Brittany Luce

I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Okay, we're talking about your book today.

It's all about the grind set, aka the entrepreneurial work ethic.

How would you define that term?

The idea of making one's own job is something that obviously applies to people who do gig work or direct-to-consumer, direct-to-customer sales.

But this idea also spread to company workers who, according to your research, are encouraged to think of themselves as entrepreneurs, even if they technically aren't entrepreneurs.

There's a phrase, there's a term that comes up a lot in the book, intrapreneur, that's spelled I-N-T-R-A plus preneur, meaning like entrepreneur on the inside of an organization.

I used to work in corporate America.

I mean, I used to work a lot of places before I started working here.

Listen, I changed diapers.

I coached teenagers.

I fit people for bras.

I answered phones.

But something that came up at more than a couple of workplaces was this idea of being an entrepreneur.

How did that happen?

And what does that look like, like being an entrepreneur even in a company?

Yeah, I mean, so it sounds like there's an impetus from both the side of the employer or the owner and the worker to kind of buy into entrepreneurship.

Like for the employer, it's like if people are constantly ideating on how to do things better or, you know, extract more value, you know, you're going to get to innovation that much quicker.

And I've definitely experienced that firsthand working here.

In a startup environment for four and a half years, for the employee, it sounds like it's not just like a way of working that can serve you within the company, but also a way of thinking that can serve you if you lose your job.