What’s your plan B? Does your plan B focus on how you are going to deal with challenges or does it focus on how you are going to leverage opportunities?

In the Friday commute home, I was listening to Marketplace on WPLN and heard London Business School founder Charles Handy give this encouragement to those whose plan B is making their own way.

The world is full of potential clients — for something. The problem is that you have to create the something yourself, and most of us are not born entrepreneurs. Particularly if we have grown up and even grown old in institutions, moving from school to college to organization, places where work was shoved at you, yours only to pick up your shovel or pen and deal with it.

It’s best to practice it young if you can. I said to my kids, “When you leave college don’t get a job at first. Find someone who will pay you money for something you make or do for them. It will be good practice for life later on.” But it’s never too late to start, and more of us will have to, one day, now that life is longer and organizations much slimmer.

I did it. I became fed up with organizations — grew out of them really — and went on my own when I was 49. Cold-calling potential clients, learning to live a cash-flow life after a salaried one. It was hard at first. But I learnt to love the freedom, and the joy of working with people rather than for people. Besides, if you are your own boss, it’s up to you how hard you work, or where, or when, or why.