Never Nine to Five: A Podcast for Soloists
Never Nine to Five is a new podcast from The Solo Project about the booming population of freelancers, indie professionals, creatives, and free agents.
We’re Soloists. This is the Solo Movement. And this is our new world of work.
The Solo Project offers inspiration, ideas, tools, and community for the country’s most ambitious soloists. We’re a media and research company, launched by the people who helped create and lead the Fast Company and Inc. Magazine brands.
Our Job: To document the New World of Work.
Nicole Dyer, host of Never Nine to Five
38 million.
That’s how many Americans are currently working as soloists.
We’re everywhere: in accounting and design, programming and the law, consulting and carpentry. We work on our own or in small teams.
We work with corporations, but not for them.
There are many economic forces driving the solo movement — but there is also a cultural one: the rising status of the indie professional.
Soloists are disproportionately thought leaders, creatives, and tastemakers — outsized influencers not just of the strategies of our corporate leaders and policymakers but of everything we watch, eat, listen to, and consume.
Those of us who choose to work on our own, once suspect, are now respected and admired as never before.
What attributes predict success as a soloist? Not the ones you might think. The strongest predictors are these:
Tolerance of ambiguity. (And by “tolerance of” we mean “hunger for.”)
Adequate professional network capital.
Mastery, but not of everything. One highly leverage-able competency trumps versatility.
The ability to fall in love easily (but mostly with ideas and projects).
A sense of “calling” — or at least the feeling that your work is more authentically interesting than you can reasonably resist.
Join us as we get up close and personal with real soloists on the ground, in their spaces, and doing the work they were born to do.
What does the new world of work look like? It looks like this.
