Business for Bohemians summary

Introduction

Business for Bohemians by Tom Hodgkinson Bohemians can achieve freedom and financial stability through creative entrepreneurship. Does the idea of business sound counterintuitive to your free-spirited nature? Like spirituality for atheists or dog ownership, for cat lovers, the two things might not seem to go together. After all, Bohemians are creative types.

They want to live a life of art and leisure. By contrast, business is about making money. It often means working all the time. What could be more at odds with the Bohemian lifestyle than that?

This summary reveals that they are not as incompatible as you might think. While there is some tension between them, they can also support one another. This provides a sustainable way to be a Bohemian. You can make money at the same time.

Let us find out how.

The Bohemian Approach to Business

The Bohemian Approach to Business. Let us be honest. If we could live in our ideal version of reality, most of us Bohemians would not be drawn to the world of business. We want to spend our time pursuing creative projects.

We want to listen to music, drink wine, and discuss philosophy. We want to stroll through countryside. We do not want to be sitting in an office. We do not want to be filling out spreadsheets.

We do not want to be talking about gross profit margins. More than anything, we want freedom. Freedom to live the good life. But unless we are born into wealth, we have to make money somehow.

We need to pay our bills. That alone gives us the time and basic options. Get a job or go into business. The key message here is this.

Compared to a job, going into business provides Bohemians with a better way of maintaining freedom in their work lives. Let us start with the first option. Getting a job means submitting yourself to the authority of someone else. Often, this is a giant corporation.

There is a reason they call it wage slavery. It is not just low-paid workers who suffer from it. Even if your salary is high, your labor still belongs to your employer. No wonder there are so many miserable bankers and lawyers out there.

Yes, they make boatloads of money. But they have to sacrifice most of their waking hours to working for someone else. The result is basically just a form of luxurious servitude. The alternative is to work for yourself.

That means going into business, whether as a freelancer, sole proprietor, small business owner, or entrepreneur. This way you get to decide what you do. You also decide how you do it. What is your product or service?

When and where do you work? Who do you work with? You get to answer these questions for yourself. That means you get to Is there something bourgeois about going into business?

Sure, but there is also something anarchistic. It is even revolutionary about it. You are doing your own thing, not someone else's. You are taking your life into your own hands.

Rather than giving it away to a corporate master, you are creating something new in the world. Rather than following a career path, that has already been laid out for you. In short, you are no longer just yearning for that freedom. You crave it as a bohemian.

You are seizing it for yourself.