For a recent Idler, says Tom Hodgkinson, I went to interview the great management guru Charles Handy. I asked him about his tips on being a freelancer and creative entrepreneur in the modern world and what he thinks the future holds

Charles Handy: We did a book, The New Alchemists, which looks at people who start new businesses, some theatre companies, social websites and so on. We came up with some rules. The first one is, the most important one, is that you have to be passionate about what you’re doing, you can’t do it to make money out of it. Money can be a result but not the purpose. It won’t work if you don’t really care about the business or magazine for example.

Tom Hodgkinson: Something you would do whether you were paid to do it or not.

CH: Exactly. Secondly, you can’t do it on your own. No one has ever achieved anything in terms of organisation on their own. You need people you can trust and who also, to some extent, are passionate about it. Thirdly, it helps enormously to know what your particular skills are. Because there’ll be something that you’re really good at, and you must make sure you concentrate on that and it will compensate for things you can’t do, like accounting. And then you can contract out what you’re not good at. You also need enormous support from home, whether they’re involved in it or not, they need to understand that this is your passion and that you’ll need those two years.

TH: What the Idler is really about is a kind of human liberty, it’s for people who don’t want to feel trapped in a corporation or bureaucracy. How do you think that was twenty years ago? Do you think people then had more opportunity to a liberated life? Today it seems that that the creative occupations and the middle classes have lost all their money, whilst the owners of Uber and Airbnb and Google have sucked it all away.

CH: The statistics are that of the 40 million people who are of working age in this country, only 18 million are in proper full time jobs. Of the others, 8 million are doing homework, looking after the kids, unpaid but working, and there are 6 million unpaid family carers, very important, but also unpaid. Then there are all the part time workers, and the self-employed and the tiny businesses. As you probably know, 94 percent of the businesses in Britain have less than five people, they’re effectively self employed. Now that self-employed element is growing to five million or something, like the Uber drivers, they’re never going to get rich but they’re doing what they want to. They’re doing this whilst looking for a better job, living a pretty satisfied life.

Others rent out their houses, through Airbnb. There are a lot of mini businesses around the place and I think that’s what it’s going to be like in the future for an awful lot of people. They’re not going to get rich, but they’ll be to some degree free.

They may feel some pressure to make more money, but if they don’t it’s their choice. That’ll be OK, if we can get the world off consumerism and get people to realise that having enough is OK, provided we can have a bit of time, a bit of idle time, to do things you enjoy and have control over… and that you won’t be bossed around. So the world is much more an Uber-world, in spite of what the government wants to do: they’re not employed, they’re self-employed with a sort of agent as it were. The relationship I have with my agent and publisher is going to be much more common. I couldn’t have my books published without the help of what I call the elephant – I’m the flea – but they don’t employ me and I wouldn’t dream of being employed with them, They can’t tell me what to do, it’s an adult to adult relationship and they pay me by results, with a little up front if I’m lucky. I think more and more people are going to have that relationship and an organisation is going to be more like what the name sounds like.

This is an excerpt from an interview with Charles Handy which appears in issue 48 of the Idler

Charles Handy is a writer and business expert. He worked at Shell before becoming a professor at the London Business School. He has been chairman of the RSA. He has written twenty books including The Empty Raincoat, The Age of Unreason, The Elephant and the Flea and most recently, The Second Curve.