Exploding the Myth That Freelancers Aren’t Real Entrepreneurs

Getting real about business, scale, and happiness

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There’s a trend in hustle culture to look down at freelancers. You will hear many online business gurus say that freelancers aren’t real entrepreneurs.

That is bullshit.

Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering new ways to combine resources. It is about assuming the risk of organizing and managing a business.

When gurus say that freelancers aren’t real entrepreneurs, they are saying that freelancers don’t run real businesses. This is a tired myth that needs to be exploded.

There is nothing wrong with creating a business where you are not directly involved in the creation of the product or service.

Many people have happily created agencies or software companies where their role is in getting the right people together to do the job.

But that does not mean that if you are the one involved in creating the product or service that you’re somehow not a true business person.

A lot of this attitude can be traced back to Michael E. Gerber’s books The E Myth and The E Myth Revisited. These books were hugely influential in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street in the 1990s and the early 2000s