Well, not all people want to be an entrepreneur, what we can all do is to take charge of our careers instead of haning down the power to a corporation.

Entrepreneurship advocates forget that some passions and professions can’t be hold outside of a corporation. Like a astronaut. How many would be without space agencies? Richard Branson and how many more? And he didn’t get to the moon yet.

So, to me it’s just a matter of taking your career in your hands, whether if it’s flying solo or not.

Working with clients in an entrepreneurial fashion does not always put one in the driver’s seat what with client demands, etc. and the “working for someone else,” mode can gives that discipline.

As Paul Meyers once mentioned, it’s all about attitude.

Thanks for the post.

Bill

As one who’s changed employers more times than most, I can say you can get perhaps 5 of the 8. It takes a little enlightenment of the employer for the rest to happen. There’s still an amazing amount of, “We’ve been doing things this way since…” These 8 qualities would make a great round table company meeting!

I think the key thing is about choice, as you say at the end of your post. Sadly, a lot of the way we are educated to think about work surreptitiously invites us to hand power over to the corporate institutions who have most of the employed jobs. I think there’s a real challenge at large for a huge mindset shift when it comes to how we think about work. A key part of that is about us taking back our own sense of power, and exercising it positively.

Also, as other people have said here, work doesn’t need to be an employed/self-employed, either/or dichotomy. That just sets up unnecessary splitting in a good versus bad sort of way. For me there’s a continuum. It depends what you really love and what you really want from life. I predict that, in the future, people may dance more between various forms of earning a living for themselves because they need different things for themselves at different stages. That demands a different kind of personal clarity than our current society by and large affords. Nevertheless I think people are hungry and there’s stuff out there now in alternative forms that will help things move in this direction.