What do you envision as the alternative to having a job? Running your own business? ... Living off of a trust fund?
That list makes a decent starting point.
"Let them eat cake", thy name is Morendil!
Again, the issue not whether the functions accomplished by a job can be broken down into their consitutent components. Of course they can. But Godin's claim goes further, into saying that people are fundamentally ignorant of alternate ways to accomplish these functions.
Does he really not think that people are aware that if you have enough money, you don't need to work to earn an income?
Also, this is another tenuous division of conceptspace:
Another is taking orders, vs giving orders, vs neither. And so on.
Why is one taking orders, while another isn't? One way or another, you usually have to do something other people want to get their money. Grocery stores are taking my orders to bring them food. Employers are only giving me orders in the sense that, "if you want this money, you will perform this act. If you don't like that tradeoff, we can go our separate ways."
The identification of employment as "taking orders" is hardly a natural category for it, and certainly not one people are ignorant for not making.
Upvoted with gusto.
Most work boils down to solving some problem or another. An employee solves problems within the constraints imposed by their company. An entrepreneur solves problems within the constraints imposed by their customers. The former are really just an indirect representation of the latter.
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.