Posted on:Self-Employment

The joy of amateurism

You know what I love? Doing things I’m only OK at doing. Below average even. It’s really the best.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to be the absolute best at what you do, which is often a trademark quality in freelancers and entrepreneurs of all kinds, you know the incremental improvement game: hours and hours and hours of every day are spent focused polishing, refining, developing, researching and practicing the same skill/product/business you’ve been polishing, refining, developing, researching and practicing for the past bazillion days. It’s exhausting. Of course it’s rewarding and fulfilling and all that too, but today, we’re acknowledging that it’s exhausting too. Come on, A-typers, you can admit it.

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Posted on:Writing

Project Pivot: Breaking the rules to follow an idea

Where I come from, you finish what you start. Join a team; make every practice. Get an assignment; complete it on time. Start a book; finish the book. Say you’re going to do whatever; do whatever until whatever is done. Those were the rule’s in my mother’s house, so those are the rules, at age 32, I still march to in my own house. Good training, Nancy.

I’ve recently stumbled upon a quandary with regard to these instincts. The project I started a few months ago, a new book, was being threatened by a series of things: a) I wasn’t sure if I was up to the task of jumping, feet first into a long work of fiction, b) I was kind of procrastinating, c) I was hit with another idea that I got really excited about.

But following new ideas into the weeds with an open project pending isn’t part of my programming. So I resisted. Maybe later. I said I’m doing this thing. So I’m doing it.

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Posted on:Self-Employment Writing

Don’t even try and rush me, Wednesday (A freelancer’s nail painting guilt)

Painting my nails on a Wednesday afternoon always feels a little scandalous. Never mind that the last 48 hours were an intense marathon of working from waking up through Daily Show time. Or the fact that painting my nails takes ten minutes, and I’lll go back to working when I’m done. It seems indulgent. And I feel guilty about it.

Even though freedom is the number one reason freelancers cite for choosing to work for themselves, it’s difficult to get cozy with it.

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