Why Be a Peasant When You Can Be a Knight Errant?

What adventurous boy or girl didn’t grow up wanting to be a knight?

All of our favorite stories, video games, and histories let us imagine ourselves spending our lives as a series of adventures. Yet somehow most of us have chosen to be peasants.

There wasn’t much attraction then to the idea of serving a lord, tying down to a fixed point of earth, and living on the good graces of the powerful. But when we’ve chosen our careers, we’ve generally chosen to commit our whole working lives to serving on the land of another while a whole realm of people with quests awaits.

By “whole realm of quests”, I mean the markets – known and unknown – that we could be serving if we were entrepreneurial. And the alternative to being a “peasant” in this world of markets is being a “knight errant”* – always in search of entrepreneurial opportunities.

We see one form of “knight errant” work quite literally in the gig economy. It’s now possible (if not easy) to for many people to support themselves doing gigs they choose, from driving people around to making deliveries to creating designs to walking dogs. For every skill, there is a freelance opportunity, and for every opportunity taken, there are “knight errant” virtues to gain: resourcefulness, courage, stamina, independent judgment.

Peasant life may be more comfortable, but a quest-based life is going to be more interesting. We’re heading into a world in which the average “workweek” can have multiple quests. The work will take many forms, God willing. And with that variety, we can count on work requiring more of a spirit of knightly adventure from all of us.


*If you think the analogy silly, consider that our term “Freelance” was first used to describe mercenary medieval warriors.

Save as PDFPrint

Written by 

James Walpole is a writer, startup marketer, intellectual explorer, and perpetual apprentice. He opted out of college to join the Praxis startup apprenticeship program and currently manages marketing and communications at bitcoin payment technology company BitPay. He writes daily at jameswalpole.com.