Tips for Better Freelancing: Part One - Choose your Coffee Wisely

[damooch916]

      Choose your coffee wisely

 

Routine. If you’re in a relationship, it’s a dirty word. If you’re building muscle - it’s an often used checkpoint. But the truth about routines is that they are as valuable (or not) as their maker. 

 

To understand the relationship between routines and it’s benefit to the freelancer, you must first ask yourself a nightmarishly harsh, squeamishly stated, draconian question: What are you doing?

 

Welcome to the NEW new world. The “everyone is talented; I’m professional because I say so; freelance - as - industry” brand new way of life. If you think the pool is full now, wait till the swim team gets here. Hope you brought your life preserver. 

 

It’s not hard to see why. In 2021 Forbes estimated that 91% of new American millionaires were self - made. 28% of the American workforce admitted to some form of entrepreneurial income. And the Hill reported an estimated 582 million people identified as entrepreneurs … With just a bit more identifying as being a freelancer (1.2 billion)… 

 

In fact, by 2027 America will have more freelancers than contracted employees. 

 

You might wanna fire up that coffee. 

 

 

        The Best Part of Waking Up

You’re likely saying to yourself, “Well - good. Those numbers are encouraging. That shows a clear growing trust in the acumen of the gig economy worker. I’ll take it. It’s nice to trust things. Well … except for Vince Vaughn. He clearly can’t be trusted. Every time I see him I think, ‘hey, it’s that Swingers guy. I like Swingers. I found his overtly annoying, charming non-self awareness kind of fun. Surely that won’t become some weird and continuous acting choice that chops through the rhythm of every movie he’s in; until his performance is so fragmented that his movies become things that happen around him. Sure, I’ll try another movie of his. 90’s nostalgia rules.’ 

Well, that’s what I get. Silly 90’s. Don’t you know the bottom is gonna drop out for a solid ten years?”

 

Well sure. You might say that to yourself. You may even be right to focus on the positive aspects of these upward trends. 

 

Or … you might be a few years shy of competing against the most highly skilled, expertly trained, market advanced, top tier freelancers that the world has ever produced. Spoiler: it’s that one. That’s the one it’s gonna be. 

 

Yes, freelancing is an already incredibly competitive market. But the vast majority of brand new freelancers are the same skill-lacking novices that this very new world seeks to shut out. And that brings us back to routine (you didn’t think I was gonna make it, did ya skip?). 

 

               Where Do you Start?

Beyond the “Highly Successful Habits,” talk - “routine” speaks to the lifespan of your time as a person of skill. Starting with the very foundation of what your skills are based on: knowledge. And this is where a lot of freelancers fall short. They lack true and industry accepted knowledge. Because they don’t actually have any. 

 

It’s this complete imbalance that allows for freelancers to plaster themselves in nice sounding blanket terms like: Professional. Market Ready. Expert. Experienced. Psychic. 

 

Words with actual meaning (most of them). Copied from the copy of someone’s poorly written copy. When in reality, most freelancers don’t even know the industry separators that identify “pro” from “non-pro.” 

 

Quick test: Did you start your freelancing career by looking round, deciding what would be “easy” to sell, launching a website and start charging people? If you answered yes, you don’t have a good routine. 

 

This also means that you’re an “amateur.” Well here’s some encouraging news: No matter what you’ve been told, amateur is not a dirty word. Not when you’re honest. Some of the hardest working, most adaptable, greatest of the capable people in the world are amateurs. Knowing that will allow you to present the most honest aspects of your abilities to the client. You might say, “Mr. or Ms. Client - what I lack in experience, I will make up for in dedicated work and a hands approach to communication.” 
 

In a world where everyone seeks to say the same thing, say something else. 

 

Your first routine as a freelancer should be, “the acquiring and practicing of skill.” This means that at its minimum, you should be waking up everyday and devoting half the time of a typical day’s work (commonly referred to as eight hours, according to people not in charge of their own business) to the study, practice, news, events and market of the job you want to enter into. 

 

This also means that you aren’t quite ready to take jobs at a certain skill. The truth is: most freelancers fail because they aren’t skilled enough to freelance. They aren’t ready. And people can tell. 

 

Yes, everyone would love to work for themselves - but what knowledge could you gain from someone else’s business while you work up the abilities to work on your own? 

 

Step one in the routine of an amateur freelancer is: learn the craft. 

 

The Lethal Charm of the Freelancer Routine 

For the rest of us, we’re out to succeed and we know the lingo. Successful people have a routine. You know that. You’ve read that. But are you doing anything about it? There are the age old standards:

 

Wake up at the same early time

Declutter your physical and digital locations 

Get moving around to fire up that headspace

Listen to cheery music 

Eat and include carbs 

 

Then there are some methods that go outside of the typical:

 

Take a hot to cold shower to jolt the system

Read a chapter of a book 

Go for a morning run 

 

All of these methods are great ways to engage with the workday. But an important question to these methods should always be - which one is working and why? 

 

Without realizing, a lot of us have a routine already. A routine that’s been developed out of habit and behavior. Most freelancers don’t even realize where their time is going and how much of it has been wasted. 

 

As an exercise, write down a log of things you do for the next two days. See if some strange patterns emerge. Do you hover over the coffee maker for ten minutes, read the news, take a shower, browse client requests and wait patiently for messages that never come? 

 

The problem is your routine. 

 

Try spending the first ten minutes of your day looking at phrases, words and offerings made by the top competitors in your field. Spend the next ten minutes adjusting SEO - if you are developing an understanding of seller offers to term popularity. 

 

Do you find yourself waking up and reading the news? Eating, slowly and groggily bumbling about and barely squeaking through that first order? 

 

Try ten minute yoga. A jog outside. Or spend five minutes running at the wall. Either way, the issue of slugging around is the result of low energy, which can be addressed by exercising. Even if the issue is lack of sleep - exercising is known to regulate your sleep pattern. 

 

(End of side one. Please turn the record over to begin side two)

 

        The Breakfast of Champions
In the early 2000’s, as a matter of pure accident, I toured the eastern states as lead singer/ pianist for a fairly rough biker band. We were the “go to” group for bike weeks, poker runs, major events and every type of loosely crafted, middle class, anarchist, club color wearing, stark raving event that you could imagine. I dubbed this colony of weirdness, “Caligula in denim.”

 

It was a far distance from my roots as a staff songwriter, a job that I still maintained at the time. I was accustomed to jazz festivals, casino show rooms, colleges, state fair amphitheaters, songwriter rounds and entertainment showcases. 

 

This was not that. 

 

It certainly didn’t match my self imposed vision of the future; some strange variation of Frasier meets Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail. I was categorically “other” than the mass of underground humanity that followed that band and I made no attempt to showcase myself as anything less. 

 

As a declaration of my “difference,” I placed a giant sticker on the front of my keyboard, easily the most visible real-estate on every stage we played, being located at the front of every stage we played, that proudly read:

 

“I’ve drank enough coffee to not feel the bullets.” 

 

It was a primal scream that announced my belonging to a specific collective: the coffee people. And no situation, even a dangerous one (like deep mountain night clubs with “Blues Brothers” barbed wire stage shields) was going to make me shed my true colors. 

 

I can’t tell you how many tough-as-nails bikers complimented that sticker. 

 

            The Choice is Yours 
Coffee has informed many of the characteristics, preferences, relationships and decisions that I’ve made in my life (by many, I mean “all”). This is probably due to “coming of age” in a unique time in America. In the early to middle 90’s, the coffee shop went from a hybrid of “all night” eateries to a very specific, very curated identity. This period is reflected in our films, sitcoms and music of the time. 

 

For a brief and beautiful moment, before bookstores became toy sellers; before the clacking of student-panic performed the soundtrack to every cafe on laptops the world over and before Starbucks took aesthetic cues from the airport bathroom … for just a brief moment, you could know everything about a person just by knowing where they got their coffee. 

 

Maybe, you still can. 

 

Coffee is etched into the routine of human life. It has been for a very long time. Upward to 40% of the world’s population drinks a coffee everyday. This fact is important because it speaks to how many people allocate time to a single substance on a daily basis. Chances are fairly high that you’re one of them. This is a provable thru-line that occurs in almost half of the routines of human beings. That certainly makes it worth paying attention to. 

 

What, if any, correlation exists between espresso and salary? 

 

How many coffees does the average millionaire drink versus the 40k and below crowd? 

 

Are you more or less likely to be successful at your job if you drink more coffee than the average person?

 

These are good questions. Maybe. There’s a lot of chicken-and-egg stuff lurking in the fabric, but still they beg some looking into. And for good reason: We need to understand our routine and it’s relationship to the routine of people who succeed in our field. 

 

Accounting for time is a crucial element to freelancing success. This is especially true for freelancers because we rarely have a “boss” to oversee our work. It’s our burden to learn “self governance” and “self regulation.” These arts aren’t restricted to understanding the time we allocate, as we can also understand the relationship our activities have to the “above average” and reverse engineer ourselves into their modes of thought. 

 

Or maybe we can’t. But the ability to philosophize on these daily designs seems like a strong pre-indicator of success. The process itself is a winning utility. So it’s definitely one to engage with. 
 

 

   Fear and Loathing at the Coffee Pot
In 1992 Alec Baldwin famously shouted, “Put that coffee down,” to a disbelieving Shelley “The Machine” Levene - as portrayed by the brilliant Jack Lemmon. Baldwin, as Blake, then uttered a line that divided the earth and became the battlecry for die-hard sales people everywhere. 

 

“Coffee is for closers. Only.”

 

Then, Baldwin went on to have a podcast or something and I refuse to acknowledge anything passed that. 

 

The point was made. In one sentence, writer David Mamet deconstructed the difference between the successful and the not-successful.

 

It boils down to our concepts of time and reward. It comes down to our ideas of preparation and our engagement with the minutes we have vs the minutes we use. Lemmon’s character didn’t deserve a “break,” because he hadn’t earned one. Baldwin’s character seeks to implement his own “self-regulation” onto a person who can’t possibly imagine living with such a demanding structure. To Levene, this is cruel and degrading behavior meant solely to demoralize. But to Blake, this is the first step in understanding the art of success. 

 

Routine is the art of analyzing your time and engineering a code that seeks to increase your success.

 

An ever evolving, always adaptable, continuously seeking code that begins with the opening of one’s eyes and begs to understand every second of our behaviors - from customer interactions -  to the first sip of coffee that we drink in the morning.
 

Every. Single. Cup. 

 

So … yeah …  choose your coffee wisely.

 

                    (End of record) 

 

[shathil_zaman]

Learnt something from this article. Thanks. 

[damooch916]

On 3/16/2022 at 3:16 PM, shathil_zaman said:

Learnt something from this article

Awesome. Hopefully you’ll enjoy our follow up series, “When Coffee Goes Bad: a true-crime Pod-thread.” 

[newsmike]

7 hours ago, damooch916 said:

“I’ve drank enough coffee to not feel the bullets.” 

Tommy, this is why I want you on my side in every single bar fight.  Bada Bing. 

[damooch916]

2 hours ago, newsmike said:

Tommy, this is why I want you on my side in every single bar fight.  Bada Bing. 

Buddy, in thirty years of playing music - I’ve been in some good ones. 
 

Not bad for an English Lit academic with a propensity for absurd vaudeville - who leans more Tin Pan Alley than he does Greg Allman. 

[frank_d]

16 hours ago, damooch916 said:

“Coffee is for closers. Only.”

 

Then, Baldwin went on to have a podcast or something and I refuse to acknowledge anything passed that. 

 

The point was made. In one sentence, writer David Mamet deconstructed the difference between the successful and the not-successful.

 

It boils down to our concepts of time and reward. It comes down to our ideas of preparation and our engagement with the minutes we have vs the minutes we use. Lemmon’s character didn’t deserve a “break,” because he hadn’t earned one. Baldwin’s character seeks to implement his own “self-regulation” onto a person who can’t possibly imagine living with such a demanding structure. To Levene, this is cruel and degrading behavior meant solely to demoralize. But to Blake, this is the first step in understanding the art of success. 

 

Routine is the art of analyzing your time and engineering a code that seeks to increase your success.

What a great example and cherry on top, that's one of my favorite movie scenes of all time.

The concept of time/reward is universal I think.

What changes is our perception. 

Sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but having the right mindset is key. 

How you can do that? It's simple: much like anything else, you need to train for it.