Making Cogs vs. Being Cogs

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When I lived in South India, at 5:30 each morning my neighbor’s rooster or the guy hawking traditional South Indian breakfast foods or the guy offering to sharpen people’s knives from the back of his bicycle would wake me up.
 
And on the way to work, I walked past the banana leaf cutting station for the nearby resto, the guy selling fried chicken from a cart in front of his house, and the man who ironed clothes. Then I would be solicited by women selling jasmine flowers for my hair.
 
Too rarely when we think of poverty do we equate it with such incredible industry. In this thriving neighborhood, I learned my lesson. But at the same time, it made me wonder at the absence of such micro-entrepreneurship in the United States (and other wealthy nations).
 
“Most of us are not born entrepreneurs, particularly if we’ve grown up and even grown old in institutions, moving from school to college to organization, places where work is shoved at you, yours only to pick up your shovel, or pen, and deal with it," said Charles Handy, while delivering an essay called "Need Work: Try Making Your Own" on Marketplace, the American Public Media radio program on all things money.
 
In his essay, Handy, founder of the London Business School and author of Myself and Other More Important Matters, cautioned of relying on organizations to hire us, especially in a “jobless” recovery.
 
He told the story of his friend who had lost his job, and his friend’s plumber, who had plenty of jobs.  The difference, Handy said, was that his friend thought of a job in terms of an employer-employee relationship, while the plummer considered a job to be any client who needed their pipes fixed.
 
“The world is full of potential clients for something,” said Handy. “The problem is you have to create the something yourself.”
 
Handy gave this advice to his own children: “When you graduate from college,” he told them, “don’t get a job. Find someone who will pay you money for something you make or do for them.”
 
Some young people in the United States do seem to be getting the memo. An exciting Wall Street Journal article by Justin Lahart details how, given the low costs of technological tools, young people are starting to make stuff.
 
"In today's marketplace,” Blake Sessions, 20, MIT, told WSJ, “you can't only offer a technical aptitude. You have to be able to provide something more."
 
Lahart describes hackerspaces where young people get together and share tools, ideas, coffee and creativity.
 
According to the article, Bre Pettis started one of the first of these hackerspaces in Brooklyn, New York. And he created the MakerBot, a 3-D printer.
 
Can you imagine that? You just tell it what you want it to make, and it makes it for you. In 3-D.
 
Awesome, right? Finally! Kids can design their own toys and print them in the MakerBot. Engineers, craftsman, architects and others can use it to design three-dimensional prototypes. Our imaginations can run wild with the possibilities.
 
MakerBot Industries is selling the prototype for nearly $1000 a piece, but this is quite reasonable when you think about how much more creativity, innovation and wealth one machine could ignite.
 
We can’t all be engineers, but we can all tinker to express our creativity and perhaps turn that into a way to provide real goods or services from which we can make a living.
 
“And more of us will have to," Handy said, while closing his address, "as lives are getting longer and organizations much slimmer.” 
 
After the financial crisis and massive layoffs of the past year, there are many of us who want to be more economically resilient in 2010. And earning money independently of corporations is one way to do that. I know of young professionals creating web-based companies from the ground up, and others selling cupcakes on Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods.
 
But whether their idea is complex or simple, these young people are invigorated by their projects. Their hearts are in it, and they're creating the "real economy" as they go.
 
(Photo by PlaneMad)
 
Read more stories at YPNation, America's young professionals network.