Brittany Luce

For the next few weeks, we're breaking down why getting a job and keeping it feels so hard right now and how our ideas about employment just aren't matching up with today's realities.

Eric, welcome to It's Been a Minute.

Hello, hello.

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.