netflix, but the market didn’t allow it. There are also demands for an enormous number of products and services that weren’t possible

It is in seeking a path with no risk, no mistakes, and no variation (stable income, clear promotion path) that Max has in fact exposed himself to a massive downside—getting fired at forty without a skillset for creating new systems or operating in complex environments, the metaphorical car falling on his head.

The internet has done more to facilitate information transparency than any technology since the printing press. Knowledge that used to be opaque and hard to source is often now just a Google search away.

The democratization of distribution has fattened all the tails. Products have gotten cheaper to make and markets have gotten easier to reach, but are there enough markets to support this shift?