Entrepreneurship Is for Everybody

[Street Knowledge]

Entrepreneurship Is for Everybody
Entrepreneurship Is for Everybody | Dan Sanchez
Entrepreneurship is for everybody. That may strike you as an exaggeration. “Surely not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur. It takes a certain kind of person to launch and run a business. Most people are better suited to earn their livings as employees.”

This formulation of entrepreneurship is far too narrow. Everyone is the sole proprietor of an enterprise: namely your own career. You are the CEO of “You, Inc.”

• Like any entrepreneur, you have customer(s): in this case, your “employer(s).”
• Like any entrepreneur, you have a product to sell: in this case, your labor.
• Like any entrepreneur, you spend money to create, improve, and market that product. You purchase human capital-enhancing products and services from suppliers like training programs, programming books, and online course providers. You also use your labor to barter for valuable experience in the workplace. When you buy a suit for interviews, you are spending money on marketing your product.

All these costs could exceed your resulting “sales” (your additional pay), and in that case you incur losses, just like any entrepreneur. Or your sales could outstrip your costs and net you a profit.

To successfully manage your career, to truly thrive in the labor market, requires all of the character traits normally attributed to people who are “cut out” for entrepreneurship:

• a passion for value creation
• innovativeness
• insight into and anticipation of the wants and needs of “customers” (employers)
• good judgment as to what will satisfy those wants and needs
• vision
• imagination
• alertness to opportunity
• the ability to cope with uncertainty and risk
• initiative

It is tragic that most people don’t think of their careers as enterprises, or of themselves as entrepreneurs. Instead they too often have an “employee mindset.” According to this mindset, all of the above qualities are only required of their entrepreneurial betters. The employee himself doesn’t need a passion for value creation; the boss decides for him how he is to create value by assigning him specific tasks. It is for the employee to dutifully perform those tasks, and that’s it.

With such a “worker drone” attitude weighing them down, too many people find themselves in a rut in their career and their lives. They see work, not as an exciting opportunity for advancement through value creation, but as a drudgery to be endured. Keep your head down, do your assigned work, learn the routine, hope to get incremental raises for time served, and pray you don’t get laid off.

Imagine if Steve Jobs had treated his customers (buyers of Apple products) the way most workers treat their customers (buyers of their labor services). “Well, they keep asking for the Apple II computer, so I’d better just focus on continuing to give it to them.” He would have never developed the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. The world, and more to the point, he himself, would have been much poorer as a result.

Consumers of personal tech care more about value than about any particular product per se. Similarly, any boss who is himself an entrepreneur, as opposed to a bureaucratic functionary, cares more about value creation itself than about rule following and task completion per se.

Workers should see task assignments not just as responsibilities, but as starting points: clues for potential opportunities for greater value creation. This may involve going above and beyond the original tasks. It also may involve innovating altogether different ways of doing things.

A bureaucratic boss would be annoyed by such deviations from routine as uppity insubordination, and as needlessly creating extra hassles. An entrepreneurial boss would eagerly embrace the value-adding innovations, and facilitate the creation of more innovations by giving the innovator a bigger role. She would also know that other entrepreneurial bosses would happily bid away the innovative worker’s services if given the chance; so, to prevent that, she would increase the worker's pay.

By intelligently and assertively pursuing value creation (and by staying on the job market), the entrepreneurial worker finds him or herself in high demand, and so is faced with greater opportunities: for higher pay, better benefits, better working conditions, more fulfilling work, a more fulfilling life.

This mindset is not only financially rewarding, but invigorating as well. Human beings are not constituted to be programmed automatons or beasts of burden to be yoked and driven. When we relegate ourselves to such a role, we become dejected and neurotic.

Our nature is to be purposeful actors, to be intrepid discoverers, to boldly undertake ventures (“entrepreneur” is derived from the French equivalent of the English word “undertaker,” which was the term used by Adam Smith). Taking on life as an entrepreneur is what makes us fully come alive.

Down with the employee mindset. All workers should consider themselves “self-employed.” Your boss is your (current) customer (maybe one of several), not your “employer.” You are the ultimate employer of your own labor. Only you are ultimately responsible for your own value creation, your own pay, your own career. You are the entrepreneur in control of “You, Inc.” Entrepreneurship is for everybody.

The best way to learn entrepreneurship is to actually engage in it. But if you need a bit more inspiration to do so, try out FEE’s free online course “The Economics of Entrepreneurship.”

In this course, you will find further discussions of what it means to be entrepreneurial, as well as inspiring examples of successful entrepreneurs. In that course, you can also learn about the tremendous public service that entrepreneurs (including entrepreneurial workers) provide via their role in the market economy. Understanding that can contribute to your sense of fulfillment as you embark upon your career as a lifelong entrepreneur.

 

[JahFocus CS]

I support everyone having side hustles and seriously pursuing entrepreneurship at least once in their lives, but this article is pure propaganda trying to sanitize the reality of wage slavery.

All workers should consider themselves “self-employed.” Your boss is your (current) customer (maybe one of several), not your “employer.”

As a rebuttal of some of the assumptions and assertions in OP's article:

Four Myths About the “Freelancer Class”

Freelancers have more in common with other workers than with small-business entrepreneurs.

by Sarah Grey

Ashley Barron / Open Book Toronto

I got a strange call late last year from Duane Morris, an international law firm based in Philadelphia. The woman on the phone said that Duane Morris was working with former Sen. Blanche Lincoln and some of the world’s leading corporations, like Microsoft and Google, to build a “grassroots movement” to help freelancers.

I asked how this movement would do so, and she replied that employment law makes employers vulnerable to lawsuits and fines for intentionally misclassifying workers — calling workers independent contractors rather than permanent employees (who would be eligible for benefits). This “vulnerability” creates a disincentive to hire freelancers and is, according to the organizers of this “movement,” the biggest problem — bigger than getting health care, paying the bills, shouldering the crushing burden of student-loan debt, or accessing capital — facing freelancers today.

Since I’m a freelance writer and editor, she asked me, didn’t I want to join the fight for my freedom to operate my business?

The woman on the phone directed me to the new movement’swebsite — it was full of infotainment about defending freelancers’ right to run their businesses — not to mention crossword puzzles, stock photos of small-business owners, and a truly amazing Flash game in which the reader can throw snowballs at razor-toothed, tie-wearing zombie snowmen meant to represent politicians.

The website warned that laws like the Payroll Fraud Prevention Act and the Employee Misclassification Prevention act “could force thousands of people to close their businesses and fire employees. If this happens, there will be disastrous consequences to the economy.”

It was clear that this attempt at a scaremongering “grassroots movement” to make it easier for corporations to classify workers as temps was in fact about making it easier to deny benefits to a large sector of workers. Microsoft’s presence here was a dead giveaway — the software giant is notorious for such practices and has beensued several times by workers.

In an economic context in which a wider variety of workers than ever before, from Uber drivers to ER doctors to hairstylists, are being forced to work as “independent contractors” instead of being employed with some degree of stability, the problem isn’t that small businesses need freedom to operate — it’s that what used to be jobs are now considered small businesses.

Blurring the line between the working class and the petit-bourgeoisie clearly benefits big capital here — not people like me. I declined to join the “movement.”

Freelancers who don’t buy the argument that they’re the smallest part of big business often argue that they’re part of what’s come to be called the “precariat.” The term emerged out of the 2001 G8 protests in Genoa — a portmanteau of proletariat and precarious intended to describe the global trend away from formal employment and toward casualized, nonunion labor (especially in developed countries) and a growing informal sector (particularly in developing economies).

Since then there has been considerable debate about the term. Economist Guy Standing wrote a book about this new class, composed of “temporary and part-time workers, sub-contracted labour, call-centre employees, [and] many interns,” arguing that these workers are not part of the proletariat — which he defines in a shockingly narrow way as “workers in long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionization and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features they were familiar with.”

Other scholars question the classificatory implications of the term. Charlie Post argues that before World War I, “the vast majority of working people lived an incredibly precarious existence,” with little access to the sorts of jobs Standing classifies as “working class”; Jan Breman, in his review of Standing’s book, notes that in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels argue that one of the defining conditions of “proletarianization” is precarity: “Stripped of the means of subsistence on the land, workers could only survive by selling their labour.”

Compounding the confusion over how to understand and identify class in modern capitalism is the fact that freelancers, whose numbers have exploded in recent decades, are ideologically constructed as part of the petit-bourgeoisie, albeit the bottom rung, despite selling their labor for wages and often living hand to mouth, without access to health care or other benefits — a sort of “precari-bourgeoisie.”

Arguments from the top and from the bottom for the existence of this pseudo-class have popularized a number of myths about its members. Let’s look at a few of the most common to see whether this concept of the precari-bourgeoisie holds up.

Myth 1: The Extremely-Petit-Bourgeoisie
The designation of freelancers as a new entrepreneurial class — a group of extremely-petit-bourgeois mini-CEOs running small businesses that are poised to become true corporations — is one of the central myths connected to precarious work today.

I became a full-time freelance writer and editor in 2011 and, like most new freelancers, came face-to-face with the pervasive ideology of entrepreneurship. There’s a whole industry of books that propagate this myth, including The Wealthy Freelancer, The Well-Fed Writer, and — my personal favorite — The Hell Yeah Diaries: Uncensored Outbursts on the Path to 7 Figures. Be a six-figure freelancer! Take charge of your destiny! You’re not a freelancer, you’re the CEO of You, Incorporated!

The ideology is clear: adopt the mindset of a CEO and in no time you’ll be hiring employees, moving into a slick new office, and shopping for Ferraris. Dozens of business networking breakfasts promote this narrative. Should you choose to attend one, you’ll need to practice your elevator speech and exchange business cards with other working-class people wearing suits. Networking won’t make you rich, of course — you’ll most likely just agonize about the hour of productive time you’ve lost, then spend weeks fending off life-insurance salespeople.

The New York–based Freelancers Union (caution: not a real union) defines freelancers as “individuals who have engaged in supplemental, temporary, or project- or contract-based work in the past 12 months.” This definition fits 53 million Americans — 34 percent of the total national workforce. According to Freelancers Union founder Sara Horowitz, during “the Great Recession after 2008 the number of Americans starting their own businesses reached a fifteen-year high — and most were sole proprietors.”

The Freelancers Union recently surveyed 5,000 self-identified independent contractors and found that 40 percent of the independent workforce — 21.1 million people — make a living as independent contractors. Another 14.3 million freelance while holding down a day job full time. Another 9.3 million hold a part-time job to supplement freelance work, and 5.5 million are considered temps. Only 5 percent, 2.8 million, could be classified as freelance business owners, employing one to five other people.

As for those six-figure freelancers, they’re not actually making all of that money selling their labor piece rate or by the hour. Most make it by selling products — like e-books or pre-recorded classes on how to become a six-figure freelancer (available for just $49.95). They also do it by hiring employees or (more likely) contracting vendors and exploiting their labor — in other words, by transitioning into the ranks of the true petit-bourgeoisie. And, at least in most cases, making that transition requires access to capital.

In reality, class divides among freelancers mirror the class divides in the rest of society – freelancers, for the most part, remain members of the class they were members of before they started freelancing. The 99 percent, so to speak, of the freelance world remains in the working class, selling our labor as piecework, locked in the constant struggle with the capitalist class — now as clients rather than bosses — over the rate of exploitation of our labor (that is, how much we get paid).

Labeling freelancers entrepreneurs rather than workers saves capitalists a bundle on salaries, benefits, and wage taxes. Not surprisingly, misclassifying workers as independent contractors is an extremely common form of corporate fraud — precisely the type of fraud that the companies that hired Duane Morris want to legalize.

In addition, while it’s already difficult for workers who work in the same space, are paid standard wages, and have daily contact with each other — none of which most freelancers experience — independent contractors also have to contend with the Sherman Antitrust Act, which brands efforts to set standard industry wages as price-fixing and thus illegal.

While it’s certainly the case that class structures can and do change over time (as Bertell Ollman points out, Marx was quick to note this, especially in relation to the United States), it’s important to define them not with a list of attributes in common but in terms of the relations of production — the conflict that lies at the heart of all class struggle.

Aligning freelancers ideologically with the goals of the petit-bourgeoisie (which some Marxists also do, as Eric Olin Wright documents in Classes), even though most have far more in common with the working class, erects yet another barrier to prevent them from organizing and demanding rights as workers. As Richard Seymour puts it: “The attempt to obscure, or ‘disappear,’ the concept of class is a deliberate politicized mission.”

Myth 2: The Creative Class
What about the “creative class” of freelancers who view work as a labor of love, who put in long hours for sheer love of the game? As thesaying goes, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

In this view, creative work is the “antithesis of alienation” — as Nicole Cohen puts its — because cultural workers who deal in ideas or self-expression are granted “relative autonomy in the labor process,” with a degree of control and self-direction in their work. Working from home, in particular, frees the worker from the tight control of the employer — dress codes, Internet filters, and restrictions on breaks; capitalists have realized that, as Cohen describes it, “control over production can be surrendered if it is not an impediment to exploitation.” If the worker isn’t salaried, all that matters is whether the job gets done.

Freelancers are commonly thought of as working in creative, white-collar fields like media, publishing, and tech. But the category is actually quite expansive and includes people as varied as cabinet-makers, nannies, sex workers, insurance agents, administrative assistants, artists, translators and interpreters (and my own occupation, copy editors).

Continued here

 

[Cynic]

Feel good drivel for the masses....

People aren't about that disciplined life

Enterpreneurship isn't for everyone...nobody believes you'll make it

and when you do after failing and getting depressed/fat they'll say you were lucky

These same doubters expect you to pay for everything because "you got it like that"

That sh!t is lonely as fukk.......goodluck trusting anybody who isn't as rich as you

fukk you, the writer and ya whole post n!gga


Negged

 

[88m3]