Skipping Jobs

The development of technology looks different in every place. The path that is followed in one country will be different in another country with different economic reality and different laws.

One of the most noteworthy examples of this is the adoption of mobile phones in developing countries. In many African and Asian countries, landlines never existed. They didn’t have a landline phone to mobile phone transition, they went from letters to mobile phones.

I was listening to an episode of the Crossing Borders Podcast today with an entrepreneur from Bolivia. He mentioned almost in passing that 65% of people in Bolivia are entrepreneurs. They are self-employed hustlers doing all types of tasks from food carts, to clothing stalls, to small-time repairs.

In Bolivia, like so many Asian or African countries you have to be a hustler to survive. There are no jobs for the non-privileged classes, so people are forced into the grey market to freelance and start small-scale businesses.

The End of Jobs

In his great book on how technology is changing the way we work, Taylor Pearson talks about how we are moving past a job-based world. How solopreneurs, freelancers, and small “multi-national” businesses are the way of the future.

Tech tools like AWS, social media, website templates, cross-border payments, Amazon fulfillment, Square, etc. give individuals major entrepreneurial power which changes the logic of large organizations. Slowly but surely people are leaving behind their jobs and starting life as entrepreneurs. This transition is similar to the landline to mobile phone transition we went through twenty years ago.

In places like Bolivia and other developing countries, just like they skipped the landline, they may skip jobs altogether. People aren’t starting side hustles as a way out of their full-time jobs, they are using technology to improve their full-time hustles. They are using social media, messaging apps, payment processors, etc. to improve their businesses and operate at a higher level.

They never transitioned into Organization Men, so they don’t have to transition out. As a result, they may actually be better equipped for the end of jobs because they never lived in a job world. They skipped it entirely.