This Is Why Following Your Nose Is the Only Way to Go

Twenty years since Daniel Pink’s ‘Free Agent Nation’ and curiosity still reigns supreme.

Until a half-century ago, entrepreneurship (the solo or hero variety), was taboo. The nerve of folks who made their living from customers and friends for that matter! Entrepreneurs, so it went, could not cut it inside the organisation — poor souls had to strike out on their own. Today this way of life is a bragging right.

Lifetime loyalty to a single company has long gone the way of the dodo bird.Our economy’s fundamental unit is not the organization — it’s you.

You can follow your nose, try out different things, and see where it takes you. But what does this mean for the future of work? Two decades since chronicling free agent nation, I caught up with author Daniel Pink to get some answers.

Get a Leg Up

At the turn of the century, Pink found free agents in every nook and cranny — even tracking down Betty Fox, an early yet elderly (sixty-eight-years-old) internet entrepreneur.

Using her knowledge, the web, and a bit of help from her son, she launched and sold an online business for seniors.

Like Betty, for those with a knack of leveraging technology, free agency can provide a one-way ticket to liberation.

But for others, free agents or otherwise — work is still just a way to make ends meet. The net outcome of technological advances might mean an elite few are catapulted ahead while the rest are left waving in the rearview mirror.

Not seeing the explosiveness of the change that would take place, Pink remarks:

“Remember: I wrote Free Agent Nation before smartphones and, equally more important, before widespread broadband! But that’s not all. It was also before Facebook, before Twitter, before the cloud, and before Uber, TaskRabbit, and the gig economy. In a way, the conditions I described back then now almost seem quaint. I’m hoping that this country will reckon with its ugliest truth: That the modern economy is leaving people behind. What’s happening has less to do with the form of work…and much more to do with who has skills that are in demand and who doesn’t. The fact that too many people who work hard and do the right thing can’t get ahead is the most urgent moral and economic issue we face.”

Read more: https://www.inc.com/jonas-altman/this-is-why-following-your-nose-is-only-way-to-go.html?cid=search