Going Solo

A quick quote sent to me by my friend Kevin Marks. To be honest, I’m too knackered right now to read the whole article, but it looks interesting:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

Much of childhood today is spent, not in organized sports or organizations, but in ad hoc teams playing online games such as Half Life, or competing in robotics tournaments, or in constructing and decorating MySpace pages. Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

And who is going to dissuade them? Mom, who is a self-employed consultant working out of the spare bedroom? Or Dad, who is at Starbuck’s working on the spreadsheet of his new business plan?

The Next American Frontier

Quick news: the main session videos are up; help us tag the photos on Flickr; a survey has been sent out to participants (let me know if you didn’t get it) — thanks for filling it in as soon as possible; if you wrote about Going Solo and it’s not in the coverage list, let me know (e-mail or Twitter message); make sure you’ve signed up for the newsletter if you want to be sure not to miss news about the upcoming Going Solo Leeds (and elsewhere!) and the online community developments we’re planning (I’ll blog about it too, but right now I really need a nap… tiredness of these last months is really kicking in!).

Imran pointed me this morning to this article on Salon, titled What every freelancer should know, by Catherine Price. Cathering is a freelance writer, and the article is well worth the read (I could definitely take some of her advice right now).

I could never be happy in a traditional job. I hate fluorescent lights. I detest working in groups. While I can get interested in just about anything, nothing interests me enough for it to be a full-time career. Also — and, to me, this is no small thing — the smell of office carpet makes me existentially depressed.

So I became a freelancer — thus joining the growing armada of the self-employed who sit at the same cafe table every day and thrust their business cards in your face during casual conversation. For the most part, it is a satisfying existence, a life of freedom and flexibility and almost no personal connection to “the office.” Then there are days when the clock slips past noon, but I haven’t been outside, I haven’t spoken to another human being, and I start to wonder if I’m going to wake up one morning when I’m 70 and regret never having owned a pantsuit.

Read the rest while I go and swap my dressing-gown for proper clothes and have some breakfast.