This week Twitter announced that it was going to enable monetization through “super followers” on its platform. It appears to be taking some of the features of Substack, Patreon, and others and bringing them within the Twitter umbrella.

Here’s a preview of the screenshot they teased:

I’m both worried and intrigued.

Worried because the potential to make a ton of money is going to attract all kinds of people who are not invested in the health of this new emerging ecosystem.

I’m also intrigued because many of the people that do seem to already be succeeding in this world do seem to care deeply about how they engage with the people closest to them.

However it seems as though all of these new opportunities risk blinding people as they get drunk on potential monetization opportunities.

This is a natural result of the narrative around the creator economy which mostly focuses on how to make money, how to scale, how to build audiences and how to invest in the space.

This is all great but to me its a little too much economy, not enough creator.

A lot of the creators I look up to seem to know a deeper secret. That the goal is not to monetize but to find the things they want to do and then build a life around continuing to do those things. If monetization helps with the life design, then its worth doing.

All this is to say that almost no one is talking about the soul of the creator economy.

If the creator economy is to last and offer a meaningful path for people to do the creative work they want to be doing it will have to offer a different environment than the current culture of work. It will have to be about more than enabling high-paid Big Tech employees to quit their jobs and make even more than when they were employed.

For the creator economy to be something more than creating a new uber-elite of rich independent creatives, it needs to ground itself in a culture of creativity, generosity, and mentorship. It will require current creators (including myself) to contemplate important questions:

• Are we going to reward people based on their existing social capital and connections or actively search for people creating things in interesting ways?
• Are we going to optimize over making the most money as possible or are we going to use money to fuel a long-term creative journey?
• Are we going to scale our own operations infinitely or hit pause along the way to bring others along with us, regardless of their background?
• How can we gift money to other creators without expecting a “return on investment”?

Unless people start getting serious about developing a different kind of culture that goes beyond the default competitiveness and more is better ethic of the rest of the working world the creator economy risks becoming seen as a money grab for the credentialed elite.

I want to highlight two major risks. First the risk of thinking that the solo creator employment identity is one that will universally be seen as something noble, and two, the risk of people tearing each other apart from within the creator economy. I want to explore these issues and also brainstorm what we might do about it. I hope you see this as the start of an ongoing conversation and can add to it and help me move it forward.

First a quick rehash of how I became an accidental creator making money from selling things online over the past five years.

My Journey To Accidental Creator

I had been writing publicly since I started a business school blog in 2010 and before that had always messed around with blogging. I had even made some friends through my writing. It was pretty cool. Yet when I quit my job in 2017 writing never seemed more than something I might use to land potential leads for consulting work. After six months of consulting I earned enough to cover a year’s worth of expenses so I decided to hit pause. If I was more aware of the creative energy inside of me I could have predicted what happened next but I didn’t. Without anything to work on I launched a blog, podcast, and a bunch of other small experiments. I had no intention to monetize any of it. I didn’t think it was even possible.

In the summer of 2018 I ran my first cohort-based course experiment in inspired by Seth Godin’s altMBA. “Solopreneur shift” brought together two things I loved, learning and connection. I loved it and mostly did it because I thought it might help with my long-term goal of potentially teaching at a University. I never thought doing online courses directly could be an aim in itself.

In November 2018 after moving to Taiwan I decided to spend some of my free time (read: I couldn’t find any freelance work) building a strategy consulting skills course. My desire to build this was based on the reactions from several people I had shared a mini workshop version with over the past year: “Wow you need to share this.” So I built it….and they didn’t come. I sold five copies in four months netting about $389. Online learning was a fun hobby where I could create stuff to give away to friends that I would fund through paid work.

When I was in Bali in January 2019 two friends changed my perspective. Jonny Miller told me about Tiago Forte and his STEVEs framework and Jay Dike told me I didn’t know a damn thing about online marketing (he was right).

Tiago’s framework was that the future of online education was going to be made up of Short, Tiny, Exclusive, Virtual Experiences (though he seems to have replaced tiny with massive). This shifted my mindset away from bringing traditional education online and instead creating something completely different.

In 2019 it still seemed early. Tiago and others had bold ambition but were still pricing courses at around $400 and that was after several years of hard work. The paths for outsiders to quickly opt-in to a “creator economy” were not fully legible.

This changed towards the end of 2019 when Li Jin published her article on the Passion Economy. She started:

The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month

This article spread like wildfire through the hustle-centric investor and tech crowds. Immediately I noticed people reaching out to me, especially full-time employees, who were asking for advice for how to leave their BigTech jobs and make a living creating stuff online. After making $16k online in 2019 I told them I had no idea.

In 2020 the internet changed because work changed but even in January before the pandemic it seemed that the creator economy was happening. In January my StrategyU YouTube subscribers exploded from 500 to thousands and I began monetizing my channel. I don’t care about being rich but I have a hard time ignoring money that seems to just show up just like anyone else.

All of these trends were supercharged with the stay-at-home orders and many seemed to use their savings to take online courses. My sales tripled in April and they stayed there for the rest of the year.

For the last year I’ve been making a living from the creator economy. Wild.

In January of 2019 I made money online from five sources with the highest being $60 from Amazon affiliate links. In January of 2021 I made money from 11 online sources, including eight of them over $50 (Gumroad, Teachable, Patreon, Substack, Teachable, Stripe, YouTube, Medium).

The Creator Economy Is Great But Problems Have Emerged

I am optimistic about the internet and its power to let people create. I am the one saying we need 100x more creators. I am a believer in what Erich Fromm said about creativity, that it was a way to find a connection with the world and something bigger than yourself and that this might be a path out to meaning and even love.

The way I think about the potential of creating online starts with two beliefs:

1. Everyone has an urge to create but a lot of this is hidden because most of our economy still depends on people knowing how to follow rules, maintain order and control others.
2. The power to create and share online is essentially free and there are no gatekeepers on a majority of the internet. Most people have not adapted to this and people that have made money in traditional ways with the right credential won’t be comfortable with it for a long time. This will be laughable by the time Gen Z is their prime working years

The desire to create and share things has existed as long as humans have existed but in the past five years the technological hurdles and friction to create online have slowly eroded.

With the proliferation of people coming online and experimenting in new ways to make money online I have seen two things that could potentially undermine the acceptance of the creator economy as a positive type of employment.

Problem #1: Being a solo creator does not yet come with the positive halo effect that full-time employment offers. This means the creator economy needs to position itself as a better alternative to traditional employment in order to thrive

As more people have come to the internet to make money it has attracted bad actors who put their stink on anyone trying to sell online. Spend some time on Instagram and YouTube and you will likely be hit with a video ad from a hustlepreneur promising to show you how to make $100k from the beach.

Besides the fact that reasonable people don’t work from beaches, this leads to a negative halo around the whole ecosystem. It’s also why it feels smart for the full-time employee making a good salary to deride almost anyone making a living by selling things online.

Where does this sentiment come from?

Full-time employment is righteous and noble. This is just the way it is, for now. Work a full-time job, even at a place like Wells Fargo where defrauding customers seems to be part of the strategy, and most people will see you as a good, upstanding citizen.

This is not the same with being a digital creator. What do you mean you sell things online? You don’t have to work every day? What are you talking about?

I think part of this discomfort comes from the relative lack of constraints compared to normal jobs. In a normal job your compensation, hours and schedule are constrained. For the self-employed creator you can work 10 hours or you can work 90. You can try to earn $10k or you can shoot for $1 million.

This is amplified by making the private motivations of people public. The greedy and ambitious creator cannot negotiate their bonus in private and instead must share prices publicly and share their vision to an audience.

There are likely many more manipulative, aggressive, and psychopaths among the ranks of respectable companies than people who are trying to make money in the creator economy. However a few bad apples will hurt the creator ecosystem much worse than Jeff Skilling ever hurt the reputations of corporate executives.

Problem #2: The “wrong reasons” trap threatens to poison trust within the creator ecosystem and turn it into another type of employment we hope to escape

As people have started to make real money in the creator economy I have seen some competitiveness, driven by envy and jealousy, creep into the culture. If the creator economy is going to thrive it will be because people both hold each other accountable and support each other.

This is one of the best defenses against distrust from the outside. If we can build a culture centered around support and creativity, it will help to shift the narrative of the good kinds of work worth pursuing in society. Envy and jealous are normal human impulses but are likely just going to undermine your own energy. Helping ten people get started creating or mentoring others is a better use of time than dunking on bad actors.

This needs to be a vital part of the culture of the creator ecosystem. Without it, it will just devolve into the competitiveness and tribal politics that many of us sought to escape when we went indie in the first place.

I’ve seen many offhand comments in private discussions of other’s bad motivations. This is simply the Bachelor “in it for the wrong reasons” fallacy. Everyone assumes they are in it for the right reasons and others are all in it for the wrong reasons.

The reality is that humans are complex and that we are all pursuing various things for a mix of motivations. What separates people is often not their motivations but their ability to disguise their most aggressive and socially unacceptable motivations. I used to consult to c-suite executives, masters at hiding their desires for power and wealth.

To pretend you are not trying to make money is disingenuous but to assume others are only in it for the money or some other less acceptable aim ignores the reality of how most people are wired.

Five Ideas For A Healthy Creator Economy

The early stages of the creator economy have been amazing for people that have been creating online for many years. You have people that have been writing online for ten years that are now able to fund for their writing via an enthusiastic and supportive audience. You have others who have valuable knowledge to share that don’t need to have their dreams shattered by a five-year PhD process before being able to develop their own courses. You have others building interest-based communities that might be better than the network effects of a grad school at only $5 or $10 a month.

I want this ecosystem to thrive and I want it to become an acceptable way to make money while living a respectable life. We live in societies where there is broad political consensus around full-time jobs as the main way to distribute wealth to people. I think tremendous harm is done by this current arrangement mostly because the current labor economy only seems to still work for highly-educated knowledge workers. If we are just trying to save ourselves from moving from high-paid corporate jobs to high-paid creator jobs we are missing the point.

I don’t have a Marshall plan for creators (that’s completely the wrong idea) but I do have some ideas for how we should think about the health of the ecosystem

1. More creation: The path to getting rid of bad actors is not to spend time trying to chase them out of the ecosystem but to encourage more positive voices. This includes all people. Teach your aunt how to self-publish the book they always wanted to write. Show your uncle that he can learn how to play an instrument on YouTube. Teach your kids how to launch a podcast to explore their curiosity. Reminder: isn’t about making money. The key is to make it about showing people how easy it is to create. My bolder call for creation can be found in my call for 100x more creators
2. Develop principles: Develop your own set of principles and criteria for how you think about making money and how you decide which platforms to engage in. Don’t just chase every new way to make money because its the latest hot thing. Try to figure out what you are trying to create and cultivate beyond making money for the sake of it. Most people will burn out if they don’t have these deeper principles anyway.
3. Charity principle: Don’t fall into the “wrong reasons” trap. Default to the charity principle when seeing other creators and fight the urge to dunk on others creating or sharing in public. Most people have healthy motivations but may need coaching or a friend rather than discouragement.
4. Find others to help as early as possible: Avoid the mistake of thinking you’ll help people once you’ve “made it.” The easiest people to help are the ones right behind you on your path. This ecosystem will thrive if prestige is earned through mentorship rather than money-making.
5. Embrace “gift economy” approaches: Money is great but you know what is better? Meeting people who are not able to afford expensive things online but will blow you away with their curiosity and determination to learn. Here is how I’ve integrated a gift economy approach into my course. Please steal and copy.
6. Experiment beyond default economics: There is a large push by silicon valley to invest in the creator ecosystem through traditional venture capital and also framing the conversation around thinking about creators as businesses. ISA’s sound great but we know there is something icky about it all. These default models of investment optimize for unlimited growth and they will crush souls to create profits if they have to.We need to make the hard decisions to say no to shiny offers of money and take the slower but more interesting path of cooperatives, one-off apprenticeships, fellowships, and models that haven’t been invented yet.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post The Battle For The Soul Of The Creator Economy appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

However, in this article, Thompson still seems stuck in a systemic view of work and the symptoms of that system. By doing this, he fails to address the fundamental question of how to build a life around work. Perhaps his inability to get there comes from his own internal struggle:

This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.

As someone who has spent the last two years of my life trying to solve this seemingly impossible puzzle and writing about it through the eyes of others, I know there are many ways to “hack a living” as the practical philosopher Andrew Taggart would put it.  Taggart has written one of the most powerful assessments of this crisis in his book “The Good Life and Sustaining Life: An Inquiry Into Our Great Vexation” where I believe he correctly frames the challenge:

There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life.

As he identifies in his inquiry, “One cannot deny that the question of the good life must come before that of sustaining life.”

This is Aristotle’s good life, not the Kardashian good life.  

If we look at Thompson’s essay through this lens we start to see the problem. Many of the workers he details have the Kardashian good life, or at least the modern professional equivalent. They have solved many of the problems of sustaining life and but lack their own deeper definition of the Aristotelian good life.  It is choosing pour over coffee and luxurious vacations rather than the ability to do whatever you want on a Tuesday.

Anne Helen Peters actually gets closer to a possible question towards the end of her “Millennial Burnout” essay, which Thompson references, but never takes us any further.

It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work.

Thompson and Petersen’s articles were shared like crazy, but they never offered any ideas about what to do next.  

Our social media environment incentivizes this. It’s much safer to share something that shows vulnerability and gets a “me too!” reaction than something that might challenge the status quo.

I’ve read articles slamming co-living communities for being utopian, privileged, escapist and out of touch paradises. So last year when I went to visit one of these communities, I was shocked to find people from all over the world who were craving (and achieving) a deeper connection to others and aspiring to build a life-less centered around work.

This attitude of “well what the hell can we do?” most powerfully came through in a recent New York Times “work sucks” piece appropriately titled “America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable” which shares stories of people making gobs of money, but left utterly miserable. Even people who see a potential short-term solution seem utterly unwilling to do anything about it:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life,” he told me. “When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless.” He recognized the incredible privilege of his pay and status, but his anguish seemed genuine. “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t matter what your paycheck says,” he told me. There’s no magic salary at which a bad job becomes good. He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible. “My wife laughed when I told her about it,” he said.

Symptoms and stories but no deeper questions.

Based on the number of people that forwarded me these articles, they are still worthwhile.  They are hitting a nerve. The pain is real and people are not sure what to do.

However, they are missing the countless people across the world (and from all countries) who are reinventing their lives and living in new ways. I’d love to see more articles exploring and highlighting two things:

1. Stories of the countless people who are experimenting with new ways of living
2. What it takes to actually transform and reinvent yourself throughout different life stages

What can we learn from people that have carved their own paths?

Over the past two years, I’ve highlighted the stories of many unconventional humans:

• Jen Morilla traveled the world until she figured out a new career for herself;  
• Lydia Lee relocating to Bali to live a more balanced life;
• Jacqueline Jensen took a sabbatical to figure out if work should, in fact, be the center of her life;
• Candace Moore accidentally building a business by generously making yoga YouTube videos to help people across the globe;
• Chris Donohoe built his own consulting firm around a 40-day workweek and bringing his full self to the world every day;
• Andrew Taggart helping entrepreneurs with the “good life question” and operating in the gift economy;
• Laura Gallaher joining Remote Year with her co-worker and employee to shift her business from an in-person one to a digital one
• Ervin Ling quitting his job at 30 to work 15 hours a week as an English teacher;
• Bryan Victor skipped the traditional path of the university in Singapore to learn through life experiments.
• Khe Hy leaving Wall Street to be a sensemaker for the miserable elite
• Christine Bader “learning to quit” rather than missing out on seeing her children grow up because of work

Experimentation is not limited to personal transformation either.  Wade Foster finds that defaulting to a remote team at Zapier has helped his team live better lives.  Tash Walker thought “flextime” was BS and implemented a real 4-day workweek for her firm in London without compromising profits. Tyler Tringas investing in founders who want to build “calm companies.”

At the center of these stories is an uncomfortable truth.  One has to leave the traditional full-time paradigm to build a more reasonable life that makes sense.  

It’s just hard to dodge the judgment and guilt that comes from “stepping back” in the traditional full-time work context. This is why so many of these people I’ve talked to have left and carved their own paths.

If you’re willing to compromise on traditional metrics of success in the short term, you mine as well do it on your own terms.

How Does Change Actually Happen?

Stories of reinvention are great, but they are not sufficient. Most people can find enough difference with another person to explain away that person’s success. “Oh they could do that because they worked at X” or “sure they probably had a ton of savings.” The reason people do this is not because they don’t think they are capable, but because change is not fun and its quite hard. I think this is why it is important to demystify the process a bit. Here are three “steps” I have seen in many people’s journeys:

STEP 1 – A Crisis?: For many, there is a crisis or major life event.  This can be a health issue, a loss of a loved one, a job loss or even a positive event like getting married, having a baby or moving to a new city.

For me, dealing with a health crisis in my late twenties and taking several months leave from work forced me to come face to face the fact that I was too deeply tied to my identity as a “successful” worker.

Yet these crises rarely lead directly to a dramatic leap despite our belief in that narrative. A crisis often shatters our beliefs and then gradually as we start to pick up the pieces, the possibility of change appears as a result of profound conversations, books or other life events that linger in the brain until the person is ready to start taking action.

For Lydia Lee, she found herself literally and figuratively burned out in a Russian hotel room, but did not start to imagine a different way of life until she had a profound conversation on a boat visiting her home country of Malaysia with a German who was running a business remotely.  This piqued her interest and planted the seeds for her to start to think about her work and life in a new way.  When she returned to Canada, she re-visited Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week with new eyes and started to apply some of the lessons to how she might work with more freedom.

STEP 2 – Friends: The next thing that seems to matter is that you need at least one or two friends that will support the new way of being.  This appears to help people get “permission” to move forward and have someone to confide in when they are uncomfortable or find themselves a bit lost. These people are typically friends or family that have lived life in an “unusual” way and see some value in experimenting or compromising on short term success.

Candace Moore, who now is an author and yoga entrepreneur, she has support and inspiration from her mother, who was always a natural entrepreneur starting businesses in her home and adapting to her circumstances. Tony Triumph didn’t realize his family was any different until later in life, but reflected that he grew up around people that were always working in different ways to make a living.

One thing I have my coaching clients do is find someone online they can have a “path perspective” conversation with. Whatever you feel pulled towards, there is probably doing something like that already. I have them send a short note asking for advice and see if they’d be willing to offer 15-30 minutes of their time to share insights on what to avoid, what to think about and how to be prepared. People are often surprised at how willing people are to help others that want to follow in their footsteps.

STEP 3 – ASPIRE: Finally, the person needs to have a long-term vision of who they want to become.

People often arrive at this point after first questioning something they have taken for granted, like how they think about “success” and have it be a gateway to a deeper contemplation of who they really might want to be.

Then it comes down to actually shifting energy towards those new possibilities. As much as life hacks and “how-to” guides would want us to believe that change is a straight line and can be planned, the philosopher Agnes Callard gives us a different model. She believes that when we aspire to be a different person, we often have a hard time explaining our motives.

This is often the case in people I talk to. They may not have a clear vision of a future self, but they are open to experimenting in new ways. Callard might say that these people have a vague sense of “something better” in the future but have trouble articulating it. Instead, transformation is a process of “trying on values”

we “aspire” to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess

This is also why from the outside it is so hard to differentiate the money-driven entrepreneur from the self-employed person trying to hack a life. The people I know who are most fulfilled carving a different path are also the ones that have no idea how to explain what they are doing to anyone.

But deep down, they have a pull towards a journey or a life that tells they, “yes this is the right way.”

The “Work Sucks” Perspective Is Still Valuable

A close friend e-mailed me Thompson’s article and said “this is me.” He probably sent it to me because we’ve talked countless times over the past few years about this persons predicament. We walso talked about his unwillingness to do anything about it.

Thompson has added tremendous depth to the discussion around work. He has been ahead of the curve in questioning why we are working so much despite becoming so much more productive in his amazing essay A World Without Work. 

However, I’d love to see the Atlantic, Buzzfeed, New York Times and others do a better job of highlighting the stories of amazing people globally already starting the hard work of reinventing themselves and looking beyond the traditional path that works remarkably well for some, but leaves many hoping for a deeper connection to life.

Want to take action? Paul is launching Reimagine Work a digital online learning x coaching x experiment that will deliver activities, community and connection to people that want to carve a new path. Explore now.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Beyond Work Sucks: What To Actually Do If You Are Miserable appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The early positive impact of the emergence of two-sided talent platforms on freelancers has started to slowly erode due to three trends:

1. The “atomization” of the talent platform staffing process from one managed by highly skilled ex-consultants to one mostly outsourced directly to the freelancer
2. The proliferation of new talent platforms due to the zero marginal cost economics of a talent platform
3. The incentives of VC-backed talent platforms which prioritizes firm-level growth while ignoring the health of the overall ecosystem

I am going to walk through what I’ve seen as a former employee of a talent platform and now as a freelancer in the strategy consulting space. But first, let us jump back in time to the early 2000s.

Free Agent Nation Emerges

In the early 2000’s Dan Pink, after quitting his job at the White House, explored the trend of workers who left the default path and worked remotely, digitally or nomadically. 

He shared an anecdote from Bo Rinaldi, who was the head of a talent search firm, who shares unbridled optimism that was typical of the time:

“I believe in a talent-driven model,” he says. He has in mind something like the film industry. “In a temp agency, you test ’em and roll ’em out. In my model, everyone is a star.” The new realities of computers and networking make several of the old structures obsolete. “In the new metaphor of work, the loyalty factor is still very high. In the new metaphor of work, you have a smaller-team model and a greater sense of loyalty to the team than to this artifact known as a company. Companies do not exist. Countries do not exist. Boundaries are an illusion. But the team exists,” Rinaldi says. “The loyalty is also to you. This is the summer of love revisited, man!”

While these predictions may have not been fully realized (yet), they did describe an increase in opportunities for people bold enough to leave the default path.

Issue #1: Talent platforms have “atomized” the talent staffing process and outsourced much of the work to an unpaid freelancer labor force

The Talent Platforms 1.0 Companies Emerge

Around the year 2000, the original consulting talent platforms started to emerge. These companies, Talent Platform 1.0 Companies, offered projects to freelancers and in return asked for very little. If you were part of their vetted pool of talent and the right fit, just show up and start working.

These firms — a-connect, BTG, and Eden McCallum — were game changers for the few mavens that were already working independently and while these early consultants typically already had their own client base, were more than happy to trade off some of their earnings (or in some cases not at all because of a higher billing rate through the platform) for the work the firm did in helping source, vet and scope the projects. These firms helped solve a fundamental talent access and matching problem in an age where LinkedIn and Social Media didn’t exist yet.

These early talent platforms were “closed” platforms meaning that clients did not have visibility into the talent pool and the talent pool could not see the projects in progress or in the pipeline.

These firms were very hands-on, spending time building client relationships, sourcing and validating projects and scoping them so they were ready to go when the consultant was staffed. These firms employed highly-skilled ex-consultants and talent executives that understood how to staff projects and execute on complex consulting engagements. Both the clients and consultants were happy to let these firms capture 30–40% margins for all of this value that they offered.

The internal process was labor-intensive and depended on highly customized relationships with each client. These original platforms all explored opportunities for efficiency through having freelancers write their own proposals or debating easier ways for clients to submit projects, but they never really fit with the underlying business model.

After business school, intrigued by the emerging gig economy, I worked for a-connect. Growing up a digital native, I was shocked that they were not more aggressively “opening up” their platform to embrace a two-sided platform approach, enabling clients to submit projects directly and enabling the talent pool to bid for projects directly through a technology platform. 

I realize now, this kind of shift would have undermined the goals of the firms, whose success was dependent on building long-term relationships with clients and offering a world-class talent experience during projects.

Transparency! Talent Platform 2.0 Companies Show Up To The Party

While there had been some platforms that had embraced the two-sided approach from the beginning (freelancer.com, ODesk, Upwork etc..) none had emerged in the strategy consulting space until around 2012 when MBA & Company (now Talmix) and then Hourly Nerd (now Catalant) stepped onto the scene.

This was a big shift and now I realize why the initial talent platforms could not make the shift so easily.

This shift was not simply increasing the visibility of projects and letting freelancers directly compete for projects. It was a shift from the structure of the talent platform as a hands-on talent agency to a hands-off technology company.

It meant a major difference in the types of employees these new talent platforms hired. Instead of experienced ex-strategy consultants who could help scope and manage complex projects, these new firms depended on people that had some understanding of talent and a deeper understanding of how to use technology.

As two-sided talent platforms evolved, the customized talent approach was thrown out the window in favor of building a process that would make it as easy as possible for clients to post projects and for freelancers to bid on those projects.

What this meant most literally, was that freelancers and clients took a much more active role in the matching process, communicating directly on the firm’s talent platform. 

This was a shift from a talent-agency model to a technology company, a shift happening in most industries today. While one of the barriers to entry for a talent platform 1.0 was the availability of high-quality talent within the firm, the barrier to entry for a talent platform 2.0 company is only the technology, which operates on close to zero-marginal-cost economics.

Issue #2: The lack of a “winner take all” platform means every additional platform created more work for the freelancer

In a market with few players, network effects start to take over and result in a winner-take-all zero-to-one dominant player. For example, LinkedIn is the resume for any modern business worker. Instagram is the place for sharing photos. Google is beyond dominant in search, it is the verb used for searching. 

However, no winner has emerged in the consulting talent platform space and this is bad for everyone. As Peter Thiel offers in Zero to One:

“Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.”

I can’t even keep track of how many talent platforms have e-mailed me a link asking me to sign up for their network. Here are 25 platforms that I have engaged with on some level:

Eden McCallum, GLG Strategic Projects, UpWork, Catalant, TalMix, PeoplePerHour, 10eqs, Business Talent Group, genioo, High Point Associates, a-connect, ex-consultants agency, expert360, mindbench, Consultants 500, localsolo, Sparehire, flexy, PwC talent exchange, comatch, Barton Partnership, LinkedIn ProFinder, Deloitte Open Talent Network, BBEcosystem, expertPowerhouse

Just last week I even received an e-mail from one of the Talent Platform 1.0 companies, Business Talent Group, announcing that they were opening up their platform:

While the emergence of the first few platforms was incredible for the early freelancers 

The high number of platforms leads to a few problems:

1. First, there is no incentive for the freelancer or client to use any platform over another. Harvard professors Feng Zhu and Macro Iansiti call this “multi-homing” which occurs when “users or service providers (network “nodes”) form ties with multiple platforms (or “hubs”) at the same time.”
2. Clients are incentivized to post any project, no matter how likely they are to pursue that project. Clients can access experts and freelancers and get “free” consulting through initial pitches and conversations without the need to start an actual project
3. A large amount of unpaid “busy work” for freelancers who wish to be in good standing and aware of the new projects appearing on the platforms. This work increases with the proliferation of platforms.

As a talent platform 1.0 freelancer, you didn’t have to worry about being a member of multiple platforms. This was due to the fact that the platform only approached consultants when the project was “real” and the fact that we could only ask freelancers to help us pitch to a client so many times without actually enabling them to win a project before losing their trust.

Instead of the recruiters validating projects, I now perform that work, trying to make sense of the 5–10 automated e-mails I received per week notifying me of new projects. Occasionally I receive a personalized e-mail, but most of the time I receive standardized e-mails that rarely vary and in fact, tend to be similar across firms. See if you can tell these apart:

Even if the project seems like a good fit, you realize quickly that many of the projects fail to leave the initial aspirations of the client inputting the project into the system. In other cases, you may “pitch” and never hear back or just be rejected without explanation. Over the past couple of years, I’ve “pitched” about 250 projects for 10+ different talent platforms and have actually worked on 6–7 projects totally less than $20,000 in gross fees.

As the crowd of freelancers increase, the focus of freelancer shifts to figuring out how to “hack” the platform so you can get projects. When I was first started to freelance, another freelance friend encouraged me:

underbid on projects just to get the positive reviews so you get recommended for more projects.

As the number of talent platforms increase, the value to the average freelancer on these platforms decreases. This is shown in the following chart, where I highlight the “Freelancer Value Ratio” which is my rough approximation for the chances of winning any project divided by the amount of work that freelancer does across all platforms.

I spent a couple of hours combing through UpWork’s IPO filing and financial reports to see if I could confirm this hypothesis. Trends on average freelancer earnings or distribution were noticeably missing from all of the reports. The closest I could come was assessing their trailing 12 months data from their filing:

• # of freelancers doing projects: 375,000
• # of projects: 2 million
• Overall Project Fees: $1.56B
• Average freelancer earnings (before UpWork fees): $4,160
• Average project fee: $780 per project

The mature state for a “successful” talent platform is still an overall talent ecosystem which generates more revenue and has many more projects than before but is a worse scenario for the average freelancer due to the amount of increased work due to the increase in platforms and the competition from the increased talent supply.

Issue #3: VC incentives undermine the health of the overall ecosystem

The talent platform ecosystem has been heavily influenced by the venture funding model of the talent platform 2.0 companies. Even Business Talent Group has taken funding to try to reinvent itself as a 2.0 company.

I’ve already shared how the entrance of these new types of firms increased the number of projects available at first and how that benefit tends to disappear with the emergence of more platforms and freelancers. So the benefits to the average freelancer decrease over time. 

If we look at the motivators of the individual freelancer and the incentives of a VC-backed platform, we also see a big difference in what each cares about:

The platform is motivated to grow the firm and develop strong relationships with as many clients as possible. They are aligned with clients over the long term, but not with the individual freelancer. As long as there are enough people that can do the projects, there is no incentive for the platform to care about the success of any individual freelancer.

This alignment is clear if we look at Upwork’s S-1, the filing from the largest talent platform’s IPO last year. It’s first two points in its strategy are “Increase Spend from Existing Clients” and “Attract New Clients Through Marketing Efforts.” 

The only mention of freelancers in the strategy is its goal to “Remain a Preferred Platform for Freelancers” with an action to “continue to invest in new products and features to help freelancers grow their businesses by finding more work and increasing their earnings.”

Thee typical freelancer wants to earn more but is not motivated to make the platform as much money as possible. Most self-employed types are motivated by designing a life that gives them flexibility, the stability of income and community & connection. 

While some people working at the platform may take interest in these motivations, the survival of the platform is dependent on meeting the goals of the client, not the freelancer. If the number of freelancers was fixed, this would be a trade-off worth making.

Based on these incentives, the behavior of people working within the talent platform is always going to shift towards pleasing the client and investor.

It would not be reasonable to expect a VC-backed talent platform to prioritize relationships with freelancers, focus on building a work-class talent experience or sharing in the upside with the freelancers. Nor would the freelancer want this (at least in the short-term).

If they don’t keep growing, keep winning clients and scaling, the platform will die. 

However, given the short-term behavior of the firm and the lack of strong relationships with the firm, the incentive of the freelancer is to explore all possible ways to meet their goals without having to use any platforms.

Feng Zhu and Grace Gu found exactly this behavior, often referred to as “disintermediation,” when they studied a talent platform:

One of us, Feng, and Grace Gu, a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, saw this effect in a study of an online freelance marketplace. As the platform improved its reputation-rating system, trust between clients and freelancers grew stronger, and disintermediation became more frequent, offsetting the revenue gains from better matching.

On several projects I’ve pitched for freelance platforms, I make the initial pitch via the platform, have a call with the client to scope the project and then send a proposal and contract I write myself. 

It is easy to think “I do all the work, so why am I giving 20% of all my fees, for the length of the project, to this platform?”

Part of this neglect may be because the gig economy is not that big compared to the enormous opportunity within companies.

Catalant has already explicitly made this shift towards helping clients leverage their internal talent more efficiently rather than leveraging external experts. Their founder Rob Biederman shares:

Initially, Pat and I saw the opportunity to make external experts available with senior-level experience available to our clientele. The combination of the right experience and a fair price point was attractive to a wide range of companies, particularly smaller companies. But, as the company evolved, we’ve seen the potential to make great talent — both internal and external — more accessible and more efficient through new technologies.

Perhaps the freelancer is the ultimate sucker, hoping that these talent platforms will magically morph to align with their motivations for being self-employed.

As long as full-time employment is the default option for knowledge work and new VC-backed platforms continue to enter this space, it may never be a thriving ecosystem for freelancers.

Three Ideas For The Next Evolution Of Talent Platforms

As a freelancer, I want these talent platforms to succeed. The introduction of firms like Catalant and TalMix have been a net positive in my life. However, as the number of firms has proliferated, I can’t keep track of the number of requests to fill out profiles on new platforms or e-mails sending my projects of doubtful reality.

#1 Focus on Niche Talent Pools & Problems

Gigster and Toptal are two companies that have kept ownership of some of the talent staffing process and been very focused on specific segments of talents and types of projects. Both companies are highly selective for the types of people they allow on their platform. Gigster claims to only accept the “ the top 1% of the software engineering labor pool” and TopTal claims to hire the “Hire the Top 3% of Freelance Talent.”

In addition, they are very focused on the types of projects and talent pools they operate. As seen below, Gigster has mostly focused on technology talent and has grouped its “solutions” across six specific types of problems that companies typically solve:

By limiting the talent pool to a specific type of talent and focusing on a specific number of projects, the company learns what works, helps to scope more complex and higher-priced projects and develops relationships with a very specific talent population. 

TopTal focuses even more explicitly on specific talent archetypes:

These firms are making clear operating decisions. By being highly selective on the types of talent and retaining control over more of the talent process (rather than outsourcing it to the freelancer), they are able to charge premium fixed fees to clients ($100k — $1 million) and pay their freelancers incredibly well, sometimes up to $300 an hour.

Some firms have attempted to copy this, allowing consultants to “advertise” their own services. For example, I have several services listed on my Catalant platform:

In their research of what enables platforms to thrive Professors Marco Iansiti and Feng Zhu find:

“ Lasting competitive advantage hinges more on the interplay between the platform and the network it orchestrates and less on internal, firm-level factors”

Is this is true, how have Gigster and Toptal created enormous value? I believe it is because when you have many individual freelancers making decisions on how to pitch projects, they are likely optimizing around their life principles rather than the overall health of the platform.

By “owning” more of the talent process, Gigster and Toptal are likely reliant on a different internal talent profile than the talent 2.0 companies. Instead of having technology adept salespeople, Gigster and Toptal need people who know how to manage complex projects and scope them with high-value clients.

In the strategy consulting space, only firm that has made an attempt to launch a productized offering is Innosight X, which recently launched.

They have tried to package their services around specific projects with specific timeframes and deliverables.

By focusing on productized offerings, the platform will be able to learn from its projects and continuously improve its current offerings while adding new ones and not compromising on pricing.

The key shift that is enabling a company like Gigster to be valued at close to $1 billion is that they have decided not to outsource all aspects of the consulting process to the freelancer and consultant. They are taking advantage of the innovations of talent platform 2.0 companies with the personal touch of the talent platform 1.0 companies.

These are the types of platforms that freelancers will want to work with.

Note: Some People have mentioned to me that TopTal and Gigster are not as great as I’ve made them out to be. Regardless, I think their business models are worth highlighting as a counter-narrative to the outsource all tasks approach typical of the talent platform 2.0 companies.

#2 Find ways to create a “virtuous cycle” with freelancers

Many freelancers are used to offering help to others without expecting anything in return. However, most are sensitive to organizations which don’t operate from a principle of generosity. 

Given that I’ve written quite a bit about talent platforms, I’ve had several talent platforms reach out to me and have conversations with their leadership team about what they can do better for talent. It seems that many explore the idea, but never really take any action. The ideas I’ve offered include:

• Make it easy for freelancers to refer project and share in the commission
• Open up office space or help solve “life design” problems for the freelancer
• Build customized product offerings around a limited set of freelancers 
• Consider having a paid tier of access for projects for freelancers where the talent platforms are more hands-on in vetting, scoping & staffing projects

An easy “quick win” for talent platforms is to figure out reduce the number of projects that never turn into anything. The talent platform 2.0 companies rely on the unpaid labor of freelance consultants to screen projects and submit pitches. The incentives of the platform are to get clients to post as many projects to the platform as possible, as there is no labor cost to the unpaid freelancers submitting pitch after pitch for projects that may not exist. At a minimum, the platform could show information on what projects actually get staffed. As long as another freelancer gets the work, I’d still be pretty pumped. But how many of my project pitches disappears into the gig economy black hole of never started projects? 

There are many other things the talent platforms could do, but they all fall under the category of things that would help the freelancers lives while also building more brand loyalty and trust with the platform. How do you build a platform that is able to meet its goals while also creating a community freelancers want to be part of.

It is my hypothesis that this virtuous cycle will be foundational for the talent platform 3.0 companies that will win in the space.

#3 Embrace the generosity and human touch of talent-owned platforms

Umbrex is a talent platform for strategy consultants founded by a freelancer himself, Will Bachman, who wanted to build a community of independent professionals where groups of people could share potential projects (and share in the upside) and get together for personal development and community gatherings.

As a member of the network, I have found it to be a dramatically different feel than the technology-based talent platforms. Bachman is transparent about the fees he takes for projects (which are usually negotiable), his willingness to share a cut with freelancers who refer projects and authentic in operating from a position of generosity and compassion in how he constantly thinks about supporting freelancers, finding tools for the community and bringing people together. 

If a technology talent platform wants to succeed, they will have to build in the humanity and generosity that are foundational for talent-owned platforms.

For a vision of what might be possible, we can look to New Zealand, where Enspiral started as a collection of independent freelancers and has emerged into a platform for building companies, social ventures and consulting projects.

New Zealand’s Enspiral Network has also created an inspired model of freelancer collaboration and community. What began as a coworking space among like-minded people in Wellington six years ago has evolved into a new-fangled cooperative linking freelancers and social enterprises in a global network of mutual aid and collective action.

Despite some success in launching companies within this platform such as Loomio and innovating on how to collectively make decisions and run a firm like this, the model isn’t perfect.

“Our freelancer co-op model is still underdeveloped,” cofounder Joshua Vial explains. “We face many unsolved challenges such as recruiting leadership, providing income security, managing quality, securing sufficient working capital, resourcing work ‘on’ the business and supporting people without managing them.”

Paul Millerd writes about the future of work from the self-employed perspective and is fascinated with how our relationship with work will evolve in the future. He works with talent platforms and consulting firms who want to work with the gig economy more effectively and to help them with their positioning and strategy. He also writes a weekly newsletter where he explores the topics in more depth.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Amid all the buzzwords and reports on the future of work, I find Sarah Kessler’s stories about the gig economy to be the most insightful and the most human.  Her stories and her book, Gigged, give an accurate picture of some of the upsides of the gig economy, but also some of the downsides.

She shares stories of people that are sleeping in their office making five cents per task on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to creative freelancers who can make six-figure salaries working from anywhere.   She also shares the story of companies that see limits to the gig economy, like Dan Teran’s company Managed by Q who is following Zeynep Ton’s Good Jobs Strategy and looking at people as valuable and investing in them as full-time employees and partners in the businesses success.

Our conversation dives deeper into some of the stories she shares as well as some of the current challenges with platforms, the PR machine (all the firms say people want flexibility, but fail to mention they are happy to give it up for more pay!).

One of her subjects in the book puts it most powerfully, Kristy Milland, “I am a human, not an algorithm”

More From Sarah:

• Gigged (Amazon)
• Her writing on Quartz@Work
• Startups Incomplete Narrative On The Future Of Work (Quartz)
• Managed by Q is Profitable (Quartz)

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post The Real Gig Economy: Sarah Kessler, Author of Gigged appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The BLS recently released data on “electronically mediated employment” which covers both in-person works like Uber, Consulting and TaskRabbit as well as online-only work such as remote consulting, and online workplaces like Mechanical Turk and Clickworker.

The takeaway from the data: The platform gig economy doesn’t match the buzz

When  I group the workers in the professional, finance, information industries, I found that only 770,000 people are doing work in the gig economy via talent platforms.  This is less than 1% of the workforce.  This is likely a good estimate of the number of freelance consultants doing work via talent platforms.

Uber & Airbnb Have Created Opportunities, But Not That Many

Within the data, you also find that the number of people operating via platforms like Uber and Airbnb is surprisingly small  These workers make up an even smaller proportion of the workforce, less than 0.3% of the employed population.

The gig economy makes for great headlines and the talent platforms may be a great idea, but they are doing a better job of creating international labor arbitrage opportunities and enormous wealth for anyone with equity.  In the US at least, most of the work in our economy is still being done via traditional work arrangements.

The post How many freelance consultants are using talent platforms? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

This question might be one of the most common questions we ask yet it makes increasingly less sense for the world we are moving towards — a work in which we will depend on people who can create, imagine, connect and love.

I made the leap to self employment because of a burning desire to be more creative and spend more time doing the work that matters to me. In a world where price and value and salary seem to be the markers of one’s value, people have challenged me at every step of the journey.

Yet as I have continued to share and create for the sake of creation, I have discovered a hidden side of life. A side where generosity, connection and love are central. I experienced this most recently when I had a conversation with someone in India who had taken my strategy consulting skills course at a discounted gift price. He had completed the course and set up a call to thank me. He told me it was the first thing that really helped him think about how to approach his job search and his work.

That conversation was priceless. I received his appreciation and felt loved.

It was not something I could have written ten years ago as an analytical, “facts-first” person focused on optimizing my career path and trying to break into an industry with high salaries and good “exit options.”

After leaving the corporate world three years ago, I now realize that with work, people are searching for two things.

They want the opportunity to love others and be loved.

However, we’ve abstracted so many aspects of work from this truth and have transformed so many aspects of work into formal processes and procedures that the basic acts like connecting with others, showing genuine appreciation and love and being able to take risks and create have become impossible.

That conversation was worth more than any of the work I did in my entire corporate career, yet it is nearly impossible to convince anyone who has operated with the truth that their income is their value in the world.

For more than five years, I’ve been crazy enough to share my writing and creations, working through the inevitable embarrassment that many feel when they put their ideas in public. Yet, through this and my embrace of a gift mindset, I’ve experienced things I could not have imagined, formed incredible friendships with open-hearted people and have accidentally built a life that is filled with love and connection.

None of this has been easy. It is one thing to intellectually embrace the idea of a “gift economy” and it is another to awkwardly tell a client or conversation partner that you don’t have a price and that you’d prefer to go through an exercise to explore their open-heartedness and generosity.

This essay was originally a way for me to make sense of what it might look like if I embraced the gift economy in my work in 2018. Since then I’ve engaged in many experiments and learned a lot more. Yet this is perhaps the best guide I can offer if you are starting to think about shifting to a new way of being in your work and life.

The current system doesn’t care about your gifts

As Godin argues in Linchpin, “The educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they are told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve”

For decades, we have had a virtuous cycle of a growing economy, generous organizations that took care of people with fair wages, health care and pensions and people who were ready, willing and able to sign up for that offer.

People compromised being creative and doing what matters to them because they were being taken care of AND everyone else was doing it. Now we are in those same organizations wasting our gifts and genius without any of the payoff.

Yet, the world is craving our gifts. Individuals who embrace their gifts and unleash them into their organizations and into world without fear of looking silly will thrive. Seth Godin, The Oracle of Hudson Valley, nails it when he says that the the only choice for people is to “win by being faster, more remarkable and more human.”

There is a reason we pay attention every time Elon Musk launches a new venture. He is an original thinker, refuses to follow the script, and is willing to go broke chasing his dreams.

He is an artist boldly sharing his genius.

We are all geniuses and we are all artists

Seth Godin believes that we are all geniuses. In his book Linchpin, he challenges readers:

Have you ever found a shortcut that others couldn’t find?

Solved a problem that confounded your family?

Seen a way to make something work that wasn’t working before?

Made a personal connection with someone who was out of reach to everyone else?

Even once?

With this line of thinking, it becomes clear that we all have unique “gifts” to offer the world. Godin also pushes people to think of themselves as artists. Whether it be creating remarkable PowerPoint presentations like Carmen Simon or creating a fascinating Podcast like S-Town or reinventing the organization like basecamp or automattic or creating a remarkable customer experience at Zappos.com — it is only the artists and the organizations who embraces artists who will thrive.

The internet has lowered the “marginal cost of generosity”

Thirty years ago, gatekeepers controlled the world. If you wanted to publish a book you needed a connection.

The internet has eliminated many gatekeepers and lowered the marginal costs of everything to zero. Every day, people make edits to wikipedia, share code on github and offer advice on Medium and other platforms — for free.

As Godin says, the internet has “lowered the marginal cost of generosity”

Many people ask me “how will you monetize?” or “how do you plan on building a business?”

We are missing the point. The internet means that I can connect with hundreds of people a year from anywhere in the world who I am excited to talk to and help.

I create the work that I am most inspired to create. I do it for the reward from helping people and from the satisfaction of creating work I am proud of.

As Godin says, 

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art

But we still need to get paid right?

A gift economy is not about the money, it is about unlocking generosity & gratitude

Charles Eisenstein wrote the book Sacred Economics (gift version) to imagine how we can build a better world by embracing a “gift economy.” His agrees with Seth Godin and believes that you are “here to give and that you have a unique gift to give.”

A gift economy is not radical. It is is already quite familiar to anyone who has operated within a large family, has bought a friend a drink, has offered help when someone needed it or offered our time to someone with no expectation of return.

Within the construct of “work,” however, we abandon this community or friendship mindset in lieu of contracts, transactions and salaries.

Charles Eisenstein shares his perspective in a talk from 2015:

One thing that gifts do is that they create ties among people — which is different from a financial transaction. If I buy something from you, I give you the money and you give me the thing, and we have no more relationship after that. I don’t owe you anything, you don’t owe me anything. The transaction is finished. But if you give me something, that’s different because now I kind of feel like I owe you one. It could be a feeling of obligation, or you could say it’s a feeling of gratitude.

In 2018, I launched a Patreon account so people could support my work for as little as $1 a month. When a good friend became the first person to support me, I was overwhelmed by gratitude. We already had a great relationship, but the idea that this person wanted to support me in a deeper way was powerful. It focused my attention on how I could help him too.

Being Open To Receiving Gift Is Not Always Easy

We don’t want to receive gifts because we don’t want to be obligated to anyone. We don’t want to owe anybody anything. We don’t want to depend on anyone’s gifts or charity — “I can pay for it myself, thank you. I don’t need you

Sacred Economics

Often when someone offers you a gift, your first instinct is to reject the gift. It immediately raises the stakes for the relationship.

I don’t want to owe them anything.

Yet with our close connections and family, we often only operate within the framework of the gift. When is the last time you paid your mother for a home cooked meal?

In a gift economy you cannot get “screwed” — instead it shifts the frame to a world where where people can support each other and embrace generosity as the default state. As Eisenstein notes:

It’s the generous person who is the wealthiest in those societies (gift economies)

Despite this passing the common sense test, , we operate in a world where we are always on the defensive:

In our society we are accustomed to constantly being targeted for the sale. In the world of marketing, we are consumers to be fleeced, objects to be manipulated. Of course then, we unapologetically seek the best deal whenever we can.

Eisenstein’s was discouraged at his first attempts to implement this approach in his own work:

With all this in mind, I set a tuition price point in alignment with the resources committed and the quality of the course — $320. Then I offered a range of scholarship options for people to self-select: half scholarship, three-quarters scholarship, 90% scholarship, and full scholarship. I asked them to choose the level that establishes a commitment and that also respects their financial situation.

The results were quite the opposite of what I expected. Dear reader, maybe you are more cynical than I am, but I was surprised that among the first 150 or so registrants, half chose the full scholarship, and the majority of the rest chose 90% scholarship. The next largest contingent was the three-quarters scholarship, and only a handful paid full price.

To expect everyone to embrace generosity would be foolhardy. We have not created the conditions where that is the accepted behavior. However, we can focus our energy towards the people that are more generous and continue to devote more kindness and energy towards those people.

If people want to nickel and dime you, they are not the type of people you want to work with anyway.

Practical tips for embracing the “gift economy”

I first discovered the term “gift economy” after listening to the interview of “practical philosopher” Andrew Taggart on the Rad Awakenings podcast.

I spoke with Andrew recently about how his use of the gift economy has evolved in his practice. His framing of it seemed to explain some of this discomfort I was facing. The gift economy was about shifting focus to the person and away from the transaction. The goal is to support someone else’s life and their ability to meet their basic material needs.

What I appreciate about Andrew’s approach is that within one thought he can move between Aristotle’s contemplation of the good life, to downfalls of our current economic approach to a practical application of how to bridge that divide. It would be easy to cling to idealism, but Andrew focuses on reasonable approaches given our current world.

How to apply the gift economy to our relationships

We cannot apply the gift economy to everyone equally. This framework does not apply to everyone equally. In our lives, we often have different levels of relationships with different people. In “How An Artist Can Hack a Living” Andrew offers three types of relationships.

1. Tribe,kith and kin — share openly with each to strengthen community

2. With strangers (and I would add, organizations), you enter into exchanges out of a sense of fairness in a way that strengthens social trust

3. With ones friends or other strong connections, you offer what you can based on what you have — this creates hospitality

The first group can be your immediate family and friends and people that are driven by similar passions. Gifting comes naturally within this group.

The second groups is people you would otherwise “do business” with — these could be clients, individuals or organizations that you work with. This group is the key to building a sustainable life and creating the virtuous cycle of people that support you and are generous.

The third group is a larger collection of friends, acquaintances and “digital friendships” that may be aware of your work, may enjoy your work or just enjoy you as a person. This is the largest potential for shifting more attention to the gift economy and away from the mindset of “what is the least I can pay” towards a mindset of “how do I support more people doing great work.”

How to have the “money” conversation in the gift economy

After establishing an initial relationship with his “conversation partners” and sharing his overall gift economy approach, he then gets to the point (typically a 2nd or 3rd conversation) where he has a more explicit and in depth discussion about money and what might make sense to offer through three questions:

1st Question: What can you offer to meet my needs?

“How much during a certain period of time would you be able to offer to help meet some of my material needs?

This may raise a number of questions.

First, you are wondering, what does he mean by material needs? Andrew defines it by starting with the six ways to die, outlined by Vinay Gupta and working backwards to what helps you avoid those:

1. too hot (cooling and shelter)

2. too cold (heating and shelter)

3. thirst (water)

4. hunger (see food)

5. illness (public health and medicine)

6. injury (medical treatment)

He also often gets the question, “does this mean just your material needs, such as water, food and nothing else?” He shares that he does save for the future, but gifts help him support his desire to “ live simply and in accordance with philosophical life.”

I am struck by how different this frame is compared to a contract. Contracts have a short section outlining the work, relationship and deliverables and then devote a large amount of legal nonsense outlining what happens when one person doesn’t follow through.

Instead, this approach, as Andrew says, shifts the focus to the “social relation holding us together.”

2nd Question: Will this prevent you from caring for yourself?

If you were to offer X, would doing so make it impossible for making you care for yourself or those dependent on you?

When the person responds with a number “X,” he does not immediately move forward. He tests the answer. He tells the person that they will go through a “meditation of a sort” to test the numbers:

I tell them that we’ll be going up until we reach some pain point, which would be an intuitive way of registering over-generosity. I mark that pain point: call it B. Then I slowly count down to a point at which they feel another kind of pain, which in this case signals under-generosity. Now we have a range (A-B) with X being somewhere between A and B.

Then Andrew goes back to question number one and asks the same question:

“How much during a certain period of time would you be able to offer to help meet some of my material needs?

The answer can be the same number X again, or it can be slightly different — lets call it Y. He then asks which number sits better with them, X or Y.

If the person chooses X again, he confirms,

So, are you willing to say, then, that X is neither too much to give in light of your current material circumstances nor too little to give in light of your current material circumstances but more or less just enough?

If they are comfortable with the amount, they move on to the third question. If no, they start back at the first question with a clean slate.

This may sound laborious and stressful but Andrew feels that “it’s very important to test the answer to ensure that it’s the best one” to avoid resentment. He also acknowledges this process is not easy and that “finesse, compassion, and patience” are vital to the process.

3rd Question: Wholeheartedness

If you were to offer X within this period, could you do this wholeheartedly?

If the answer is no, you would again go back to question one and start the inquiry again. If the person says yes, then Andrew responds that he accepts this wholeheartedly.

Is this number fixed in stone? Again, here is Andrew:

…the amount of the offering may change over time and with reason. At certain times and due to changing circumstances, it may make sense for you to offer more, less, or something else. We’d want to inquire about your reasons for wishing to explore this change. And yet what needs to be underscored from the outset is that the more your life comes to order, the easier it will be for you to give freely.

Andrew has found that this approach, while seeming awkward at first, actually “irons out a lot of difficulties with money.

While he is motivated by leading an ascetic life, he has been surprised by increase in the gifts he has received over the years.

Beyond Pride: Not Being Attached To What We Create Or Expecting an Outcome

As I tried to make sense of all of this, I used the word “for” as in: “here is a gift for what you did for me.”

Andrew calls this an illegitimate move. The goal in the gift economy approach is to support each other’s attempts to meet their basic needs. This means disconnecting activity X you may do for someone from the gift of supporting one’s life, Y.

When we create something remarkable or do great work, we are wired to think we should be paid for this.

In order for a gift economy to work, we cannot just apply the thinking of our existing economy. We need to pursue the work we are most passionate about and aim to create things that are remarkable — and once we create those things are created, continue doing the work that matters to us…

If we instead attach pride to our work, we will become obsessed with thinking we need to be paid for everything we create.

The reality is that some of what you create may inspire others, but many things may not. We need to continue to experiment, create and as Andrew says, “hack a living as an artist.”

It may not be easy and it may not make sense. There may not be a “business plan” and the model may not meet your basic needs at first, but judging by the increasing number of people embracing this approach, the benefits in connection, energy and the belief in other people seem to be more appealing than the old model.

The gift economy can be a spark to help unleash the huge potential in our world

In How an Artist Can Hack a Living, Andrew states:

the modern institutions, built in part, to financially support and encourage the creative life are in decline.

Yet, we operate in a world in which parents tell people to do what they love and where the advice we scream on Medium is “pursue your passion!”

This disconnect shows itself as the increasing anxiety and disengagement in our organizations.

To me this is good news.

This means there is enormous amounts of human potential and creativity waiting to be unleashed into the world.

But we need to bridge the gap to a better working world where people who wants to be an artist, a creator and do things that matter can pursue that path in a more sustainable way.

I do not present the “gift economy” as an absolute solution. I offer it, instead, as something that can be embraced more widely in our current system to help us operate in a more humane way.

As our economy increasingly pivots to one that not only enables, but requires remarkable experiences and connection, we need new models and mindsets to appreciate and encourage these behaviors. I hope that a broader embrace of the gift mindset can be one of these models.

Seth Godin is one of the best examples and champions of the gift economy. He sees incredible potential to not only unlock our creative spirits through a gift economy, but to bind us at a deeper level to each other:

The magic of the gift system is that the gift is voluntary, not part of a contract. The gift binds the recipient to the giver, and both of them to the community. A contract isolates individuals, with money as the connector. The gift binds them instead.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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