🔥 Campfire 18
What is the one skill that can help me succeed as a freelancer?
What is the one skill that can help me succeed as a freelancer?
Freelancing requires you to wear many hats. But I genuinely believe that there’s one skill that, when you master it, will help you succeed as a freelancer.
The good news is that most of you have already been practicing this skill without even noticing it. And that skill it…
Communication
As simple as it might sound, your ability to communicate your ideas, solutions, value, and impact you create is crucial when it comes to freelancing.
At the end of the day, it’s the best communicator who gets the job, not the best practitioner.
That should be encouraging news to anyone freelancing or thinking about getting into freelancing.
You might have to spend an entire lifetime to become the best practitioner in your field. But you’ve already spent a lifetime mastering communicating with other human beings.
Learning this skill was a natural process for you, so go ahead and put it to practice. Talk to potential or existing clients, present your ideas and solutions, and get paid what you are worth.
This week's discovery
"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you." — Carl Jung
Apps and websites
DALL·E 2 →
DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It can create original, realistic images and art from a text description. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles.
Around →
Meetings don't have to crush your soul. Around is a radically unique video calls platform, designed to help hybrid-remote teams create, collaborate, and celebrate together.
Play →
Play is the first native iOS design tool built for creating mobile products. It's the first tool to make contextual design for mobile possible. No more proxies, simulations, or syncing to mirror apps. With Play, you can design, iterate and experiment with your product as you create it.
Tweet of the week
Paper books have become a sign of luxury
A luxury of NOT multitasking
Of doing 1 thing holding a device that doesn't send messages, push notifications, or display time.
But can luxury be also useful? Should a useful non-entertaining non-fiction book be printed on paper?— Ana Bibikova (@NotechAna) June 6, 2022
I personally love both physical and digital books. Both have their upsides and downsides. Depending on where I am and what I want to get from reading I choose one over another. What about you? How do you prefer to read?
Food for thought
Quitting Consulting Via Productization →
In the solo consultant model, you’re typically doing pretty well if you can actually bill 75 percent of your time, so 75 percent of the time is actually billing engagements. The other 25 percent of the time is overhead, prospecting for new engagements, taking your vacations, etc.
The happiness ruse →
Modern thinkers tend to view happiness less as a lack of pain than as a surfeit of wellbeing.
Perhaps one solution to the quandary of happiness – we want to be happy but not to alienate or hurt ourselves on the path to it – lies in realigning ourselves with the Romantics, who embraced both their joys and sorrows.
The Internet Can Make Us Feel Awful →
Our ability to make choices that really reflect our values is subsumed by nudges to do more of what platforms want. If YouTube really cared about our intentions and values, when we logged on to learn ukulele it would try to serve that need — and then send us off to practice! — rather than tapping into our lizard brains with unrelated videos to get us to spend more time watching.