Briefly: If you ever get the chance to work for a start-up, you should probably do it. I could see there being exceptions to that rule, but I’m two months into my job with a local marketing company that only started a few years ago and I’m loving it so far. I don’t think I’d ever realized that the things I value in my personal life–flexibility, adaptability, plenty of time to read and write, etc.–could ever be realized in my professional life. At least not without leaving Lincoln. And I think I had resigned myself to that fact–I’d plug away on my personal writing and someday it may pay off, but in the mean time, if we want to be in Lincoln, I’d have to work less-than-ideal jobs. Turns out, that wasn’t true–and I’m very grateful that it wasn’t.
Anyway, start-ups… if you get the chance to work with one, you should do it. It’s a totally different type of work and one that probably suits an extremely independent person like myself to a tee, but I think just about anyone would benefit from the experience.
Great place to be–at your company but also that feeling of independence, value, self-defined work, etc.
We’re pretty pleased to have you around too, Jake.
I completely agree – even though my startup experience didn’t have the legs yours has, it was extremely valuable and enriching – but I wonder how you square this perspective with the anti-choice, anti-freedom perspective you embrace in the next post. After all, many people would say that a man with a wife and child to provide for was someone for whom taking the risk of a startup position was the wrong decision, and one therefore they needed to be prevented from choosing. And while I think a reasonable person might respond by pointing out that the startup would be the right choice for them, personally, that’s exactly the argument from personal choice that you and Alan Jacobs explicitly reject.
Justin – Really good question and a fair point. Brief reply: I think there’s an implicit question here about authority and knowledge that needs to be discussed. If I’m in a start-up and some far off bureaucratic authority with zero knowledge of the industry starts passing rules that I’m bound by and that limit what I can do as a business, then I’m pretty ticked off and annoyed and am probably lamenting the lack of choice I’m being given. But the issue is with the way that authority is being wielded–it’s impersonal, ignorant, and coercive.
Now if someone else came in with start-up experience and said, “You know, these practices were really helpful to us and these weren’t,” that’s a different proposition. In the first place, they’re knowledgeable about the business. In the second, they presumably have some desire to see us prosper–else they wouldn’t have offered the advice. Finally, they aren’t forcing us into a specific behavior.
I want to think more about this issue of coercion and authority, but I think one of the major issues we have today–and the death of Burke’s “little platoons” is a huge factor in this–is that we struggle to think of authority functioning in non-coercive ways. It’s not that all coercion is wrong, but that coercion is overused in our world and that we tend to think that the only way to solve a problem is through coercion–IE a state-enforced law.
In talking about freedom this morning, I’m not thinking that someone being coerced into the “right” choice is more free than someone with options. I’m not thinking of coercion at all. I’m simply thinking that, to use the business image, the entrepreneur “free” from a dozen bad ideas and committed to a few good ones is more free than the entrepreneur who hasn’t figured those things out yet. And if that’s true, then what does that say about freedom and how does it inform the way we think about it?
Apologies for the brief reply, but I really appreciated this question and wanted to say something b/c I think it’s a really good point you’re raising. But I don’t have a ton of time for managing comments so I can’t do much more than this for a reply.
Finally, they aren’t forcing us into a specific behavior.
Well, that’s kind of the rub, isn’t it? You and Alan Jacobs have argued that they should be forcing you into a specific behavior, because you’ve construed freedom, in these situations, as a process of preventing you from making the wrong choice.
Not dissuading; not presenting other alternatives that you didn’t consider; actually preventing you from making the “wrong” choice.
In talking about freedom this morning, I’m not thinking that someone being coerced into the “right” choice is more free than someone with options.
Then you and Alan Jacobs – whose viewpoint you pretty explicitly endorsed – are saying two different things. Because Alan Jacobs is saying that forcing people to make the right choice over the wrong one is what makes them “more free.” Or, your jam example – you can’t buy a jam that isn’t for sale. Keeping the “wrong” jam out of the store for the “benefit” of jam buyers is directly a form of coercion. So color me confused, if you’re suddenly backpedaling from a pretty explicit argument in favor of coercing other people’s choices “for their own good.”