Recommended reading
After reading my “Don’t wanna go to school” post, a friend suggested I write about how working freelance is like being home schooled.
She’s right. It is. Working solo is about doing something that interests you, learning from it and using it to create even more new experiences, ones you can hopefully make money from. Home schooling is about learning more from life experiences than from books and using those experiences to have a more fulfilling life. The comparison is so good, I wanted to steal it and take sole credit. Unfortunately, someone beat us to it.
In Free Agent Nation, author Daniel Pink explores the world of solo workers, those who abandon the corporate ladder in favor of working independently. (I never liked climbing anyway. Bad for the knees.) It’s a good book, one that makes you think differently about education, employment and what it means to make a living.
A free agent, according to Pink, thinks about life as one long learning process. So, in much the same way that traditional schooling prepares us for life as a corporate drone, home schooling breeds an entrepreneurial mindset by encouraging students to pursue those subjects that interest them most. It’s no wonder that home schooling has moved from the hippie-freak fringes a couple decades ago to being almost mainstream.
Education is changing in other ways, too, Pink says. Aside from specialized professions like doctors and lawyers, many jobs don’t even require a college degree, despite conventional wisdom. There are other ways to learn the ins and outs of a job, like online training and the original on-the-job training program, apprenticeship.
Like I said, a different way of looking at things. Free Agent Nation gets the Uncle Ron Seal of Approval.
