Substack is filled with a call to abandon the traditional job in favour of creating your own work – the “portfolio career” as it’s being called.

This is not an exhaustive essay, just a few points that I would make if someone wanted to raise the case that the traditional career path offers way more benefits than just “a stable income” (as is often downplayed):

• The chance to work on problems much bigger in size and complexity than you could work on by yourself/in your team. The scale of what you work on is incomparable and the impact you can have is much greater.
• The ability to learn from people who are more experienced than you, daily. Not a mentoring session once a week with a coach. But to daily experience how people approach their work and the issues. The people above you or equal to you also present an opportunity for real time feedback: each task is an opportunity for feedback and each criticism is an opportunity to pivot.
• The reward of being granted responsibility and trust – this is the true difference as you climb up the ladder. You are trusted with more and you are responsible for more. The trust and responsibility are a reward and recognition of value and therefore have much more importance than if you were forced to be responsible for that same degree of work as an entrepreneur. It’s not whether you self trust yourself to handle the problem but whether others trust you to do it. Money is just one form of recognition of success. The praise of doing good work, the recognition by others that you have done quality work, is a reward as well.
• Learning the benefits of working in a team, not as a leader but a member. How can you lead a team when you never learned to work in one. How can you learn what makes a good leader when you never learned to work under one . It is a skill to work with other people of different natures, some better some worse, and achieve a common goals
• The opportunity to learn the skill of working hard even when you don’t want to. The discipline of the routine. The system that requires you to show up and be present at least 8 hours a day. The hard work required to complete boring meaningless tasks at work because they are necessary teaches you a lot about patience and your ability to do things when there is no manifets reward.

Entrepreneurship works for some. It’s not a universal solution. Sure, many entrepreneurs make more money than they did as a salaried employee. But many don’t. Many make equal to the average salary, working way beyond 24/7, taking on greater risk. Of course the benefit is that the work product and the work is your own. But it doesn’t mean that’s the only thing people should be aiming for. The idea of a future where everyone is an entrepreneur forgets that there is a reason business were formed in the first place – because it’s more efficient to transact in the market. The market doesn’t inherently perform better when everyone becomes a contractors. It also forgets that people who build the tools like AI did it as part of a business in a career.