via How To Get A Freelance Job In 5 Days – Forbes.

Can you get a freelance job in five days? You definitely cannot get a freelance job in five days if you do not try.

People in their twenties (also known as People Most Likely to Be/Want to Be Freelancers) send me emails on occasion. Oftentimes, they want to know: How can I get a freelancing job?

Most of the time I don’t reply. I’m too busy freelancing.

TIP #1: You’re not unemployed

Recently, a twentysomething I know and like emailed me, and she was like, “I’m unemployed!” And I was like, “No, you’re not. You’re self-employed.” With this easy rhetorical trick, you can go from unemployed to self-employed in under 60 seconds.

Once upon a time, I was unemployed. Really, it wasn’t that long ago. The biggest obstacle between you and employment is your brain.

Side-effects of unemployment can include but are not limited to: low self-esteem, depression, loneliness, anxiety, and paralysis.

You don’t have to be unemployed to be a freelancer — that’s the great thing about freelancing: anyone can do it — but the unemployed may find the gravel shoulder on the journey to employment is made of freelance gigs.

Read the whole thing at Forbes

****

Related at PJ Lifestyle:

Kathy Shaidle: Talent Isn’t Everything: 5 Secrets to Freelance Success

via The Daily Routines of Famous Writers | Brain Pickings.

Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview:

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

[…]

I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time. Later on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I went up to UCLA and found a basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cents into the typewriter, you could buy thirty minutes of typing time.

[....]

Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote standing (“Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.”), approaches his craft with equal parts poeticism and pragmatism:

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

[....]

Productivity maniac Benjamin Franklin had a formidably rigorous daily routine:

Read the whole thing

Hat tip: AB

****

Related at PJ Lifestyle on writing:

‘They’re Responding to What I Wrote, Not Me.’

An Old Fashioned Secret For Injecting Some Life Back Into Your Writing

Talent Isn’t Everything: 5 Secrets to Freelance Success

10 Reasons You Should Skip Traditional Publishers and Self-Publish Ebooks Instead

via The Brand Is You – Forbes.

DON’T BE A DREAM CRUSHER!

This article is utter drivel.

Your article is b.s.

And Susannah Breslin should not be a writer.

Maybe one day you too will be a story teller as opposed to a blow hard braggart.

I’ve written about negative feedback here before: “This Is Why You’re Stupid, or How to Deal with Criticism on the Internet.”

For the most part, criticism of this sort doesn’t bother me. They’re responding to what I wrote, not me.

Plus, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve gotten used to it.

Supposedly, the web is a “conversation.”

Meanwhile, brands are obsessed with consumer “engagement” — but only so they can figure out how they can turn it into profits.

(I ought to know, I used to be a Facebook whisperer.)

I think the real reason people communicate online is because they are communicating with themselves.

It may look like a blog post, an article, a tweet, a status update, an infographic, a photograph.

But what you’re witnessing is someone engaged with, holding a conversation, communicating with themselves.

Read the whole thing here and Read Everything Susannah Breslin writes.

For links to other writers who fall into the “Read Everything They Write” category click here and also see the PJ Columnists line-up.

****

Related at PJ Lifestyle:

3 Rules for Handling the Online Trolls, Bullies, and Crackpots 

The ‘Me’ in Social Media: The ONLY Online Etiquette Rule You’ll Ever Need

E-Mails to My Past Self: 5 Facts I Wish I Could Send Back in Time

5 Ways To Transform Your Life Just By Changing Your Vocabulary