The Secret of Self-Employment
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Fabio Cecin
Mar 13, 2014, 12:53:18 PM3/13/14
to reinventing-business
The Secret of Self-Employment
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140313045246-52594-the-secret-of-self-employment
"
(...)
The truth is that we train kids in school and in college to think of
their careers through the lens called Employment when we should be
teaching them to attend to and track with the changes occurring around
them, which is the essence of entrepreneurism. I know people who are
experts in their fields, sub-fields or sub-sub-fields and utterly
helpless at navigating the ups and downs of actual life.
That real wages have fallen is a sign that too many people, not
knowing their value apart from what's told to them by the very same
employers assigning that value, have ridden the earnings curve down to
near-subsistence levels.
Someone in a Hiring Capacity told them they had no other choice but to
do that, and they have no independent point of reference. If they had
a part-time entrepreneurial project going and a handful of side
clients, they'd be better off in three ways:
* they'd have a counter-balance to unreasonable employers unwilling to bend
* they'd have a pulse on the talent-market value for their services; and
* they'd have the business savvy that entrepreneurism gave them,
perfect for negotiating with employers.
(...)
"
...
There's a trend that still fits perfectly within traditional
"capitalism" (the singleton globalized money/trade system) which is
about people simply pausing the "just going to work and doing work" to
realize they're being exploited and/or wasted, and that they should
not just let others value them but do that themselves.
Entrepreneurship is dealing with yourself as a business as you deal
with other businesses (people and people groups) to create other
businesses, etc. The argument is that no one can afford to just lose
themselves inside of any one corporation (whether they own it or not)
-- you need to be aware you might be losing your real sense of value
by just being at the company and letting them value you. And "value"
includes the potential to "make money," which in the current money
system, means how much society thinks you deserve to be alive, for
example.
This is an improvement, but the mistake being made here is in missing
the larger picture, which is, the world is going to dump the
single-dominating-social-value-system, which is the global monetary
system and diversify (we're already doing that). You will need an
interface to "social value" which abstracts things such as
"currencies," "legal systems," "countries," etc. because all these
things, no matter how much we think of them as "fixed," are actually
quite variable, but in a timeframe that exceeds our own lifetimes.
Nevertheless, they're variables, not constants. For example, "money"
is not dollars (or your local geopolitical tribe's equivalent), not in
any sense, be it unit of account, store of value or the other one.
We've done the impossible. We routinely objectify what's real (people,
real social relations) and we unconsciously reify mental objects -- we
take the arbitrary system you know locally as "money" (which is just a
_type_ of money) and we treat them as inescapable choices (we don't
even bother to model it as a pointer or array to value systems, we
just tack it into a "money" concept), whereas we treat other real
people as if there's an endless supply of them, or not needed at all.
Fabio
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140313045246-52594-the-secret-of-self-employment
"
(...)
The truth is that we train kids in school and in college to think of
their careers through the lens called Employment when we should be
teaching them to attend to and track with the changes occurring around
them, which is the essence of entrepreneurism. I know people who are
experts in their fields, sub-fields or sub-sub-fields and utterly
helpless at navigating the ups and downs of actual life.
That real wages have fallen is a sign that too many people, not
knowing their value apart from what's told to them by the very same
employers assigning that value, have ridden the earnings curve down to
near-subsistence levels.
Someone in a Hiring Capacity told them they had no other choice but to
do that, and they have no independent point of reference. If they had
a part-time entrepreneurial project going and a handful of side
clients, they'd be better off in three ways:
* they'd have a counter-balance to unreasonable employers unwilling to bend
* they'd have a pulse on the talent-market value for their services; and
* they'd have the business savvy that entrepreneurism gave them,
perfect for negotiating with employers.
(...)
"
...
There's a trend that still fits perfectly within traditional
"capitalism" (the singleton globalized money/trade system) which is
about people simply pausing the "just going to work and doing work" to
realize they're being exploited and/or wasted, and that they should
not just let others value them but do that themselves.
Entrepreneurship is dealing with yourself as a business as you deal
with other businesses (people and people groups) to create other
businesses, etc. The argument is that no one can afford to just lose
themselves inside of any one corporation (whether they own it or not)
-- you need to be aware you might be losing your real sense of value
by just being at the company and letting them value you. And "value"
includes the potential to "make money," which in the current money
system, means how much society thinks you deserve to be alive, for
example.
This is an improvement, but the mistake being made here is in missing
the larger picture, which is, the world is going to dump the
single-dominating-social-value-system, which is the global monetary
system and diversify (we're already doing that). You will need an
interface to "social value" which abstracts things such as
"currencies," "legal systems," "countries," etc. because all these
things, no matter how much we think of them as "fixed," are actually
quite variable, but in a timeframe that exceeds our own lifetimes.
Nevertheless, they're variables, not constants. For example, "money"
is not dollars (or your local geopolitical tribe's equivalent), not in
any sense, be it unit of account, store of value or the other one.
We've done the impossible. We routinely objectify what's real (people,
real social relations) and we unconsciously reify mental objects -- we
take the arbitrary system you know locally as "money" (which is just a
_type_ of money) and we treat them as inescapable choices (we don't
even bother to model it as a pointer or array to value systems, we
just tack it into a "money" concept), whereas we treat other real
people as if there's an endless supply of them, or not needed at all.
Fabio
Eric Platon
Mar 13, 2014, 8:04:38 PM3/13/14
to reinventin...@googlegroups.com
Great post, Fabio. Reading it, I first could not believe (or accept) such a narrow view, until you make the point that there is something else, a larger picture.
Diversity is a strength, I think, and a single mode of thought is hazardous (e.g. dictatorships). Artists are often cited as examples of social actors who are usually not entrepreneurs, nor even employee sometimes. They are seen as economic "anomalies" by traditional minds. But artists do create value and economic movements: There are examples through the ages, and most recently singers just let the Internet support them (was it RadioHead?). It can be seen as a form of entrepreneurship, but not in the usual "active" sense, and these people are first artists. RadioHead is not a good example, then. I would need one where the artist is mentored for his/her subsistence.
Single mode of thoughts are also tenacious. I have been involved recently in an interesting discussion. The popular web site Stackoverflow.com, a Q&A site for software development, announced they would spawn a parallel site entirely in Portuguese. Their numbers show that Brazilian engineers are growing fast and strong. Many people in the discussion were against that move, as we should have a single place, so a single language to discuss the matter. The problem is that this majority of opponents see no value in another language---another mode of thought. I live in Asia, and I am frequently amazed how different modes can solve some problems much more efficiently than others, while doing poorly on others. For software, it is like choosing a bad data structure, if you see what I mean. The fact today is that most people tend to opt for the single mode. It seems the Portuguese version will go ahead anyway. I argue in that direction, and believe in dumping the single mode, as you mention.
Really nice piece:
Best,
Eric
2014/03/14 1:53、Fabio Cecin <fce...@gmail.com> のメッセージ:
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Diversity is a strength, I think, and a single mode of thought is hazardous (e.g. dictatorships). Artists are often cited as examples of social actors who are usually not entrepreneurs, nor even employee sometimes. They are seen as economic "anomalies" by traditional minds. But artists do create value and economic movements: There are examples through the ages, and most recently singers just let the Internet support them (was it RadioHead?). It can be seen as a form of entrepreneurship, but not in the usual "active" sense, and these people are first artists. RadioHead is not a good example, then. I would need one where the artist is mentored for his/her subsistence.
Single mode of thoughts are also tenacious. I have been involved recently in an interesting discussion. The popular web site Stackoverflow.com, a Q&A site for software development, announced they would spawn a parallel site entirely in Portuguese. Their numbers show that Brazilian engineers are growing fast and strong. Many people in the discussion were against that move, as we should have a single place, so a single language to discuss the matter. The problem is that this majority of opponents see no value in another language---another mode of thought. I live in Asia, and I am frequently amazed how different modes can solve some problems much more efficiently than others, while doing poorly on others. For software, it is like choosing a bad data structure, if you see what I mean. The fact today is that most people tend to opt for the single mode. It seems the Portuguese version will go ahead anyway. I argue in that direction, and believe in dumping the single mode, as you mention.
Really nice piece:
> We routinely objectify what's real (people,
> real social relations) and we unconsciously reify mental objects
So Fabio, thank you for the pointer and post. A lot to say and test on this topic!
> real social relations) and we unconsciously reify mental objects
Best,
Eric
2014/03/14 1:53、Fabio Cecin <fce...@gmail.com> のメッセージ:
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Fabio Cecin
Mar 14, 2014, 12:36:33 PM3/14/14
to reinventing-business
On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 9:04 PM, Eric Platon <eric....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Diversity is a strength, I think, and a single mode of thought is hazardous (e.g. dictatorships). Artists are often cited as examples of social actors who are usually not entrepreneurs, nor even employee sometimes. They are seen as economic "anomalies" by traditional minds. But artists do create value and economic movements: There are examples through the ages, and most recently singers just let the Internet support them (was it RadioHead?). It can be seen as a form of entrepreneurship, but not in the usual "active" sense, and these people are first artists. RadioHead is not a good example, then. I would need one where the artist is mentored for his/her subsistence.
I think if we lived in a global "Artistocracy" instead of a global
> Diversity is a strength, I think, and a single mode of thought is hazardous (e.g. dictatorships). Artists are often cited as examples of social actors who are usually not entrepreneurs, nor even employee sometimes. They are seen as economic "anomalies" by traditional minds. But artists do create value and economic movements: There are examples through the ages, and most recently singers just let the Internet support them (was it RadioHead?). It can be seen as a form of entrepreneurship, but not in the usual "active" sense, and these people are first artists. RadioHead is not a good example, then. I would need one where the artist is mentored for his/her subsistence.
"Econocracy," we'd be arguing how these odd misfits known as
"businesspeople," regardless of how they seem artistically
incompetent, which can only produce things that look like their egos,
actually do provide artistic value to society within their illusions
of "economic development" and "growth" and "achievement" and all that.
We'd then struggle with big-A Artistocratic language bias to see and
describe some examples of this :-)
> Single mode of thoughts are also tenacious. I have been involved recently in an interesting discussion. The popular web site Stackoverflow.com, a Q&A site for software development, announced they would spawn a parallel site entirely in Portuguese. Their numbers show that Brazilian engineers are growing fast and strong. Many people in the discussion were against that move, as we should have a single place, so a single language to discuss the matter. The problem is that this majority of opponents see no value in another language---another mode of thought. I live in Asia, and I am frequently amazed how different modes can solve some problems much more efficiently than others, while doing poorly on others. For software, it is like choosing a bad data structure, if you see what I mean. The fact today is that most people tend to opt for the single mode. It seems the Portuguese version will go ahead anyway. I argue in that direction, and believe in dumping the single mode, as you mention.
"Single mode of thought" is a nice way to put it. Your thought engine
has a core layer that's not flexible, that you are actively preventing
from evolving. You think you are done being "educated" and now it's
time to put the constant "engine" to work -- to actually "achieve
things, dammit!"...
Perhaps someone had a "vision" about Stackoverflow, was on to
"achieve" something, and was annoyed at any tiny energy expenditure
that wasn't contributing to that "vision." No matter how stupid the
denying of that concrete proposal of "deviation" from "The Vision" is
or looks when examined. Smells like "business" mentality.
Fabio
Slawek Rogulski
Mar 19, 2014, 9:48:26 PM3/19/14
to reinventin...@googlegroups.com
Why has that reification happened? If money is to stuff what a map is to a territory then why is it that we are not all hoarding maps? Or is money like treasure maps? We get all worked up about it and we put all manner of ethical and moral considerations aside lest someone is going to beat it to the prize. Is it the promise of salvation that we imagine lies at the end of the rainbow?
How much is a treasure map worth? And how much is a dollar note worth?
Fabio
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Sławek
Fabio Cecin
Mar 19, 2014, 11:33:14 PM3/19/14
to reinventing-business
On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:48 PM, Slawek Rogulski
<slawek....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why has that reification happened? If money is to stuff what a map is to a
> territory then why is it that we are not all hoarding maps? Or is money like
> treasure maps? We get all worked up about it and we put all manner of
> ethical and moral considerations aside lest someone is going to beat it to
> the prize. Is it the promise of salvation that we imagine lies at the end of
> the rainbow?
Perhaps it is the other way around: why do we assume we're at all
<slawek....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why has that reification happened? If money is to stuff what a map is to a
> territory then why is it that we are not all hoarding maps? Or is money like
> treasure maps? We get all worked up about it and we put all manner of
> ethical and moral considerations aside lest someone is going to beat it to
> the prize. Is it the promise of salvation that we imagine lies at the end of
> the rainbow?
intelligent (in the IQ sense), or that we need to display some minimum
level of mental processing power? Why do we tax our minds so hard to
"know" and "explain" when we "just know" what is right most of the
time, the _moment_ wrong is being done?
Do we actually know how much each person can "take," mentally or
emotionally? Perhaps non-reification, non-conflation is what is hard
for us? Certainly it seems so for software. It is much easier to
design dumb systems with a confusion of concepts instead of getting
better ones. So why beat ourselves up that we're prisoners to culture?
We're falling for scam cultural stories/memes that have been evolving
their bullshit for thousands of years, whereas each of us has been
here for a blip. We don't have to be so hard on ourselves.
Charles Eisenstein, which is not your typical Cultural Matrix Dweller
by any measure, repeats often that even though he is aware of the new
way and has written thousands of pages on this very topic, that he has
to constantly police himself to not fall for the old ways (he goes
much deeper on several things we get wrong, not just our social
reputation and political resource allocation systems i.e. our dumb
"money" concept). He talks about the necessity of helping each other
"stay in the new stories."
It's what we've always known and lived. It is hard to keep two (many?)
entire social worlds in your head and do the translation between them.
> And how much is a dollar note worth?
win in a competition for scarce food, shelter, etc.? Political power?
Power to give you time to write righteous-sounding crap to mailing
lists while other people maintain your unsustainable industrialized
urban lifestyle full of cereal, boxed milk and Internet access?
If so, then, currently, that is the preferred way to get this kind of
power. The more "dollars," the better. Also, dollars give you more
dollars if you can store some (it's called "interest" -- it's a kind
of social magic).
Power to help people create new cultures, new stories? Then negative
value; more like a kind of poison.
Also, dollars have been "pre-mined." Even if you "deserve" (LOL,
right, "meritocracy!") more money than a bunch of idiots who have
millions, you first have to waste time coming up with ways to take
some money from them. It gets harder for latecomers as the decades
pass, as the "scarce money" game is essentially a distributed search
for the best, most sophisticated and most ruthless hoarders and
cheaters.
Fabio
Bolutife Ogunsola
Dec 5, 2014, 12:50:13 PM12/5/14
to reinventin...@googlegroups.com
I like this:
We're falling for scam cultural stories/memes that have been evolving
their bullshit for thousands of years, whereas each of us has been
here for a blip. We don't have to be so hard on ourselves.
Fabio
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