🔥 Campfire 12
How to waste your career, 2-step goal-setting formula, external motivation, and how to do client discounts
How to waste your career
There's one piece of advice I always give to my students when they find their first full-time job: don't stay there for long.
I try to convince young designers to start with freelancing instead of a full-time job in a company because you have a minimal opportunity to grow various skills.
Think about it: when you're hired for a full-time job as a designer, the only task you need to do is to make designs. You're focusing on one thing right away instead of broadening your skillset and looking for what is working.
Here's another perspective: you're no longer just a designer when you start freelancing. You're a solo business owner, which means you also do marketing, sales, accounting, contracts, presentations, communication, and much more besides your core design skills.
In her article "How to waste your career," Apoorva Govind, a former engineer at Uber and Apple, talks about changing jobs, especially when you're early in your career.
Change can be scary. It requires you to get out of your comfort zone. But, in my experience, staying too long is one of the worst mistakes you can make in your career.
2-step goal-setting formula
Society told us that setting goals is important. However, most people fail at accomplishing the goal. One of the reasons is the lack of emotional connection to the goal.
My 2-step goal-setting formula:
1. Pick a goal outcome I want to achieve
2. Change the goal to "Enjoy every second on the journey to achieving X"
I've found 95% of achieving anything comes down to cherishing the daily, monotonous consistency – and this reframe makes it easy.— Dickie Bush 🚢 (@dickiebush) March 17, 2022
External motivation
As humans, we often tend to overthink the importance of motivation. Motivation is an excellent energy source to start a new project or work on your goal. However, it doesn't last long most of the time.
People are constantly trying to find ways to motivate themselves with external things:
Buy a new iPhone when I do X
Travel to Y when I accomplish Z
But it doesn't work like that. Instead, find an inner motivation to drive you through the most challenging times.
Moina Abdul perfectly illustrated this in her visual:
External motivation is futile. Change your work instead. pic.twitter.com/ITluirOal9
— Moina Abdul (@moina_abdul) March 4, 2022
How to do client discounts
One of the readers of Alex's Camp asked about discounts:
One of my clients wants a discount. But he says that he will bring a lot of work in the next few months.
First, make sure this is not the type of client to avoid. Usually, the client's who want a discount are not the ones you want to work with regularly.
But if you have already worked with this client and he's trustworthy, here's how to give them a discount and protect yourself.
Only discount in retainer form.
If they're bringing you a lot of work, you'd want to lock that engagement in for the next 3-6 months. And then reward that commitment with a 5% or 10% discount.
Be sure to bring in the contract as proof of engagement, payment, and discount. It's a good practice to take 30% to 50% of the project payment upfront, so you will be protected if the client magically disappears.