The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you’re in the minority—a job would destroy my psyche) is that you’ve been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it’s more than training or acclimation. It’s something that’s been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.
What brazil84 said. Godin sounds like he’s overextrapolating from personal experience. For his claim about “it’s because you’ve been brainwashed” to work, he would need to show that people are taking circuitous routes to standard employment in preference to viable alternate means of making a living.
Yes, there are ways to make the same money with less time or “taking orders” … but they’re hard and risky to work out. If people are wrong in these assessments, it takes a heck of a lot more than just realizing, “hey, there are other ways!” You have to know one of those other ways well enough to get it to work! To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, “non-wage-slave is not an income plan”.
Furthermore, his claim is heavily penalized by it’s assertion of conspiracy: he’s saying all your teachers “needed” you to beleive this is the natural order of things, that every professor you had believed that, that all employers (not just the businesses but the hiring managers) believed that, etc. Yes, I’m aware of the history of public education (incl. Gatto’s claims about it), but Godin is going further, and saying that these people need you to believe lies.
Employers don’t look for college grads because they’re trying to enforce an oppressive system; they do it because the existence of the university degree option sorts applicants by ability in the most efficient, legal way. Teachers teach because of a combination of liking teaching and the benefits, not out of a deep-seated need to indoctrinate people into a 9-5 lifestyle.
Don’t tell me how bad it is to have a standard job; show me the viable option! Don’t assume people aren’t aware of the options; show that they’re viable!
With that said, Godin has a good point, but standard jobs are a bad example. A better one might be how people blur the concepts of “getting a steady income until dealth” and “not working” into the same term (“retirement”), when really they should think of them as distinct.
Agreed. Shorter version of Godin’s point: how many different income plans have you typically become familiar with by the time you exit the education system?
Don’t tell me how bad it is to have a standard job; show me the viable option!
I’ve gone one better and outlined a process whereby you can generate multiple viable options. (See my reply to brazil.) Following this process, I picked a career for myself that doesn’t involve a “job”. I’ve done it once a few years back and am now doing it again.
That’s not “one better”. That’s hardly different from telling me, “Find out what you want, and pursue that.” Duh? I’m perfectly capable of doing the excercise you outlined, I’ve done it regularly, and I’m still not living off interest.
I’m sure you made the leap one time yourself; but you did it with a lot more insight and resources than you provided in your answer to brazil84.
How about this:
1) Earn $1 million as quickly as you can. 2) Live off the interest.
The way I would put it is that it is difficult and unnatural to be an entrepreneur, or to work under someone’s direction in a management hierarchy. An efficient economy requires both kinds of people, and it’s arguable that our current educational system overemphasizes the latter at the expense of the former. But rather than conspiracy, I think a more reasonable explanation for this is inertia: rapid technological change means we need more entrepreneurs than we used to, but the educational system hasn’t kept up.
For those wondering about viable alternatives to being a wage slave, here’s something that worked for me. About ten years ago, I took a one-year break from my regular job, and used the time to write a piece of software that I saw a market niche for. While I went back to work, I found a partner to continue its development and to sell it over the Internet. It hasn’t made me rich, but eventually I got enough income from it to to quit my job and spend most of my time working on whatever interests me.
I suppose you could start a non-profit organization, but that’s just another form of entrepreneurship. You could leech off society or friends and relatives, but presumably we don’t want to encourage that. So, I don’t know… You seem to be implying here and in other comments that you have more ideas. Why not share them?
Well, if it turns out to be so hard to extend the list of “ways people make a living” beyond the two items {entrepreneur, worker under management hierarchy} that would constitute support for the “brainwashing” hypothesis (overstated as the term may seem).
When I was younger I wanted to become a novelist and make a living that way. That seems different enough from entrepreneurship; it’s one of the passive income categories. (My parents discouraged that—“you need a real job”.) Another classic one is to be a landlord. Silas mentioned investment income earlier, that could be considered a separate category. You could also consider as a different category someone whose intellectual or artistic output doesn’t generate royalties but who is supported by patronage.
To maintain that “the educational system hasn’t kept up” we would have to believe in the first place that it was at one point designed to turn out a then-optimal balance of people trained in one or another way of supporting themselves. I’m not sure we have good reason to think that.
While I went back to work, I found a partner to continue its development and to sell it over the Internet. It hasn’t made me rich, but eventually I got enough income from it to to quit my job and spend most of my time working on whatever interests me.
It may not be LW material exactly, but I would be interested to read about this in an Open Thread (or see a link to a recountal).
Um. This quote from Seth Godin (from Brainwashed) just caused me to lower my regard for his ideas a notch. (Consider this a mini-oops.)
Do you remember learning to factor quadrilateral equations? x2 −32x +12? Why were you taught this? Why did they spend hours drilling you on such clearly useless content?
On balance, I still think he’s on to something. But the lesson here is, stick to what you truly know, and if you ever start talking with authority about something you clearly don’t understand, shut up, fast.
What do you envision as the alternative to having a job? Running your own business? Being unemployed? Being a hunter-gatherer? Living off of a trust fund? Sustenance farming? Living in your mother’s basement?
That list makes a decent starting point. My recommendation would be more along the lines of “deconstruct the notion of a job into its component options, list several alternatives to each of these options, figure out what you want, then build up from the list of preferred alternatives the kind of life you’d like to live”. One of the most important distinctions is active vs passive income. Another is taking orders, vs giving orders, vs neither. And so on.
Something in the way you’re asking suggests you might not really want answers. I’d be delighted to find out I’m wrong...
What do you envision as the alternative to having a job? Running your own business? … Living off of a trust fund?
That list makes a decent starting point.
“Let them eat cake”, thy name is Morendil!
Again, the issue not whether the functions accomplished by a job can be broken down into their consitutent components. Of course they can. But Godin’s claim goes further, into saying that people are fundamentally ignorant of alternate ways to accomplish these functions.
Does he really not think that people are aware that if you have enough money, you don’t need to work to earn an income?
Also, this is another tenuous division of conceptspace:
Another is taking orders, vs giving orders, vs neither. And so on.
Why is one taking orders, while another isn’t? One way or another, you usually have to do something other people want to get their money. Grocery stores are taking my orders to bring them food. Employers are only giving me orders in the sense that, “if you want this money, you will perform this act. If you don’t like that tradeoff, we can go our separate ways.”
The identification of employment as “taking orders” is hardly a natural category for it, and certainly not one people are ignorant for not making.
Most work boils down to solving some problem or another. An employee solves problems within the constraints imposed by their company. An entrepreneur solves problems within the constraints imposed by their customers. The former are really just an indirect representation of the latter.
From a different angle, an employer solves a set of problems for employees—smoothing out the income stream, and doing a bunch of logistical details associated with finding work, having what’s needed to do the work, and getting paid. This is apparently so valuable that free-lancers get paid between 2 and 3 times as much per hour as employees.
This is a seductive explanation, but competing hypotheses exist, for instance Coase’s, which states that firms, as a phenomenon, arise due to the transaction costs incurred when hiring on an open market a freelancer to perform a job you need.
If there is an economic advantage to reducing these transaction costs by having the job performed “internally”, and this advantage overcomes the intrinsic costs of keeping the job internal, firms will tend to form, and grow larger as the discrepancy between these costs.
So here, rather than “employees choose to work in firms” we have an explanation of the form “firms have an interest in acquiring employees”, and no particular reason to expect that the formation of firms benefits employees.
What evidence (as opposed to just-so stories) can we find for or against each of these hypotheses?
I was offering a different angle, not saying that employment can be fully explained either by employer or employee motivations.
There are circumstances where a government forces matters in one direction or the other. In Slavery by Another Name, it’s explained that after the Civil War, there were laws requiring black people to get permission from their employers to get a job with someone else, and also vagrancy laws against being unemployed.
On the employee’s side, there can be laws (France, the Soviet Union) or customary contracts (tenure) which make it impossible or almost impossible to fire them.
In general, I’d frame it as employees and employers are hoping that the other will solve problems for them, and the hope is frequently more or less realized.
I am very surprised that you see Ronald’s explanation in contrast to Nancy’s. Income-smoothing is the only example she gives that does not look to me like a transaction cost. I think the economics party line is that the transaction costs will be split between the employee and the firm, with agnosticism about who will get the bulk of the benefit.
The following is only a sketch of the complete argument since that would take pages to write and time I don’t have.
The most basic law of economics is that prices are determined by supply and demand. An entrepreneur naturally chooses to provide goods or services to a market niche where a high potential demand faces a low supply so that he can sell his goods/services at high prices. An employee on the other hand imposes on himself a limit of one customer. He artificially limits his market and thereby reduces the price he can get for his skills. Although he can potentially quit his job and work for someone else this is associated with additional transaction costs in comparison to self employment. That the company indirectly markets the employee’s skills to a larger market does not alleviate this price reduction since it’s not the companies interest to maximize employee’s salaries.
So why would anybody choose employment over self employment? It is because most people lack the fundamental skill to market their own skills and a market of one customer is still better than zero. The important question now is why people lack this skill. That is a complex thing, but one factor is that our culture does not encourage risk taking, sales talk and other important entrepreneurial skills. There is still a strong bias of preferring a “honest worker” over a “capitalist pig” which simply prevents most people from developing their marketing skills.
And that is what is meant by the original quote. Imagination is based on culture and our culture cripples people’s potential to imagine what it would be like if they were entrepreneurs instead of workers.
The most basic law of economics is that prices are determined by supply and demand.
Another basic law of economics is that wealth can be created by specialization.
An employee on the other hand imposes on himself a limit of one customer. He artificially limits his market and thereby reduces the price he can get for his skills.
A firm dealing exclusively in government contracts, on the other hand, imposes on itself a limit of one customer. It artificially limits its market and thereby… ?
So why would anybody choose employment over self employment? It is because most people lack the fundamental skill to market their own skills and a market of one customer is still better than zero.
So why would anyone hire a programmer instead of just writing the code themselves? It is because most lack the fundamental skill of crystallizing their requirements into machine-readable form. The important question now is why people lack this skill.
I think I get it now. There seems to be a confusion about what specialization means. It means specializing in the service you provide, not in the customers you provide it to. Market segmentation is only a tool to identify how to specialize your service. But no sane company would refuse to deliver to a paying customer simply because he doesn’t fit into their target audience.
And there is a difference between computer programming and basic marketing. The former is a specific skill with a smaller area of application while the latter is a very general skill, and what is more one that stems from a basic human trait, namely the formation of relationships. Of course, not everybody needs specific marketing knowledge as taught in business administration.
Finally, I’m not arguing against working for a single employer in general. Quite the contrary. When you’re relatively new to your field of work you almost certainly lack the experience to be a successful entrepreneur and should first learn the trade under the relative security of employment. What I am arguing is, that if a huge number of people do not gain the confidence from experience to form their own idea of the service they want to provide and market it to a relevant audience something seems to be wrong, because taking responsibility for your life and forming relationships is an essential part of growing up.
Something in the way you’re asking suggests you might not really want answers. I’d be delighted to find out I’m wrong...
Well I’m mainly trying to figure out what Seth Godin’s point is. For example, his point might be that people have been brainwashed into feeling that they need to make money to buy various things. On the other hand, his point might be that people have been brainwashed into thinking that they should have a traditional 9 to 5 job. In other words, is he Ted Kozsynski? Or Carleton Sheets?
Anyway, having done a couple web searches, I gather that he is advocating entrepreneurship.
In any event, brainwashed or not, I think a lot of people—perhaps most—are actually better off working as somebody’s employee.
The obvious place to look is the context of the quote, Seth Godin’s blog. For example:
I don’t believe that everyone should be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, that everyone should quit their job and go work for themselves. I do believe this:
The less a project or task or opportunity at work feels like the sort of thing you would do if this is just a job, the more you should do it.
Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it’s difficult, not because it’s something you need to feel like.
and in a video interview I saw, he distinguished “the job” from “the work”. He hadn’t (he said) “done his job” for at least ten years, he did “the work”, which is the stuff you do because it fires you with passion, because you can’t not do it.
He isn’t giving detailed recipes. That’s what schools and training courses do. If you need one, that just means you aren’t who he’s addressing.
Probably not. For one thing, what is a “right” or a “wrong” utility function?
More to the point of your translation, Godin says nothing about liking your job, the particular job you have. His point is about being happy with the idea of having a job, with its various entailments: reporting to someone, taking orders, being expected to show up 5 days a week at certain hours, and so on.
His point is that we take these entailments for granted, not because they are somehow the natural order of things, or because we pondered in what social structure we would create the greater amount of value and then picked one with these characteristics; no, we take them for granted because we’ve been brought up to think that way.
I’d think of it as epistemic misfortune. Or, perhaps, if we do end up computing that this type of social contract is such that we produce the greater value, epistemic luck. But Godin’s hunch is the opposite. He thinks people create greater value in different circumstances.
I happen to agree, but I also chose the quote as an illustration of epistemic ill-luck, and for the way he uses the word “brainwashed”—he says he picked that term with consideration, and distinguishes it from training or acclimation; that’s an interesting point, if controversial. The potentially useful idea is something like “epistemic ill-luck arising from vested interests in preserving certain social structures”.
Ferriss’s book, however, isn’t just “Hey, there are alternatives to 9-5, and you ignore them because you’re brainwashed” It’s “hey, there are alternatives to 9-5, and here’s why they’re better, and here’s a step-by-step for how to do it.”
He never used the word ‘brainwashed’ but the sentence would fit in Tim’s book. The main reason that ‘brainwashed’ seems remotely controversial is that we usually use that term to refer to indoctroniation by those who are not of our culture. The other divergent connotation is that the brain must be cleaned of what is already there. The first set of beliefs about how the world should be doesn’t require cleaning the brain of pre-existing dogma before instilling itself.
It’s rather:
When your utility function doesn’t include that the activity that you spent most of your time with has meaning but your utility function rather puts it’s weights on the values of on conformity, safety or money than you must have the wrong utility function.
-- Seth Godin
What brazil84 said. Godin sounds like he’s overextrapolating from personal experience. For his claim about “it’s because you’ve been brainwashed” to work, he would need to show that people are taking circuitous routes to standard employment in preference to viable alternate means of making a living.
Yes, there are ways to make the same money with less time or “taking orders” … but they’re hard and risky to work out. If people are wrong in these assessments, it takes a heck of a lot more than just realizing, “hey, there are other ways!” You have to know one of those other ways well enough to get it to work! To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, “non-wage-slave is not an income plan”.
Furthermore, his claim is heavily penalized by it’s assertion of conspiracy: he’s saying all your teachers “needed” you to beleive this is the natural order of things, that every professor you had believed that, that all employers (not just the businesses but the hiring managers) believed that, etc. Yes, I’m aware of the history of public education (incl. Gatto’s claims about it), but Godin is going further, and saying that these people need you to believe lies.
Employers don’t look for college grads because they’re trying to enforce an oppressive system; they do it because the existence of the university degree option sorts applicants by ability in the most efficient, legal way. Teachers teach because of a combination of liking teaching and the benefits, not out of a deep-seated need to indoctrinate people into a 9-5 lifestyle.
Don’t tell me how bad it is to have a standard job; show me the viable option! Don’t assume people aren’t aware of the options; show that they’re viable!
With that said, Godin has a good point, but standard jobs are a bad example. A better one might be how people blur the concepts of “getting a steady income until dealth” and “not working” into the same term (“retirement”), when really they should think of them as distinct.
Agreed. Shorter version of Godin’s point: how many different income plans have you typically become familiar with by the time you exit the education system?
I’ve gone one better and outlined a process whereby you can generate multiple viable options. (See my reply to brazil.) Following this process, I picked a career for myself that doesn’t involve a “job”. I’ve done it once a few years back and am now doing it again.
That’s not “one better”. That’s hardly different from telling me, “Find out what you want, and pursue that.” Duh? I’m perfectly capable of doing the excercise you outlined, I’ve done it regularly, and I’m still not living off interest.
I’m sure you made the leap one time yourself; but you did it with a lot more insight and resources than you provided in your answer to brazil84.
How about this:
1) Earn $1 million as quickly as you can.
2) Live off the interest.
Anyone feel like they learned something there?
The way I would put it is that it is difficult and unnatural to be an entrepreneur, or to work under someone’s direction in a management hierarchy. An efficient economy requires both kinds of people, and it’s arguable that our current educational system overemphasizes the latter at the expense of the former. But rather than conspiracy, I think a more reasonable explanation for this is inertia: rapid technological change means we need more entrepreneurs than we used to, but the educational system hasn’t kept up.
For those wondering about viable alternatives to being a wage slave, here’s something that worked for me. About ten years ago, I took a one-year break from my regular job, and used the time to write a piece of software that I saw a market niche for. While I went back to work, I found a partner to continue its development and to sell it over the Internet. It hasn’t made me rich, but eventually I got enough income from it to to quit my job and spend most of my time working on whatever interests me.
What other kinds besides these two could we think of?
I suppose you could start a non-profit organization, but that’s just another form of entrepreneurship. You could leech off society or friends and relatives, but presumably we don’t want to encourage that. So, I don’t know… You seem to be implying here and in other comments that you have more ideas. Why not share them?
Well, if it turns out to be so hard to extend the list of “ways people make a living” beyond the two items {entrepreneur, worker under management hierarchy} that would constitute support for the “brainwashing” hypothesis (overstated as the term may seem).
When I was younger I wanted to become a novelist and make a living that way. That seems different enough from entrepreneurship; it’s one of the passive income categories. (My parents discouraged that—“you need a real job”.) Another classic one is to be a landlord. Silas mentioned investment income earlier, that could be considered a separate category. You could also consider as a different category someone whose intellectual or artistic output doesn’t generate royalties but who is supported by patronage.
To maintain that “the educational system hasn’t kept up” we would have to believe in the first place that it was at one point designed to turn out a then-optimal balance of people trained in one or another way of supporting themselves. I’m not sure we have good reason to think that.
It may not be LW material exactly, but I would be interested to read about this in an Open Thread (or see a link to a recountal).
This sounds very Foucauldian, almost straight out of Discipline and Punish.
I’m not Seth Godin, by the way.
Um. This quote from Seth Godin (from Brainwashed) just caused me to lower my regard for his ideas a notch. (Consider this a mini-oops.)
On balance, I still think he’s on to something. But the lesson here is, stick to what you truly know, and if you ever start talking with authority about something you clearly don’t understand, shut up, fast.
What do you envision as the alternative to having a job? Running your own business? Being unemployed? Being a hunter-gatherer? Living off of a trust fund? Sustenance farming? Living in your mother’s basement?
That list makes a decent starting point. My recommendation would be more along the lines of “deconstruct the notion of a job into its component options, list several alternatives to each of these options, figure out what you want, then build up from the list of preferred alternatives the kind of life you’d like to live”. One of the most important distinctions is active vs passive income. Another is taking orders, vs giving orders, vs neither. And so on.
Something in the way you’re asking suggests you might not really want answers. I’d be delighted to find out I’m wrong...
“Let them eat cake”, thy name is Morendil!
Again, the issue not whether the functions accomplished by a job can be broken down into their consitutent components. Of course they can. But Godin’s claim goes further, into saying that people are fundamentally ignorant of alternate ways to accomplish these functions.
Does he really not think that people are aware that if you have enough money, you don’t need to work to earn an income?
Also, this is another tenuous division of conceptspace:
Why is one taking orders, while another isn’t? One way or another, you usually have to do something other people want to get their money. Grocery stores are taking my orders to bring them food. Employers are only giving me orders in the sense that, “if you want this money, you will perform this act. If you don’t like that tradeoff, we can go our separate ways.”
The identification of employment as “taking orders” is hardly a natural category for it, and certainly not one people are ignorant for not making.
Upvoted with gusto.
Most work boils down to solving some problem or another. An employee solves problems within the constraints imposed by their company. An entrepreneur solves problems within the constraints imposed by their customers. The former are really just an indirect representation of the latter.
From a different angle, an employer solves a set of problems for employees—smoothing out the income stream, and doing a bunch of logistical details associated with finding work, having what’s needed to do the work, and getting paid. This is apparently so valuable that free-lancers get paid between 2 and 3 times as much per hour as employees.
This is a seductive explanation, but competing hypotheses exist, for instance Coase’s, which states that firms, as a phenomenon, arise due to the transaction costs incurred when hiring on an open market a freelancer to perform a job you need.
If there is an economic advantage to reducing these transaction costs by having the job performed “internally”, and this advantage overcomes the intrinsic costs of keeping the job internal, firms will tend to form, and grow larger as the discrepancy between these costs.
So here, rather than “employees choose to work in firms” we have an explanation of the form “firms have an interest in acquiring employees”, and no particular reason to expect that the formation of firms benefits employees.
What evidence (as opposed to just-so stories) can we find for or against each of these hypotheses?
I was offering a different angle, not saying that employment can be fully explained either by employer or employee motivations.
There are circumstances where a government forces matters in one direction or the other. In Slavery by Another Name, it’s explained that after the Civil War, there were laws requiring black people to get permission from their employers to get a job with someone else, and also vagrancy laws against being unemployed.
On the employee’s side, there can be laws (France, the Soviet Union) or customary contracts (tenure) which make it impossible or almost impossible to fire them.
In general, I’d frame it as employees and employers are hoping that the other will solve problems for them, and the hope is frequently more or less realized.
I am very surprised that you see Ronald’s explanation in contrast to Nancy’s. Income-smoothing is the only example she gives that does not look to me like a transaction cost. I think the economics party line is that the transaction costs will be split between the employee and the firm, with agnosticism about who will get the bulk of the benefit.
The following is only a sketch of the complete argument since that would take pages to write and time I don’t have.
The most basic law of economics is that prices are determined by supply and demand. An entrepreneur naturally chooses to provide goods or services to a market niche where a high potential demand faces a low supply so that he can sell his goods/services at high prices. An employee on the other hand imposes on himself a limit of one customer. He artificially limits his market and thereby reduces the price he can get for his skills. Although he can potentially quit his job and work for someone else this is associated with additional transaction costs in comparison to self employment. That the company indirectly markets the employee’s skills to a larger market does not alleviate this price reduction since it’s not the companies interest to maximize employee’s salaries.
So why would anybody choose employment over self employment? It is because most people lack the fundamental skill to market their own skills and a market of one customer is still better than zero. The important question now is why people lack this skill. That is a complex thing, but one factor is that our culture does not encourage risk taking, sales talk and other important entrepreneurial skills. There is still a strong bias of preferring a “honest worker” over a “capitalist pig” which simply prevents most people from developing their marketing skills.
And that is what is meant by the original quote. Imagination is based on culture and our culture cripples people’s potential to imagine what it would be like if they were entrepreneurs instead of workers.
Another basic law of economics is that wealth can be created by specialization.
A firm dealing exclusively in government contracts, on the other hand, imposes on itself a limit of one customer. It artificially limits its market and thereby… ?
So why would anyone hire a programmer instead of just writing the code themselves? It is because most lack the fundamental skill of crystallizing their requirements into machine-readable form. The important question now is why people lack this skill.
I fail to see your point.
I think I get it now. There seems to be a confusion about what specialization means. It means specializing in the service you provide, not in the customers you provide it to. Market segmentation is only a tool to identify how to specialize your service. But no sane company would refuse to deliver to a paying customer simply because he doesn’t fit into their target audience.
And there is a difference between computer programming and basic marketing. The former is a specific skill with a smaller area of application while the latter is a very general skill, and what is more one that stems from a basic human trait, namely the formation of relationships. Of course, not everybody needs specific marketing knowledge as taught in business administration.
Finally, I’m not arguing against working for a single employer in general. Quite the contrary. When you’re relatively new to your field of work you almost certainly lack the experience to be a successful entrepreneur and should first learn the trade under the relative security of employment. What I am arguing is, that if a huge number of people do not gain the confidence from experience to form their own idea of the service they want to provide and market it to a relevant audience something seems to be wrong, because taking responsibility for your life and forming relationships is an essential part of growing up.
Well I’m mainly trying to figure out what Seth Godin’s point is. For example, his point might be that people have been brainwashed into feeling that they need to make money to buy various things. On the other hand, his point might be that people have been brainwashed into thinking that they should have a traditional 9 to 5 job. In other words, is he Ted Kozsynski? Or Carleton Sheets?
Anyway, having done a couple web searches, I gather that he is advocating entrepreneurship.
In any event, brainwashed or not, I think a lot of people—perhaps most—are actually better off working as somebody’s employee.
The obvious place to look is the context of the quote, Seth Godin’s blog. For example:
and
and in a video interview I saw, he distinguished “the job” from “the work”. He hadn’t (he said) “done his job” for at least ten years, he did “the work”, which is the stuff you do because it fires you with passion, because you can’t not do it.
He isn’t giving detailed recipes. That’s what schools and training courses do. If you need one, that just means you aren’t who he’s addressing.
I agree. As noted earlier, I did a couple web searches and concluded that he is advocating entrepreneurship.
Seth appears to be contrasting a “job” with things like “being an entrepreneur in business for oneself,” so perhaps the first of your options.
Yes I agree.
Is that a fair translation of the point?
Probably not. For one thing, what is a “right” or a “wrong” utility function?
More to the point of your translation, Godin says nothing about liking your job, the particular job you have. His point is about being happy with the idea of having a job, with its various entailments: reporting to someone, taking orders, being expected to show up 5 days a week at certain hours, and so on.
His point is that we take these entailments for granted, not because they are somehow the natural order of things, or because we pondered in what social structure we would create the greater amount of value and then picked one with these characteristics; no, we take them for granted because we’ve been brought up to think that way.
I’d think of it as epistemic misfortune. Or, perhaps, if we do end up computing that this type of social contract is such that we produce the greater value, epistemic luck. But Godin’s hunch is the opposite. He thinks people create greater value in different circumstances.
I happen to agree, but I also chose the quote as an illustration of epistemic ill-luck, and for the way he uses the word “brainwashed”—he says he picked that term with consideration, and distinguishes it from training or acclimation; that’s an interesting point, if controversial. The potentially useful idea is something like “epistemic ill-luck arising from vested interests in preserving certain social structures”.
For a similar point of view read Timothy Ferriss: “The 4-hour work week”.
Ferriss’s book, however, isn’t just “Hey, there are alternatives to 9-5, and you ignore them because you’re brainwashed” It’s “hey, there are alternatives to 9-5, and here’s why they’re better, and here’s a step-by-step for how to do it.”
He never used the word ‘brainwashed’ but the sentence would fit in Tim’s book. The main reason that ‘brainwashed’ seems remotely controversial is that we usually use that term to refer to indoctroniation by those who are not of our culture. The other divergent connotation is that the brain must be cleaned of what is already there. The first set of beliefs about how the world should be doesn’t require cleaning the brain of pre-existing dogma before instilling itself.
It’s rather: When your utility function doesn’t include that the activity that you spent most of your time with has meaning but your utility function rather puts it’s weights on the values of on conformity, safety or money than you must have the wrong utility function.