Self-Employment: Ownership Is Not Freedom

4 hours ago

Self-employment is about ownership, not just freedom, encompassing risk, uncertainty, and full responsibility.
The psychological shift required for self-employment involves abandoning societal assumptions about effort, credentials, and security.
Ownership demands a long-term perspective, where progress is measured in years, not immediate rewards.
Self-employment can be lonely and unglamorous, with much of the work involving repetitive tasks and operational fixes.
Feedback in self-employment is direct and unforgiving, tied to value delivered, not intentions or effort.
Ownership cannot be delegated; it requires making decisions and absorbing consequences, highlighting the importance of structure over cleverness.
Current economic adjustments are exposing work that drifted from value creation to coordination and signaling.
Ownership offers rare rewards like alignment between effort and outcome, compounding skills, and social capital built through accountability.
The essay concludes that ownership provides clarity, not freedom, by forcing a recalibration of what progress and success mean.

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