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

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

Ideas and concepts which never even entered Rockefeller’s consciousness are now almost ubiquitous. The rise in Zen Buddhism and Stoic philosophy in the modern West is closely linked to the rise of technology and the internet. Rockefeller simply never had access to those ideas despite having enough money to buy a small country.

The same is true of almost every class of media and product. It’s cheaper to make something. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to reach those markets. There are new markets willing to buy those things.

More Money, More Freedom, and More Meaning

We live in a society defined by what venture capitalist Peter Thiel calls indefinite optimism. While we all sense on some level the expanding amount of possibility and opportunity available to us, you must step up to seize it. While many feel destined for something more, something bigger, few of us have taken actions to seize it. We

As a society, we’re paying people more money to do things which create less wealth. Yet we’re at a point where we can create more wealth and make more money for ourselves and others by pursuing work which forces us to grow in a way we personally find meaningful.

Markets, while not perfectly accurate, will generally correct over time. You know the value of a 2012 Honda Pilot is $15,000, but you find someone that is moving out of the country and in a hurry to sell it and will take $12,000. You know you can hold onto it and wait until someone who will buy it for $15,000 comes along. This is what Munger and Bu

Complex is where the relationships between cause and effect are only clear in retrospect. It’s an emergent practice. This is the field that entrepreneurs frequently find themselves in. It’s not clear what to do next, because you exhausted the expertise you gained through education. The problem is solved, instead, by testing new solutions and seeing