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From gig laborers to salaried workers, a lot of people are keeping their noses to the grindstone in order to remain afloat, avoid job loss, and stay one step ahead of market fluctuations. But this culture of overwork isn\u2019t new \u2013 according to (https://histsci.fas.harvard.edu/people/erik-baker) Erik Baker, Harvard lecturer and author of Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, the grindset has been intentionally promoted and structurally enforced over decades. Brittany sits down with Erik to discuss how we got here \u2013 and how we can untangle the culture from these working conditions.Support Public Media. (https://plus.npr.org/) Join NPR Plus. Follow Brittany on Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/bmluse/?hl=en) @bmluse For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR\u2019s Pod Club newsletter at (https://www.npr.org/podclub) npr.org/podclub . 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(https://tracking.swap.fm/track/XvDEoI11TR00olTUO8US/prfx.byspotify.com/e/play.podtrac.com/npr-510317/npr.simplecastaudio.com/d26aaa31-0a11-46ca-a4ae-a682d381c8c1/episodes/715b3176-1c66-452b-926f-0b2839e5cc58/audio/128/default.mp3?awCollectionId=d26aaa31-0a11-46ca-a4ae-a682d381c8c1&awEpisodeId=715b3176-1c66-452b-926f-0b2839e5cc58&t=podcast&e=nx-s1-5694657&p=510317&d=1209&size=19344867&sc=siteplayer&aw_0_1st.playerid=siteplayer) Listen \u00b7 20:09 20:09 (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5694657) Transcript Toggle more options (https://tracking.swap.fm/track/XvDEoI11TR00olTUO8US/prfx.byspotify.com/e/play.podtrac.com/npr-510317/npr.simplecastaudio.com/d26aaa31-0a11-46ca-a4ae-a682d381c8c1/episodes/715b3176-1c66-452b-926f-0b2839e5cc58/audio/128/default.mp3?awCollectionId=d26aaa31-0a11-46ca-a4ae-a682d381c8c1&awEpisodeId=715b3176-1c66-452b-926f-0b2839e5cc58&t=podcast&e=nx-s1-5694657&p=510317&d=1209&size=19344867&sc=siteplayer&aw_0_1st.playerid=siteplayer) Download Embed Embed () < iframe src=\"https://www.npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-5694657/nx-s1-mx-5694657-1\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"NPR embedded audio player\"> (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5694657) Transcript (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) BRITTANY LUSE, HOST: The year was 2010. I was very committed to skinny jeans. I 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. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, \"ALL I DO IS WIN\") DJ KHALED: (Singing) Up down. 'Cause all I do is win. LUSE: But in the job market, all I did was lose. (SOUNDBITE OF SAD TROMBONE) LUSE: 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. ERIK BAKER: There are all these books now that will offer you a guide for how to, you know, detach from your work and, like, chill out a bit, and, you know, 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. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: That's Erik 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.\" BAKER: When I was writing the book, I sometimes told people that I was writing the kind of prehistory of the grindset. LUSE: (Laughter). (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: 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, is this play about us? Like, the pressure of the grindset 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. BAKER: I think that's exactly was my motivation for writing this book was to name and to criticize this culture that so many people, you know, myself included, have experienced and find exhausting. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: This is nonemployment. For the next few weeks, we're breaking down while getting a job and keeping it feels so hard right now, and how our ideas about employment just aren't matching up with today's realities. Erik, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE. BAKER: Thanks so much for having me on. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, 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. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: OK. We're talking about your book today. It's all about the grindset, aka, the entrepreneurial work ethic. How would you define that term? BAKER: 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. And so this kind of set of virtues, increasingly, over the course of the 20th century, this comes to be described as being entrepreneurial. This entrepreneurial work ethic becomes dominant. LUSE: 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. BAKER: Yeah. LUSE: 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 intrapreneur. How did that happen? And what does that look like, like, being an entrepreneur, even in a company? BAKER: The idea that even ordinary company workers should be entrepreneurial really takes root in the response to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, especially in response to the threat of global competition from businesses in East Asia. You know, 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, you know, OK, which kind of workers are going to go? And this rhetoric emerges that you need to be entrepreneurial in order to kind of prove your value in order to stay. LUSE: 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 a startup environment for 4 1/2 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. BAKER: Yeah. LUSE: 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, you know, the day the axe finally falls on you, you'll be able to, you know, move forward. BAKER: 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, you know, 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. You know, 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. You can be that way, too, if you buy in. LUSE: 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. (Laughter) But there's this idea very present that, like, 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? BAKER: Exactly. LUSE: It can feel very forced. BAKER: 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, you know, spontaneously happens to allow people to express themselves creatively in their work on a day-to-day basis. So then there's kind of a real cynical dimension to a lot of this, this kind of strategizing for how to make people - almost gaslighting workers into thinking that this plainly uncreative work is, in fact, equivalent to being an artist. LUSE: 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. BAKER: Yeah, and so this is part of how these ideas first get into the management, consulting and, you know, sort of business school world. These management experts realize that if they're able to convincingly draw this kind of equivalence between ordinary workers and entrepreneurs, then, so they hope, a lot of the causes of worker dissatisfaction can be addressed without needing to actually empower workers in any kind of substantive way. LUSE: The concept of, like, making one's own job, the idea can feel really salient for some groups of people, especially people who are marginalized in the workforce, because, you know, perhaps making your own job either within, you know, salaried work or outside of the workforce could feel like having more agency. I attended Howard about 20 years ago. And entrepreneurship, even within the bounds of, you know, full-time salaried work for someone else, that was one of the skills that they were really big on drilling into our heads. And, like, 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? BAKER: 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, you know, then it's because you aren't being adequately entrepreneurial. It can also be scaled up to the group level. And so, you know, you can explain various discrepancies in wealth or income by saying, you know, 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. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: Coming up... BAKER: You know, they may say, OK, 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. LUSE: Stick around. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: 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? BAKER: 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. You know, this was a kind of staple of the rhetoric of the labor movement going back to the 19th century. You know, workers took a lot of pride in the fact that they were doing something every day that, you know, was ultimately, you know, making or providing something useful. This rhetorical shift that, again, is related to this increasing preoccupation with international competition that, as mentioned earlier, the sense that value really actually comes from not just making the useful thing but continually coming up with new things, staying one step ahead of the curve, the people who are creating value are the ones who are, you know, running this race the fastest. And so that, you know, 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. LUSE: As I've said, I feel like the grindset 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, well, I can't really get around this, or, you know, there are aspects of this that have worked for me. But I wonder, like, how does the promise of making your own job fall short? BAKER: Yeah. Well, you know, first of all, it's not enough to just kind of set the intention to change our mindsets, but, you know, we need other ways of responding to the needs the entrepreneurial work ethic is promising to supply, whether that's, you know, changes in social policy or strengthening unions, giving people more security at work. I think that the downsides are numerous. You know, first is the sense of depletion and burnout that a lot of people experience. And I talk in the book about how the concept of burnout, experts kept kind of discovering it in broader and broader circles of workers. Everyone was suddenly experiencing burnout, and, you know, I think that this is a big part of it, that sense of, you know, 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. You know, and then I think there's the the general sort of political downsides, the sense that the gig worker, you know, making their own job, that this person is essentially doing the same thing that Elon Musk is doing, just in a miniature form. You know, I think that that's ultimately really politically toxic and helps prevent people from confronting structures of inequality in our society. LUSE: 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, I don't know if it's really paying dividends for everyone. BAKER: Yeah. LUSE: Yeah, OK. 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? BAKER: It's tough to find alternatives. You know, at the end of the day, if you need healthcare, you need to pay the bills, maybe making my own job and getting rich, you know, by grinding, maybe there are long odds there, but is, like, Medicare for all, you know, is that more likely in the short term? A lot of people would say no, you know, 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, OK, 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. LUSE: 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 as in Maslow's hiarchy 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. 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? BAKER: It's a really good question. I mean, I think that that Maslow quote is interesting because he's not just saying you should bring entrepreneurs in to save a deteriorating society, but he's kind of denigrating these alternatives. And again, you know, I think that part of it is there's a real sense of pessimism about, you know, the ability of other kinds of people, you know, 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, you know, 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 figureheads. The United States in particular, you know, we love a cowboy, we love a superhero, you know, 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. LUSE: Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. BAKER: You know, well, people do actually need jobs if they can't, you know, turn to the government, for example, to provide them entrepreneurs who 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. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LUSE: Erik, you've given me so much to think about. I had to sigh for a second. You've given me so much to think about. Thank you so much. BAKER: Oh, it's been my pleasure. LUSE: That was Erik 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.\" This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by... LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain. LUSE: This episode was edited by... NEENA PATHAK, BYLINE: Neena Pathak. LUSE: Engineering support came from... DAVID GREENBERG, BYLINE: David Greenberg. LUSE: Our supervising producer is... BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Parton Girdwood. LUSE: Our VP of programming is... YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni. LUSE: Alright. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon. Copyright \u00a9 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179876898/terms-of-use) terms of use and (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179881519/rights-and-permissions-information) permissions pages at (https://www.npr.org) www.npr.org for further information. Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR\u2019s programming is the audio record. Facebook Flipboard Email Read & Listen (/) Home (/sections/news/) News (/sections/culture/) Culture (/music/) Music (/podcasts-and-shows) Podcasts & Shows Connect (/newsletters/) Newsletters (https://www.facebook.com/NPR/) Facebook (https://www.instagram.com/npr/) Instagram (/series/750003/press-room/) Press (/sections/publiceditor/) Public Editor (/corrections/) Corrections (/transcripts/) Transcripts (https://help.npr.org/contact/s/) Contact & Help About NPR (/about/) Overview (/diversity/) Diversity (/network/) NPR Network (/about-npr/1136563345/accessibility) Accessibility (/ethics/) Ethics (/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances) Finances Get Involved (/support/) Support Public Radio (/about-npr/186948703/corporate-sponsorship) Sponsor NPR (/careers/) NPR Careers (https://shopnpr.org/) NPR Shop (/sections/npr-extra/) NPR Extra (/about-npr/179876898/terms-of-use) Terms of Use (/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy) Privacy (/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy#yourchoices) Your Privacy Choices (https://text.npr.org/) Text Only Sponsor Message Sponsor Message (/about-npr/186948703/corporate-sponsorship) Become an NPR sponsor (Optimizely Internal Frame) " ], "output": "htmltotext.txt", "pwd": "/data/archive/1776553635.167056", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-04-18T23:08:00.799381+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "media": [ { "cmd": [ "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp", "--restrict-filenames", "--trim-filenames", "128", "--write-description", "--write-info-json", "--write-annotations", "--write-thumbnail", "--no-call-home", "--write-sub", "--write-auto-subs", "--convert-subs=srt", "--yes-playlist", "--continue", "--no-abort-on-error", "--ignore-errors", "--geo-bypass", "--add-metadata", "--format=(bv*+ba/b)[filesize<=750m][filesize_approx<=?750m]/(bv*+ba/b)", "--skip-download", "--cache-dir=/data/yt-dlp-cache/", "--cookies=/data/yt-dlp-cache/cookies.txt", "--proxy=socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150", "--no-playlist", "https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5694657" ], "cmd_version": "2024.10.7", "end_ts": "2026-04-18T23:08:11.368578+00:00", "index_texts": [], "output": "media/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1776553635.167056", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-04-18T23:08:04.810287+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/postlight-parser", "https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5694657" ], "cmd_version": "2.2.3", "end_ts": "2026-04-18T23:08:00.626434+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1776553635.167056", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-04-18T23:07:56.930181+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpjrz9caq7", "https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5694657" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-04-18T23:07:48.071076+00:00", "index_texts": [ "(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)BRITTANY LUSE, HOST: The year was 2010. I was very committed to skinny jeans. I 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.(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, \"ALL I DO IS WIN\")DJ KHALED: (Singing) Up down. 'Cause all I do is win.LUSE: But in the job market, all I did was lose.(SOUNDBITE OF SAD TROMBONE)LUSE: 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.ERIK BAKER: There are all these books now that will offer you a guide for how to, you know, detach from your work and, like, chill out a bit, and, you know, 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.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: That's Erik 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.\"BAKER: When I was writing the book, I sometimes told people that I was writing the kind of prehistory of the grindset.LUSE: (Laughter).(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: 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, is this play about us? Like, the pressure of the grindset 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.BAKER: I think that's exactly was my motivation for writing this book was to name and to criticize this culture that so many people, you know, myself included, have experienced and find exhausting.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: This is nonemployment. For the next few weeks, we're breaking down while getting a job and keeping it feels so hard right now, and how our ideas about employment just aren't matching up with today's realities. Erik, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.BAKER: Thanks so much for having me on.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, 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.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: OK. We're talking about your book today. It's all about the grindset, aka, the entrepreneurial work ethic. How would you define that term?BAKER: 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. And so this kind of set of virtues, increasingly, over the course of the 20th century, this comes to be described as being entrepreneurial. This entrepreneurial work ethic becomes dominant.LUSE: 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.BAKER: Yeah.LUSE: 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 intrapreneur. How did that happen? And what does that look like, like, being an entrepreneur, even in a company?BAKER: The idea that even ordinary company workers should be entrepreneurial really takes root in the response to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, especially in response to the threat of global competition from businesses in East Asia. You know, 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, you know, OK, which kind of workers are going to go? And this rhetoric emerges that you need to be entrepreneurial in order to kind of prove your value in order to stay.LUSE: 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 a startup environment for 4 1/2 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.BAKER: Yeah.LUSE: 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, you know, the day the axe finally falls on you, you'll be able to, you know, move forward.BAKER: 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, you know, 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. You know, 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. You can be that way, too, if you buy in.LUSE: 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. (Laughter) But there's this idea very present that, like, 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?BAKER: Exactly.LUSE: It can feel very forced.BAKER: 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, you know, spontaneously happens to allow people to express themselves creatively in their work on a day-to-day basis. So then there's kind of a real cynical dimension to a lot of this, this kind of strategizing for how to make people - almost gaslighting workers into thinking that this plainly uncreative work is, in fact, equivalent to being an artist.LUSE: 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.BAKER: Yeah, and so this is part of how these ideas first get into the management, consulting and, you know, sort of business school world. These management experts realize that if they're able to convincingly draw this kind of equivalence between ordinary workers and entrepreneurs, then, so they hope, a lot of the causes of worker dissatisfaction can be addressed without needing to actually empower workers in any kind of substantive way.LUSE: The concept of, like, making one's own job, the idea can feel really salient for some groups of people, especially people who are marginalized in the workforce, because, you know, perhaps making your own job either within, you know, salaried work or outside of the workforce could feel like having more agency. I attended Howard about 20 years ago. And entrepreneurship, even within the bounds of, you know, full-time salaried work for someone else, that was one of the skills that they were really big on drilling into our heads. And, like, 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?BAKER: 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, you know, then it's because you aren't being adequately entrepreneurial. It can also be scaled up to the group level. And so, you know, you can explain various discrepancies in wealth or income by saying, you know, 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.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: Coming up...BAKER: You know, they may say, OK, 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.LUSE: Stick around.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: 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?BAKER: 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. You know, this was a kind of staple of the rhetoric of the labor movement going back to the 19th century. You know, workers took a lot of pride in the fact that they were doing something every day that, you know, was ultimately, you know, making or providing something useful. This rhetorical shift that, again, is related to this increasing preoccupation with international competition that, as mentioned earlier, the sense that value really actually comes from not just making the useful thing but continually coming up with new things, staying one step ahead of the curve, the people who are creating value are the ones who are, you know, running this race the fastest. And so that, you know, 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.LUSE: As I've said, I feel like the grindset 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, well, I can't really get around this, or, you know, there are aspects of this that have worked for me. But I wonder, like, how does the promise of making your own job fall short?BAKER: Yeah. Well, you know, first of all, it's not enough to just kind of set the intention to change our mindsets, but, you know, we need other ways of responding to the needs the entrepreneurial work ethic is promising to supply, whether that's, you know, changes in social policy or strengthening unions, giving people more security at work. I think that the downsides are numerous. You know, first is the sense of depletion and burnout that a lot of people experience. And I talk in the book about how the concept of burnout, experts kept kind of discovering it in broader and broader circles of workers. Everyone was suddenly experiencing burnout, and, you know, I think that this is a big part of it, that sense of, you know, 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. You know, and then I think there's the the general sort of political downsides, the sense that the gig worker, you know, making their own job, that this person is essentially doing the same thing that Elon Musk is doing, just in a miniature form. You know, I think that that's ultimately really politically toxic and helps prevent people from confronting structures of inequality in our society.LUSE: 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, I don't know if it's really paying dividends for everyone.BAKER: Yeah.LUSE: Yeah, OK. 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?BAKER: It's tough to find alternatives. You know, at the end of the day, if you need healthcare, you need to pay the bills, maybe making my own job and getting rich, you know, by grinding, maybe there are long odds there, but is, like, Medicare for all, you know, is that more likely in the short term? A lot of people would say no, you know, 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, OK, 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.LUSE: 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 as in Maslow's hiarchy 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. 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?BAKER: It's a really good question. I mean, I think that that Maslow quote is interesting because he's not just saying you should bring entrepreneurs in to save a deteriorating society, but he's kind of denigrating these alternatives. And again, you know, I think that part of it is there's a real sense of pessimism about, you know, the ability of other kinds of people, you know, 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, you know, 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 figureheads. The United States in particular, you know, we love a cowboy, we love a superhero, you know, 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.LUSE: Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.BAKER: You know, well, people do actually need jobs if they can't, you know, turn to the government, for example, to provide them entrepreneurs who 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.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)LUSE: Erik, you've given me so much to think about. I had to sigh for a second. You've given me so much to think about. Thank you so much.BAKER: Oh, it's been my pleasure.LUSE: That was Erik 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.\" This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.LUSE: This episode was edited by...NEENA PATHAK, BYLINE: Neena Pathak.LUSE: Engineering support came from...DAVID GREENBERG, BYLINE: David Greenberg.LUSE: Our supervising producer is...BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Parton Girdwood.LUSE: Our VP of programming is...YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.LUSE: Alright. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.\n\n Copyright \u00a9 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.\n\n \n Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. 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