A little freelance advice
Image Tim Haynes
“No input, no output.” Joe Strummer.
After years of scaling the greasy pole of creative leadership and enduring the redundancies and firings that are our industry’s biggest occupational hazard beyond sitting-related lower back pain, we’re now freelancers by choice.
With a combined 20+ years of (mostly) solvent self-employment, working for ourselves clearly works for us.
But having spent a long time on both sides of the fence, we know it doesn’t work for everyone.
And it never will.
Because whether they admit it or not, surfing the wave of low-level anxiety that comes with waiting for the next paying project is most people’s idea of professional hell.
That’s because being a headline act in the gig economy relies on you having the experience, self-motivation and confidence to work around the industry expectation that freelancers are ‘always on’.
And we say ‘work around’ because if you want to go freelance and preserve your talent, physical health and sanity, you need the confidence to be always on…but on your terms.
Bianca Guimaraes, ECD and founding partner of agency Mischief neatly summed up the required mindset.
“What we say yes to shapes us, and what we say no to defines us, and that’s the biggest reason we follow what we believe in.”
Still, ask any freelancer his or her deepest professional fear and you can bet saying ‘no’ is up there with an unexpected letter from the ATO.
It doesn’t matter how senior, talented and bulletproof reliable you are, knocking back work always comes with the nagging feeling the phone will never ring again.
Spoiler alert: It will.
Because if you work on the Guimaraes theory that the projects you knock back say as much about you as the ones you take on, you’ll be well on your way to building a respected freelance brand.
One that gives you the courage to push through those times when your survival instinct’s telling you to just drop your day rate and principles along with your trousers, and shuffle like a terrified penguin at whatever’s offered.
Of course, the ability to look your kids in the eye as you’re feeding them and being able to sleep at night are also nice.
As Gillian Welch sings towards the end of the track we name checked in our last post, ‘Everything is Free’…
Never minded working hard
It’s who I’m working for…
Being always on but on your terms also means taking a deep breath at least once a year and switching off.
Thanks to an Irish judge named Murphy, the moment you book the air fares, a month of lucrative work will drop into your lap.
But there’s a solid argument that those few weeks each year you spend not working are as important as the ideas you crack, presentations you nail and pitches you win when you are.
Read Dr Seuss to your kids in a caravan by the beach. Watch ants build a nest. Enjoy an electrical storm. Have an extra glass of wine. Go to a gig with your significant other for the first time in years. Read a novel or try writing one.
Whatever it is, just don’t think about chasing work while you’re doing it.
Because whether you still have the luxury of four weeks’ paid leave or not, staying at the top of your creative game is, as Joe Strummer so pithily put it, about constantly feeding the beast.
And you can’t do that – or stay one step ahead of the Terminators - if you never take time to be inspired by anything new and different.