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Comment by robertwiblin | Hacker News Reader

Working for yourself will often be fulfilling, because it can provide many of the six things we list that matter:

* Work you’re good at * Work that helps others * Engaging work that lets you enter a state of flow (freedom, variety, clear tasks, feedback) * Supportive colleagues * A job that meets your basic needs, like fair pay, short commute and reasonable hours * A job that fits your personal life.

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Disagree. Working for yourself would provide none of these but allows you to create all/many of these out of your sheer will. These things are not a pre-condition.

I believe robertwiblin et al.'s point is that ceteris paribus working for yourself that features these characteristics will make you happier than working for yourself and focusing on other things.

In the original article, they clearly identify that some things (e.g. competence) can change over the course of a career. Hence "pre-condition" is a strange way to look at the research.

It doesn't necessarily provide those things certainly. But inasmuch as it makes people fulfilled, it will mostly be because working for yourself is providing those things. :)

or there is a simpler explanation. Those 60 studies made assumptions about what a job is and that definition would have excluded working for yourself.

The study would still make perfect sense if you look at job as an employment working for some other employer.

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