Month: November 2019

Hmm. I received this mysterious package that I apparently secretly ordered from some sort of game-building site when I wasn’t looking. I think I’m up to something, but the part of my brain that appears to be doing whatever the hell this is appears to be NDA’ed off from the rest.

The haul appears to include a deck of 100 cards with consulting tips, some yak coins, a yak zodiac 24-tile set, and some yak zodiac stickers. Now why would I have had all this made? 🧐

Any ideas? I’l probably have to go on some sort of vision quest powered by yak butter tea to figure it out.

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In other news, it’s Thanksgiving here in the United States, so Happy Thanksgiving, and a big thank you to all of you for supporting my first experiment in subscription email newslettering. We’re just over six months in, can you believe it?

A special shout-out to Tom Critchlow, Paul Millerd, Corissa Nunn, and Tom Kerwin, who all have been especially helpful in developing this project through its initial awkward months. I recommend following all of them (and of course @artofgig) on Twitter to level up your gigging game.

I’m still mulling various ways to make this a more social project, and connect what I’m doing here with what fellow explorers on the gig economy frontier are doing. Those of you who know me from my blog are probably aware that an interesting community grew up around that over the last decade (largely by accident, and despite my reluctance to cultivate it). I’d like to develop a more deliberately conceived community element here, but in an imaginative new way. A do-over of traditional blog-style communities seems a bit boring. Been there, done that.

Plus, the gig economy is a bigger, broader phenomenon than the blogosphere; and a more all-subsuming way of life. So it needs a more daring conceptualization of a community/social aspect. Meetups and conferences might be good enough for blogs, but won’t cut it for meaningfully leveling up the gig economy.

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This list now has 300 odd paying subscribers, generating annualized revenue of almost $16,000 (😱😨🤯), which I totally didn’t expect. Again, thank you. It’s now the equivalent of a medium-sized consulting gig, and is just past the threshold where I feel like I can afford to think somewhat expansively to come up with interesting and imaginative ways to develop it further.

More than the money itself, which is nice to have, this measure of validation feels like permission to think at a meta-level about consulting and the gig economy. We’re not just a bunch of delinquents living a life comprising one damn thing after another. There’s a bigger story developing here, and we’re all part of it.

When you’re in the trenches pursuing leads, chasing down invoices, and riding the cash-flow roller coaster, it’s hard to step back and take the pressure off of yourself without feeling guilty about it. It always feels like available time could be spent more productively on concrete activities related to actual or potential gigs, or things like lead-gen.

Even as I write this, I feel a bit guilty about doing this rather than finishing up some notes I owe clients.

For an essentially shadowy sector of the economy, it feels self-indulgent to spend time thinking about general principles, doctrinal aspects, and philosophy. And dare I say it, exploring the seams of fun and games that are naturally present in the lifestyle, just as office parties and happy hours are a natural part of the paycheck lifestyle.

Writing this newsletter, for the first time in 8 years, I feel like I’m above the weeds, able to look at what we all do from enough of an altitude to provide meaningful perspective.

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I plan to invest some of this incoming $$ into developing something more substantial under this newsletter, to help the gig economy develop and mature. The game-like assets in the picture are my own first idea in this direction. I’m sure many of you will have more ideas for me.

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with the game assets. Mainly I wanted them for myself, to play with. So I got myself this prototype set to help me think about what to do with them.

My initial thought when I started this list was to eventually compile the content into books (which I might still do for the nonfiction essay-like) parts, but I figured I ought to experiment with tabletop gaming as a new publishing medium for exploring, teaching, sharing, and learning consulting and gig economy concepts.

For those who came in late, the Yak Zodiac is described here, the consulting tips deck is from my tip tweets, compiled in this series. The yak coins feature prominently in the consulting fiction I was sharing over the summer, and made their first appearance in the pilot issue of this newsletter. We’ll pick up the fiction and world-building again in a bit (as you’ve noticed, I like to keep some seasonal variety going here).

I’ll have these things available for purchase in a week or two, and going into the new year, we can all play with them and swap notes and ideas.

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Speaking of games, holidays, and community, the general drift here for me is towards thinking of consulting and gig work as a full-fledged folkway, which historian David Hackett Fischer defined as:

…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.

Gigwork is evolving from a narrow status as an alternative mode of work, into a full-blown folkway that fits Fischer’s definition.

Fischer developed his concept of a folkway in his classic Albion’s Seed, to talk about the early streams of immigration from Britain that made America what it is today. I have found it a useful concept for thinking about more migrations in general, including conceptual ones across non-physical borders. For example, I’ve explored the idea of folkways of globalization, to think about the nature of our emerging cosmopolitan, globalized life (which is still evolving steadily, despite some reactionary backsliding). In fact, I’d argue that the gig economy is one of the major folkways of globalization.

What we are doing here with this list, and what you are all doing in your own corners of the gig economy, constitutes one stream of migration from an Old World — the industrial paycheck economy conforming to the contours of nation-state geography — to a New World, based on gig work as a central economic mode, and conforming to the contours of global digital infrastructure.

But to make the migration successful (which means nudging it to evolve into a full folkway by Fischer’s definition, one that plays a significant role in shaping the future of the economy at large), significant injections of imagination and creative construction are required.

Though they are primarily emergent phenomena, folkways don’t make themselves. Per Fischer, they are the “deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.” And in the very young modern gig economy, merely surviving for a few years without descending into penury makes you part of the “elite”. Which means you bear a share of the responsibility for this “deliberate contrivance.”

Fischer lists the following components of a folkway, of which only one is about work per se: speech ways, building ways, family ways, gender ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways, learning ways, food ways, dress ways, sport ways, work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways, social ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways.

Fischer’s inventory is effectively a to-do list of social, cultural, and economic construction work that all of us in the gig economy participate in. Some of us do it consciously, others do it unconsciously, via casual advice they hand out, joking, griping and moaning on twitter, and tips and tricks they borrow from peers.

It is tempting to think of this to-do list as an institution-building imperative, but that’s too narrow. Though a folkway is a set of institutions in the broadest sense, when most people talk of institutions for the gig economy, they mean things like unions, coworking spaces, and health insurance.

That’s not only too limited, it’s a case of thinking ineffectively about the new through the lens of the old.

And in general, that has been a disaster, as scams like WeWork, and ill-conceived (though perhaps well-intentioned) legislative efforts like California’s AB 5 show. Things aren’t going to improve unless we in the gig economy take a much broader view of our responsibility for inventing our thread of the future for ourselves. If all we do is look back with wishful nostalgia at creaky, century-old constructs, all we’ll get is misguided attempts to reproduce old models, with cosmetic tweaks, that undermine the gig economy rather than strengthen it. Often instigated by people who are either not part of it, or don’t want to be. Far too much of the conversation around the gig economy is driven by people who seem to be wishing it would just go away.

The idea of a folkway is an invitation to think more expansively and imaginatively, and go beyond formal cargo-cult institutions that mimic industrial paycheck economy institutions. This means thinking in more fluid ways about a much broader class of concerns. Everything ranging from handshakes and greetings — which are institutions by certain definitions — to games, mythologies, histories, and epistemologies.

Otherwise we’ll be eternally caught in the purgatory between predatory politicians, wannabe union organizers, and apathetic paycheck-employee-centric HR departments.

We’ve barely scratched the surface here. While swapping tips and case studies, and how-to playbooks for landing clients is valuable, it is not enough.

In 2019, nearly twenty years into the modern gig economy, constructing our identities primarily in terms of how we relate to the paycheck folkway is no longer good enough. After all, there is a good chance the gig economy will outgrow the paycheck economy, relegating the latter to a minority sector of the economy overall. Imagining our future in relation to the future of paycheck work would be like early industrial age workers imagining their future in terms of the future of farming. Much of the supposed “future of work” thinking I see around the gig economy strikes me as the equivalent of early factory workers worrying about where to park their cows.

So the gig economy needs to outgrow its origin story in the paycheck world. For the gig economy to grow from limited sideshow to full-blown folkway, we need to talk about a lot more, and develop much deeper internal realities and subjectivities.

This process of reimagining and refactoring our world from an internal perspective is already underway. For example, people have lately been talking about the passion economy as the evolutionary descendant of the gig economy. Nice development of an rudimentary inner life, but evolution can’t stop at incorporating a notion of “passion”. That’s merely one more dimension. There’s a couple dozen more to go before we can call ourselves a folkway.

There’s a lot more evolving and designing and contriving to be done here, and by the time we’re done, you and I will be old, and looking forward to whatever the equivalent of “retirement” is for the gig economy folkway (gigway?).

It’s a long journey ahead, and we’re just getting started.

The idea I’ve cited most often in the last few years is Arthur C. Clarke’s “hazards of prophecy” in Profiles of the Future, which asserts that the failure of nerve is a bigger problem than a failure of the imagination. Failure of nerve happens when, despite being given all the facts, and despite the required reasoning being trivial, people fail to draw obvious conclusions about the future. The problem is that the simple reasoning from simple premises leads you towards an unpleasant conclusion that’s hard to face.

This is an important phenomenon for us in the gig economy to recognize. Possibly the most basic level of failure in failed gig economy careers is failure of nerve.

First Leap versus nth Leap

It’s sort of obvious that taking your first leap into the gig economy, especially when you’re not being forced to by circumstances, is an act of courage. In large part though, the courage required there is a kind of dutch courage, except that you’re high on the prospect of freedom rather than alcohol. You don’t actually know much yet about the perils you’re diving into, or what kind of courage you will need, as you plan your first leap (see my 5-part series on that). You’re merely assuming you have it.

The courage it takes is based on a belief similar to “I’m smart enough to graduate college” or “I’m strong enough to lift this weight.” It’s a belief that allows you to try, but it may not be enough for you to succeed. It is a belief that you will have the courage necessary when it is actually called for.

These beliefs fuel a kind of Dunning-Kruger false confidence that relies on ignorance, but can bootstrap you into the real thing. You find out how you actually stack up as tests of such beliefs hit you one after the other. By the time you’re on your nth leap, your courage is real, because it is in response to dangers you do understand.

Training Nerves versus Mitigating Risks

Like intelligence or strength, courage is an attribute that can be trained, refined, specialized, and generally matured into a knowledge-based understanding of what one is actually capable of. As with intelligence and strength, most people are far away from the genetic limit of what they might be capable of.

But training your nerves is not the same thing as reducing the risk itself through risk-mitigating skills.

A good example is the difference between learning to swim and learning to jump off the high board.

Learning to swim takes no courage at all if you do it in the shallow end, under skilled supervision. You can get to swimming safely without ever testing your nerves, or ever having to overcome even a moment of panic, by gradually developing your skills.

On the other hand, assuming you know how to swim, learning to jump (not dive) off the high board takes no skill at all. You just have to step off the board and fall. It’s all about raw nerve. It’s about learning to overcome the fear itself, accepting that knot in your stomach and the sudden rush of weird sensations as you step off. And it’s almost a one-step thing: the second time is far easier, and by the 10th time, you’re actually enjoying the thrill.

Learning to function effectively as a paycheck employee does not take much nerve, but does take a lot of specialized employer-specific skills you can learn in the shallow end of the pool. If the organization is well run, it should be like learning to swim with a good teacher. If it isn’t, you’ll drown.

Learning to function effectively as a free agent, on the other hand, takes a lot more nerve, but generally no additional skills beyond what you already have. It’s like learning to jump off the high board repeatedly till you enjoy rather than dread it.

To the extent there are risks, you don’t actually mitigate them much. You just learn to deal with the consequences of environments with unmanaged, unmitigated risks.

Dimensions of Boldness

Though you can’t train your nerves in the same way you train skills that derisk an activity, you can train them. What you’re learning is to act in certain ways despite unpleasant situational responses getting in the way.

It helps to break it down a bit into aspects. Here’s a spider chart of the “nerves” I think matter most in the gig economy. The purple polygon is a sketch of what I think my own pattern of boldness looks like. The red one is the pattern I think my buddy Arnie Anscombe, data science consultant, exhibits. Relative to him, I’m bolder about trusting my gut, adapting fast, and ending things cleanly, while he’s bolder at committing early and recovering fast from setbacks.

You should try drawing your own.

Along each spoke, there is a dimension of courage associated with a particular pattern of failure of nerve. In each case, you lose opportunities, time, or both. Lose enough of both, and you lose the plot entirely and bomb out of the gig economy.

• Failure to trust your gut: when things seem okay on the surface, but there’s a couple of red flags, and something just seems wrong at gut level, you either trust your gut and poke at the red flags to either confirm or allay your suspicions, or you studiously ignore your gut.

• Failure to recover fast: you will routinely have setbacks with immediate and unpleasant impacts. A gig fails to come through. An invoice gets held up, causing a cash-flow crunch. A sudden medical emergency stresses your reserves. In each case, if your nerve fails, you’ll initially freeze into helpless inaction, wondering why the universe is being so damn unfair to you. The failure of nerve happens when you don’t unfreeze and begin acting again quickly enough.

• Failure to adapt fast: circumstances have changed. The CEO was replaced, and your champion at a client company, who was going to send a nice juicy gig your way, is suddenly out of power, or out of a job. Do you reorient quickly and do something about it, or wait just long enough that the loss becomes irrecoverable?

• Failure to commit early: You have an idea you feel is basically ready to be tried. You’ve workshopped it a bit on Twitter. People are excited and seem positively disposed towards it. But you delay and hedge, and don’t act, and when you’re finally ready, the moment of zeitgeist resonance has passed. You’re too late, or someone else gets there first.

• Failure to end things cleanly: A potential client has been stringing you along for ever. But you don’t cut the conversation short as a waste of time and move on. Or a client who you thought represented 10s of hours a month in billings is only sending 1-2 hours a quarter your way, but demanding a level of support and situation awareness maintenance that you can only justify for much higher volumes. But you’re letting the gig limp along instead of just politely ending it.

All these cases are failures of nerve. The situation is not intricate or hard to read. The outcome on the present course of inaction is obvious and bad. It is obvious what to do instead, to try and make a better outcome happen.

Yet you don’t act.

Failure of nerve.

The horror of recognizing that something isn’t working, or that a comforting belief isn’t true, or that something important has changed.

The good news about failure of nerve is that it cannot become a habit. If your nerve fails you often enough, you’ll just fail entirely and drop out of the gig economy into something else (generally more unpleasant).

What can become a habit is acting with nerve. And that takes no real skill. Just doing the thing that obviously needs doing. And doing it again, and again. Until the panic reaction turns into an exhilaration reaction.

The reason this works is obvious: the riskiest thing you can do is to take no risks at all. Every time you act with courage, and avert a failure of nerve, you rebalance luck in your favor. You start being right more often. You attract more serendipity than zemblanity.

In fact, that’s how you know if you’re acting boldly enough. When you start to feel that you’re getting unreasonably lucky, and more of your bets are paying off than you’d have expected.

The idea that “fortune favors the bold” is not an observation about the nature of divine agency, it is an observation about the interaction of active human agency, luck, and unintended consequences. Fortune appears to favor the bold because the bold are making their own luck by acting in obvious ways in response to obvious imperatives. Failure of nerve is so common, it is almost the default, so even doing marginally better than others pays off.

As Wayne Gretzky succinctly put it, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

There’s a gig economy disease that will likely strike you within a couple of years of going indie, if you succeed by sticking the landing on your first leap. You’ll find that you have periods with plenty of nominally “free” time, but mysteriously, no time for the kinds of personal passion projects, such as writing, independent research, maker projects, or travel, that probably motivated you to quit in the first place. I’ll call this disease sneakoffproofitis.

The problem is, as a free agent, you are your own boss, and you’re likely a bad boss, unable to relax, and driven by fretful anxiety about lining up the next gig. That would be bad enough, except that you’re also an omniscient bad boss. You know all your own tricks, and nothing is hidden from you. You can’t sneak away from yourself.

You have sneakoffproofitis.

Here’s what sneakoffproofitis looks like.

Your bank balance looks healthy for the moment. You have enough work lined up so the cash flow looks good for the next few months. You’ve only committed a modest fraction of your hours — say 10 a week — to deliver that work. You’re temporarily cash rich and time rich. It’s a sweet situation, right?

So why is it so hard to take your time/money surplus and do something interesting with it?

The thing is, fun things are only fun when you sneak off from things that feel like “work” to do them. There is a certain creative freedom that is unleashed when you’re using up “free” time that feels like it is “stolen” from commitments towards “necessary” work. The courage demanded by the time theft fuels boldness in the sneak-off activity.

This is funny because the idea of time-theft is only well-defined for robotic labor where you are paid to execute a production algorithm, with a clear relationship between time and output, rather than apply knowledge. It is incoherent when applied to knowledge work where there is only a weak correlation between time spent at work and the quality/quantity of output.

But our sneak-off instincts are still linked to robotic labor modes of production. Time isn’t high-quality creative time unless it feels a little bit stolen (which is why, paradoxically, fuck-you money can be a creativity killer).

The work of the knowledge worker is never done. You can always do an infinite amount of work for a finite piece of output. There are always more plans you could make, more background research you could do, more skills you could develop, more trends you could stay updated on, more refinements you could add to the slide-deck, more Q&A you could prepare for. Knowledge work is something like insurance, and it can always be made to violate the law of diminishing marginal returns if you’re neurotic enough.

This is as true of the free-agent life as it is of the paycheck life. There’s always more lead-generating blog posts you could write, more pitches you could send out, more tweaks you could make to your website, more spec-work you could do to go gig-fishing with, more RFPs you could respond to, more clever tweets you could put out to draw viral attention to your soundcloud.

And the bad-omniscient-boss side of you knows this. And won’t let the sneak-off-to-play side of you sneak off to do anything else while there are “productive” things you could be doing. That’s sneakoffproofitis.

What’s the cure? Well, you could get brain surgery to separate the omniscient-bad-boss you from the sneak-off-to-play you, and have the latter hide stuff from the former (weirdly, things like this do happen with brain-damaged patients), but there’s an easier way. You ratchet up the boldness of playful-you and sneak off despite the fact that the omniscient bad-boss is yelling at you.

Because here’s the secret: Omniscient-bad-boss-you is all-knowing and all-seeing, but not all-powerful. Omniscience does not imply omnipotence. In fact, omniscient-bad-boss-you is quite impotent compared to your old other-person boss. What are they going to do? Fire you?

You still need a principle to manage your sneaking-off though, and a way to balance sneak-off behaviors against money-making behaviors.

The principle I suggest is this: pay yourself first. You have probably heard that line from financial advisors. The idea is to put money in retirement savings accounts first, before spending money on other things. It’s that idea, except with time, and with sneak-off activities rather than a retirement account being the target.

So when you have some freedom in how to allocate time towards necessary commitments (for example you have 5 hours of work due to a client, but the deadline is a week off, and a to-do item to update your website before a speaking gig two weeks away) versus sneak-off activities, sneak-off and have fun first.

Subtle point: you have to fill up all available time with necessary activities before you can actually sneak off.

So if you typically plan in terms of a 40-hour week, on Monday morning, make a to-do list of “necessary” things that “must” get done “asap” and will take 40 hours. For safety, overcommit, and put 60 hours worth of work on the list.

Then sneak off.

Before attacking that list.

Sneaking off from an under-full to-do list doesn’t work, just as weight-training with no weights doesn’t work. You strengthen your sneak-off boldness by stealing from committed time, not by clearing and occupying “free” time. That’s just a hobby bad-boss-you tolerates.

Sneaking off is how you reveal your own sense of priorities and urgencies to yourself. You don’t know whether or not something can wait unless you try to sneak off from doing it. And unlike carved out “free” time, sneak-off time has no preset boundaries. How long you stay in sneak-off mode is determined by the tug-o-war between your to-do anxiety and the strength of your absorption in the sneak-off activity.

Yes, your omniscient bad-boss side will scream and bully, but you can ignore that. Learning to ignore your own screaming and bullying is the whole point of sneak-off behaviors. Quitting a paycheck job and earning your freedom from others is the easy part. You aren’t truly free until you’ve earned freedom from your own ridiculous expectations of yourself.

The logic of paying yourself first is similar to retirement savings prioritization logic. The things you do in your sneak-off time are the things that have a chance of turning into long-term compound-interest assets (though watch out for a related disease, projectitis: omniscient-bad-boss you will attempt to turn every such activity into a legible “project” the moment they smell a “return”, and ruin both the fun and the possibility of a return; eventually you have to let that happen if the activity grows enough, but delay the onset of projectitis, and stay in sneak-off-and-play mode, as long as possible).

In the short term sneak-off activities are bugs in your self-imposed productivity regimen, but in the long-term, they’re the main feature of the lifestyle you’re constructing, and the most necessary among all the things you must do.

Neglect sneak-off activities at your own peril. All work and no play make Jack a dull paycheck employee, but a dead free agent.

For the last month, I’ve been tweeting a daily tidbit of gig economy trivia on the @artofgig twitter account, and I’ll be compiling them here every couple of weeks here as a newsletter issue, as I was doing with the tips before.

Interestingly, these trivia items get far fewer likes and retweets than the tips. I think we all recognize the importance of staying on top of gig economy trends, but it’s not nearly as much fun as the fortune cookie stuff. Still you gotta eat your spinach. I plan to keep this series going for a hundred tweets as well. For this series, contributions are welcome. Tweet good trivia items at me (this compilation should give you a sense of what I consider “good”) and I’ll feature them in the tweet series.

Here are trivia items 1-22

Gig Economy Trivia #1: In 1780, less than 20% of the US workforce had paycheck jobs (Source: Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan)

Gig Economy Trivia #2: The smallest firm size range tracked by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) is 1-4, which means solopreneurs and free agents are basically not tracked.

Gig Economy Trivia #3: According to the BLS, in the US, employment share of firms with 1-4 employees fell from 5.59 to 4.75% between 1993 and 2018. In the same period, the share of firms with over 10,000 employees rose from 35.69% to 40.39%

Gig Economy Trivia #4: Unemployment is measured with respect to workforce participation rate, and does not count those who have given up looking. This rate has fallen from around 67% in 2000 to around 63% today. link.

Gig Economy Trivia #5: In the US, over 80% of the workforce was in paycheck employment around 1980, which is probably when free agency began to grow (Source: Free-Agent Nation, Dan Pink)

Gig Economy Trivia #6: According to Google Trends, the term “gig economy” began taking off as the preferred term around 2015, while “side hustle” began taking off a bit earlier, around 2014.

Gig Economy Trivia #7: According to Merriam-Webster, the word “gig” was first used in the sense of a short-term job, especially in the sense of music performance, in 1926.

Gig Economy Trivia #8: According to Wikipedia, “informal employment makes up 58.7% of non-agricultural employment in Middle East – North Africa, 64.6% in Latin America, 79.4% in Asia, and 80.4% in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Gig Economy Trivia #9: In the developing world, women are much more likely to be part of the informal sector than men. link.

Gig Economy Trivia #10: China’s gig economy accounts for 110 million workers, or about 15% of the working population, compared to 10% for the US, according to this FP article from 2018.

Gig Economy Trivia #11: According to the IMF, about half the work in the world is unpaid, most of it is done by women, and it is estimated to be worth somewhere between 10 and 60% of GDP

Gig Economy Trivia #12: “In Norway… women [do] 3.7 hours of unpaid work, while men contribute 3. On the other extreme, in Egypt, women do 5.4 hours per day of unpaid work and men only 35 minutes.” link

Gig Economy Trivia #13: McKinsey research suggests 20-30% of people, or about 2x typical government estimates, have spent time in the gig economy

Gig Economy Trivia #14: According to this McKinsey 2×2 (2016), 30% of indies in US/EU are true free agents, in gig economy out of choice and rely on it for primary income. The other 3 categories are: casual earners, reluctants, and financially strapped

Gig Economy Trivia #15: According to research at INSEAD, working in the gig economy has large positive effects on mental health.

Gig Economy Trivia #16: According to this 2018 HBR article by INSEAD professor Gianpiero Petriglieri based on “in-depth surveys” of 65 gig workers, the key to thriving is 4 kinds of “liberating connections”: to place, routines, purpose, and people.

Gig Economy Trivia #17: According to this Deloitte’s 2019 Human Capital Trends report, the use of “alternative labor” is most common in the IT function, and least common in the supply chain function.

Gig Economy Trivia #18: According to this Mastercard study from May 2019, the gig economy will grow from ~200B today to about ~450B by 2023, with about half being from “transportation-based services”

Gig Economy Trivia #19: The term “slash” was coined by Marci Alboher in her 2007 book One Person/Multiple Careers to describe people who describe their gig life with many words separated by slashes, eg: writing/speaking/coaching/teaching. How many slashes do you have?

Gig Economy Trivia #20: Tom Malone’s 1998 article, The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy, helped inspire the founding of elance, the pioneering gigwork site, which later merged with odesk and became today’s market leader, upwork.

Gig Economy Trivia #21: The term “free agent” for gigworkers was popularized by Dan Pink in his 2001 book, Free-Agent Nation, one of the first to point out that labor economists and government agencies don’t model the freelance/gig economy.

Gig Economy Trivia #22: Google Trends reveals “future of work” had a peak of interest around 2004 (the earliest data is available), followed by a decade of lower interest, followed by a 5-year ramp to 2004 levels by 2019. I suspect 2004 peak was about gigwork, 2019 is about AI.

Previously, I was tweeting daily tips. If you want to catch up on those tweets, check out the Tips Compilations series.

If you’re active on twitter, and want to join the conversation there, follow @artofgig, introduce yourself via a reply to this pinned tweet, and follow some of your fellow subscribers on this list.