Ah, my mistake. It's good to see GM users who are older than me actually.

What are brownie points?

Anyway, it might be idealistic, yeah. But it still seems that all the people that 'settle down' in a normal job don't seem to do anything that impressive with their life (as a general rule, there are exceptions), and that the largest achievements tend to come from people who don't work for anyone else. Of course there are problems with it, 90% of businesses failing in the first year and all that (although on the other hand 90% of new employees are also fired in the first year I believe).

now, i apologize for dragging commercial games into your conversation, but this coming analogy is quite fitting considering the subject matter:

will wright
shigeru miyamoto

they don't do anything impressive with their lives or creations?
maybe i'm in the minority on this, but i beg to differ...

seems as if you might be creating an artificial rule set for success.  isn't success actually determined by the individual, and not the structure of his/her work environment?

Will Wright actually owned his own business (Maxis) before being bought out by EA. Also, Miyamoto wasn't hired by Nintendo until he was about 30, before which he never had a job before, so it's possible that he learned some of his independence during that time. But yeah, I'm not saying it's universal, it just seems more common.

that's fine.  but, by this logic everybody fits your description.  nobody is employed before they're employed for the first time ;)
i'm not trying to argue, mind you.  instead i'm just trying to keep minds open and prevent gross labels and generalizations upon something that really can't be generalized.  i just don't feel that whether or not somebody is employed has any effect on their own creative potential.  the human spirit is as big as the individual decides it to be - regardless of outside force/influence.

The idea that nothing can be generalized about this is itself a generalization, though.

Also, saying that there's definitely no relationship between how hard one works and whether they work for someone else or themselves is the same type of thing as saying that there definitely is such a relationship (which wasn't what I was saying exactly, I was saying that I suspect there is).