I’m a little late getting around to starting and posting to this blog, The New Yeoman. I’ve been too busy practicing the life rather than writing about it.

I was first inspired to build The New Yeoman by an article in USA Today about Mike Rowe. The specific quote was,

USA Today: You’ve said we need to look at unemployment numbers differently. What do you mean?

Mike Rowe: I mean that 12 million unemployed people doesn’t necessarily mean 12 million too few jobs. It could just as easily mean 12 million too many employees. Not too many people – too many people trained to think like employees. Fostering entrepreneurship is no less important than “Creating Jobs.”

I couldn’t believe there was not a follow up. This was a profoundly important point for everyone in the USA (and world-wide for that matter). No one owes anyone a job. People with needs for a specific skill or set of skills create “jobs,” temporary or permanent. Not only may the employers not need, or ever need, the number of “unemployed” people, but there may be a formidable disconnect between skills needed and skills possessed by the “unemployed.” I think we have a mixture of these two issues.

So why do so many “unemployed,” possibly “unemployable” simply wait for a job that may never come? Why not self-employment? There has never been a better time to be self-employed.

At The New Yeoman, I hope to describe the self-employed life and what it looks like in the hopes of encouraging a few more people to self-remove themselves from the “unemployed” line.