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Chapter 1: What cultural factors contribute to America's grindset mentality?
The year was 2010. I was very committed to skinny jeans.
I was very committed to skinny jeans. I had just graduated from college and everyone was playing Angry Birds. It felt like All I Do is Win by DJ Khaled featuring T-Pain, Ludacris, Rick Ross, and Snoop Dogg was bumping in every club across the country. But in the job market, all I did was lose. Like many millennials, I graduated into an economy still very much rocked by the 2008 recession.
It took me years to find the kind of full-time salaried work that many people once thought of as the pot of gold at the end of the undergrad rainbow. But even though the economy recovered and I got jobs and lost them and landed new ones, I never felt fully secure. I felt and still feel like I always got to have a second or third thing I can fall back on if the work in front of me dries up.
I can never get off the grind. I know a lot of other people feel that way too. And there's a reason for that.
There are all these books now that will offer you a guide for how to detach from your work and chill out a bit. Of course, all of that's for the best, but there are really deep structural and material forces that are pressing this way of thinking on people. That pot of gold has been very elusive for a lot of people.
That's Eric Baker. He's a lecturer at Harvard University and the author of the book Make Your Own Job, How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.
When I was writing the book, I sometimes told people that I was writing the kind of prehistory of the grind set.
Ha!
When reading the book, I kept feeling like that one scene in the TV show Euphoria where the kids in school are watching a play about them, and one character says, Like, the pressure of the grind set is something that's plagued me my whole working life. It was weird to read a book arguing that that pressure was not only intentional, but also structurally enforced over the span of decades.
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Chapter 2: How has the entrepreneurial work ethic evolved over time?
Eric, welcome to It's Been a Minute.
Thanks so much for having me on.
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?
We get this new idea that increasingly emphasizes the importance of not just working hard, but about creating new work for oneself and for others, always being alert to new opportunities, trying to stay one step ahead of the market technological change and economic developments and things like that.
This kind of set of virtues, increasingly over the course of the 20th century, comes to be described as being entrepreneurial. This entrepreneurial work ethic becomes dominant.
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.
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Chapter 3: What does it mean to be an 'intrapreneur' in today's workforce?
businesses in East Asia. This sort of leads a lot of the corporate management class to become obsessed with the idea of innovation and this need to sort of perpetually stay one step ahead of the market. And so, of course, this gets passed down to workers too. This is a period as well of intense corporate downsizing and restructuring. Corporations are feeling a profitability squeeze.
So the question becomes, okay, which kind of workers are going to go? And this rhetoric emerges that you need to be entrepreneurial in order to prove your value and in order to stay.
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. Yeah.
Whatever it is, if you're already like two steps ahead as far as constantly strategizing for yourself as, I guess, a company of one, the day the ax finally falls on you, you'll be able to move forward.
Yeah.
Yes, that's all exactly right. And there's this idea that workers who are entrepreneurial are not just better able to withstand economic disruption, but they're actually happier and more self-actualized and more fulfilled. And there's this sense that
It's a kind of win-win because this kind of creative, constantly innovative work, people who are working in that way, they're putting themselves into their work. They're kind of using all of themselves. They're channeling their passions and their interests and their kind of deepest drives. And so this is ultimately a more kind of human way of working.
And this is the promise that managers make, that sort of buying into this more intense culture of work, it's less boring, it's less monotonous. Even though you're an employee in this big organization, in some sense, you actually are like the heroic founder, charismatic executive running the firm.
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Chapter 4: How did the economic crises of the 70s and 80s shape worker expectations?
You can be that way too, if you buy in.
creativity shows up so much in your book. There's this idea that like entrepreneurial work, whether you work for a company or not, entrepreneurial work is by nature creative work. And it's like a part of becoming your best self or self-actualizing, which also comes up in the book a lot.
But there's this idea very present that humans have a desire and workers have a desire to be creative with their work. And that without necessarily changing the work that people are expected to do, you're changing the way that they think about it, which is making them feel like it's this much more creative, collaborative experience.
Which I'll say, as someone who has to work for a living, I actually do work in a creative job. But I also have worked in workplaces where there was no creativity to be found. And that entrepreneurial... kind of idea of like, we're bringing our best creative juices to the spreadsheet. You know what I mean? Exactly. It can feel very forced.
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I mean, there's nothing, there's certainly nothing wrong with creativity. You know, it would be fantastic if everyone was able to spend their lives being creative, but that's clashed with the economic system that we have, a system that's
oriented fundamentally around production for profit isn't going to be one that spontaneously happens to allow people to express themselves creatively in their work on a day-to-day basis.
So then there's a real cynical dimension to a lot of this, this strategizing for how to make people almost gaslighting workers into thinking that this plainly uncreative work is in fact equivalent to being an artist.
I also want to touch on something that you get into that comes up multiple times in the book. The idea that if the employees see themselves as bosses or being like their bosses, then they might not feel like they need to unionize as workers. That seems like a pretty big benefit for a boss.
Yeah, and so this is part of how these ideas first get into the management consulting and sort of business school world.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of equating workers with entrepreneurs?
I attended Howard about 20 years ago, and entrepreneurship, even within the bounds of full-time salary to work for someone else, that was one of the skills that they were really big on drilling into our heads. And they touted a lot to us how entrepreneurship was going to be the way of the future, regardless of what your major was or what you were studying. It didn't matter.
The idea seemed to be that if we could work for ourselves, we'd not just, you know, protect ourselves from unemployment, but possibly create jobs for other Black people too. But how is this idea of making your own job also weaponized against marginalized groups?
I mean, everything you said is exactly right, but then you can kind of see how the flip side then becomes, if you aren't successful, then it's because you aren't being adequately entrepreneurial. It can also be scaled up to the group level, and so you can explain that. various discrepancies in wealth or income by saying, well, this group of people is just inadequately entrepreneurial.
So policy is a big part of it. And then the book, I show how the 1960s, the war on poverty, and later Richard Nixon's advocacy of what he called black capitalism, and into the 90s, the Clinton era, to welfare as we know it.
And a lot of these policy initiatives were framed as correcting perverse incentives that told especially black workers to turn to the welfare state or to government policy to redress inequality instead of making their own jobs. Coming up... You know, they may say, okay, yeah, sure, you know, I recognize that this is a scam or this isn't necessarily pleasant.
It would be nice if there was another approach, but, you know, I don't see it. So I'm going to have to see what I can do because I have bills to pay.
Stick around. I want to talk about a specific turning point where you write that the idea of what creates value for a company shifts from creating products to producing innovation. You put this around the 80s and 90s when you posit that companies largely start looking for employees who innovate or think entrepreneurially, as we were discussing earlier.
At the same time, you write about the workforce becoming more precarious for workers. Can you say more about how these two things converged?
Yeah, so if you think about it, there's something almost egalitarian about the idea that economic value comes from your ability to make useful stuff and provide useful services. This was a staple of the rhetoric of the labor movement going back to the 19th century.
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Chapter 6: How does the promise of 'making your own job' fall short for many?
And so that gives employers, again, a kind of logic that they can use to impose punitive conditions on the workers who are deemed to not be really driving corporate innovation forward.
As I've said, I feel like the grind set or the entrepreneurial work ethic has been something that I personally have felt that I could not escape or survive without. In some ways, truthfully, I'm not going to say it's always been the healthiest, but having an entrepreneurial work ethic has really benefited me a lot.
So I think that there are a lot of people who might be listening to this and thinking like, what? well, I can't really get around this, or there are aspects of this that have worked for me. But I wonder, how does the promise of making your own job fall short?
Yeah. Well, first of all, it's not enough to just set the intention to change our mindsets. But We need other ways of responding to the needs the entrepreneurial work ethic is promising to supply, whether that's changes in social policy or strengthening unions, giving people more security at work. I think that the downsides are... numerous.
First is the sense of depletion and burnout that a lot of people experience. I talk in the book about how the concept of burnout, experts kept discovering it in broader and broader circles of workers. Everyone was suddenly experiencing burnout. I think that this is a big part of it, that sense of you can never rest content with what you have. You have to constantly be expecting
disaster to strike and to be prepared to stay one step ahead. And then I think there's the general sort of political downsides, the sense that the gig worker making their own job, that this person is essentially doing the same thing that Elon Musk is doing just in a miniature form.
I think that that's ultimately really, really politically toxic and helps prevent people from confronting structures of inequality in our society.
Yeah.
You know, I feel like to that point, we've reached kind of like late stage entrepreneurialism. Like the whole rise and grind mentality is, you know, it's still very salient. And the economic conditions are not great. You know, making our own jobs.
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Chapter 7: What role does creativity play in the modern work environment?
I don't know if it's really paying dividends for everyone. Yeah. Okay. So you're feeling me. You're feeling me. So I'm wondering, though, why are we as a culture still so invested in it?
It's tough to find alternatives. At the end of the day, if you need healthcare, you need to pay the bills. Maybe making my own job and getting rich by grinding, maybe there are long odds there. But is Medicare for all, is that more likely in the short term? A lot of people would say no. There's a
real sense of pessimism, I think, about alternative and especially more kind of political or collective approaches for economic security right now. It's hard to blame them for feeling that way. So, you know, they may say, okay, yeah, sure, you know, I recognize that this is a scam or this isn't necessarily pleasant. It would be nice if there was another approach, but, you know, I don't see it.
So I'm going to have to see what I can do because I have bills to pay.
We get this idea that entrepreneurialism won't just save our careers, but it will save ourselves. The pioneering psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Yes, that Maslow is in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You know, the pyramid that has self-actualization at the top. That model has been critiqued actually for being unscientific, but it's something that people still reference to this day.
Anyway, Maslow reportedly said in the 1960s that the most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society would be not 100 chemists or politicians or professors or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs. But looking at our society today, a lot of entrepreneurs have wider cultural or even political sway. Many people would argue that that hasn't made society better.
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Chapter 8: Why do we culturally invest in entrepreneurs as saviors of society?
A lot of people might just, you know, they might say that these entrepreneurs just made a lot of money. So I wonder, why do we look to entrepreneurs for salvation?
It's a really good question. I mean, I think that that Maslow quote is interesting because he's not just saying entrepreneurs You should bring entrepreneurs in to save this deteriorating society. But he's kind of denigrating these alternatives.
And again, I think that part of it is there's a real sense of kind of pessimism about the ability of other kinds of people, other kinds of approaches to solving our social problems. And entrepreneurs become... At the very least, they can be kind of heroes of last resort, because even if they can't solve the social problems, ultimately, at least they can make a lot of money.
And there's perhaps something to be said for that. I think that the other part of it as well is cults of personality. There have been a lot of very charismatic cults. The United States in particular, we love a cowboy, we love a superhero, these kind of individuals that we can turn to for salvation.
That itself is an idea that I think is almost intrinsically intertwined with the entrepreneur legend. A phrase that I think is extremely revealing is the way that politicians often celebrate rich people as job creators.
Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes.
You know, well, people do actually need jobs if they can't, you know, turn to the government, for example, to provide them. Entrepreneurs are able to plausibly promise access to new jobs when times are tough. That goes a long way. I mean, this is a really important domain of people's lives.
Eric, you give me so much to think about. I just had to sigh for a second. You give me so much to think about. Thank you so much.
Oh, it's been my pleasure.
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