The Hustle Myth: A Review of Eric Baker’s "Make Your Own Job"

Eric Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America is a scalpel-sharp dissection of a modern American pathology: our unrelenting obsession with work, wrapped up in the glittering but hollow promises of entrepreneurial self-actualization.

The premise is deceptively simple: why do Americans, regardless of class, race, or geography, believe in the cult of loving what you do—even when it burns us out, alienates us, or outright fails to deliver? Baker’s work is a tightly constructed intellectual history tracing the emergence and evolution of this entrepreneurial work ethic, and it’s as readable as it is deeply researched.

If you think this is another dull screed against capitalism, guess again. Baker threads together self-help pamphlets, corporate strategy manuals, Austrian economics, and even a healthy dose of new thought spirituality to uncover the Frankenstein monster that is today’s hustle culture. And for those of us who like our history with a twist of dark humor, Baker knows how to wield a biting wit. (One particularly memorable moment involves the grimly ironic rise of Amway, which managed to commodify both optimism and family values while ruining both for many participants.)

Baker begins with a bang—literally, the tragic and fiery death of Zappos founder Tony Hsieh. This opening sets the tone for a book that manages to feel like a murder mystery and cultural critique rolled into one. It’s not just a takedown of entrepreneurialism as an ideology; it’s an attempt to understand its stranglehold on the American imagination. Why does the promise of “making your own job” remain so seductive? Why does it survive—nay, thrive—when so many of its promises have been revealed as lies?

Baker doesn’t let anyone off the hook. He connects the dots from the Gilded Age hucksterism of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale to Silicon Valley’s snake oil peddlers of “disruption.” He digs into the role of figures like Henry Ford and the Koch brothers, showing how they shaped corporate America’s vision of itself. But what makes this book shine is Baker’s keen ability to show how this ideology seeped into the culture at large—how even a factory worker in Pennsylvania or a small-town Avon salesperson is made to feel that “success” depends on self-reliance, creative thinking, and just the right mindset (union solidarity be damned).

At the book’s heart is a scathing critique of how entrepreneurialism masks class hierarchies, erodes collective solidarity, and channels dissatisfaction into a self-destructive loop. You’re not unhappy because the system is broken, entrepreneurialism tells us—you’re just not hustling hard enough.

Make Your Own Job is a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of why we’re all so tired, so anxious, and yet still so convinced that “doing what you love” will save us. Spoiler: it won’t. Baker makes that abundantly clear, but he does so without nihilism. His prose has a way of cutting through the nonsense while still leaving room for empathy—for the dad who quit his factory job to be his own boss, or the young startup founder who bought into the dream until it consumed them.

If nothing else, this book is a reminder that the “American Dream” of work as salvation was never sustainable. It’s time we wake up from that nightmare.

Make Your Own Job — Harvard University Press

A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers.How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven’t seen commensurate rewards.Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.” Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.Historian Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today’s job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job” keeps hope alive.

Harvard University PressAndrew Preston