"People who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us." ~Malcolm Gladwell
The source of the quote is Malcolm's article in the New Yorker, "How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur"...
This is consistent with the one undisputed finding in all the research on entrepreneurship: people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us. Shane says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be as happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself.
Thanks as always to bakadesuyo.
An environment with a lot of autonomy allows people to work for themselves even under the umbrella of a corporation.
I was just about to say almost exactly that. It may be a spectrum, in that people who work for others but have a lot of autonomy are nearly as happy as people who truly work for themselves, or it may be that you need sufficient autonomy to be happy and then it depends on other parts of your life.
What counts as "working for themselves"? We are entrepreneurs but we work for the corporation just like all the other employees, no?
As an employer, I think you should be suppressing that idea not propagating it.
It means I need to work that much harder to make it worthwhile to people who could otherwise work for themselves.
Zappos was able to create autonomy inside the structure of a corporation. But few can do it well. It requires a lot of trust, which creates risk, which creates a threat to profit. Most corporations are about profit / bottom line / cash money. Too bad.
Adam, as someone who is a contractor that sentiment is generally true, but there is a caveat--as long as you are able to find the work yourself or figure out a way to bring the customers to you. Some people are incapable of working for themselves. They don't have the guts to do it, but if they can muster the stomach for it, the rewards are great, especially if they become a guru at what they do.
Gee, I prefer working as part of a team. i don't need to be the boss to work for myself, where that means working in a respectful environment where title doesn't serve as pre-approval for a great idea.
