The End of Jobs summary

Jobs are becoming increasingly hard to come by and, believe it or not, those in their fifties today are partly responsible for it.

After WWII, the economic boom pushed the knowledge economy to its limit, and it began morphing into a new system.

Aside from the dearth of jobs in the U.S., there’s another reason finding work has become so difficult: the possibility of outsourcing.

Modern communication technology and increased global education has released us from our office cubicles and the number of people with university degrees has dramatically increased, making degrees less valuable. In fact, the number of college graduates in the world increased from 90 million in 2000 to 130 million in 2010. But what does this mean? Well, when we add technology like the video calls of Skype into the mix, this means that qualified talent can be hired and work from anywhere in the world.

The benefits of having a steady job have been drilled into our heads since we were children, but what if we were misinformed?

A steady job today means exposing yourself to an insidious risk that is out of your control. In our current economy, your steady income can disappear at the drop of a hat, leaving you clueless as to how to recover.

Starting a business is for highly intelligent business types with piles of cash, right? Actually, thanks to modern technology, anyone has the possibility to do anything from designing furniture to publishing a novel. Apple mogul Steve Jobs even said that entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily smarter than the average person.

One thing that has changed the game of business is, of course, the internet. One way it has done so is by dramatically reducing production costs.

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers didn’t work like we do today: they worked to survive. But this changed at the beginning of the agricultural revolution. After that, work became an obligation.

When we started creating farming communities, we worked to collect foods we could store or trade. Tilling the land was arduous, constant work to amass wealth rather than to survive.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t always a walk in the park, but it’s not as treacherous as you may think. Rob Walling, leader of three software companies, used his experience to create a useful entrepreneurial method known as the Stair Step Method.

The first step involves creating and launching a single product, selling it for a one-time fee, and using just one marketing channel.