Write drunk, edit sober:” it’s the best writing advice that Papa ever served.

And it’s one of the hardest truths for aspiring nonfiction authors to accept.

In their rush to find a ghostwriter, busy executives and experts often assume that the writing equates to brainstorming. “I’ll just do a brain dump and hire a writer to clean it up,” they think…and sometimes actually say.

But that assumption is grounded in the notion that it’s the writing that’s really hard, and that editing – known in the vernacular as ‘cleaning it up’  — is relatively easy..and therefore, delegate-able.

Not so. In fact, it’s actually the opposite. Every first draft is terrible, but at least it’s words on the screen. You can’t edit a blank page.

And there’s an adrenaline rush to writing, once you get your groove: Click, click, clickety- click: it’s just you, your foaming waterfall of Important Things to Say, and a lot of caffeine. Look at All. Those. Words!

Then you sober up and read your brain dump. And it’s just about as appetizing as a real dump, with the hopeful exception of flies. Clearly, you can do better because unclearly is how you communicated.

The harsh dawn light reveals the painful truth: you may have a lot of words…but many of them are not the right words. Or they’re the right words in the wrong place. Or the right words are too far apart…yikes.

At this point, “cleaning it up” looks daunting. Because it is.

Writing and editing are two distinct processes that demand different skills, types of attention, and collaboration.

An experienced ghostwriter knows this. And an experienced ghostwriter knows that this is news to most clients.

Here’s the thing about ‘brain dumps’: like real dumps, they should be contained to a designated place. Where? That’s one of the things you figure out with your collaborating writer. You might want to create categories of brain dumps so you start at least with a semblance of organization. I usually recommend directing the urge to dump at the outline.  

Writing a book requires energy, creativity and discipline at each stage: design, research, draft, edit, and production. To ‘think like Hemingway,” think like a city planner and create ‘brain dump zones’ so your creative mess is in the right place at the right time and can be mined for actual writing. Not to mention editing.

Want to get down to business about hiring an experienced ghostwriter for the book you envision? Email me at jycleaver@wilson-taylorassoc.com for a 20 minute exploration of the book you envision.

Nurse practitioner.

Statistician.

Home health aide.

Data scientist.

All are hot jobs, which means nothing if you’re looking for an angle for self-employment and you aren’t already in these positions.

“Hot jobs” lists are only meaningful if you’re looking for a job in those fields or very closely related fields. It’s all in the transferable skills. If you’re already a registered nurse, you are well on your way to becoming a nurse practitioner. If you’re already a data analyst, some specialized training  and key developmental assignments at work, and you can cash in on having one of the hot jobs.

Hot jobs lists are most useful for people already in those jobs. Such lists confirm that they’re in demand. They can negotiate for more money, better assignments, and experiences that qualify them for promotions – if they want them.

But hot jobs lists don’t have anything to do with finding an entry point for self-employment, if your job isn’t anything close to what’s hot.

The key to sustainable self-employment is zeroing in on a set of proficiencies that are sturdy enough to win either enough clients to build a practice, or enough customers to build a small business.

Chasing the current hot jobs doesn’t do that. Even chasing the current hot skills – skills like IT specialties in “tensor flow” and “Microsoft Azure” – aren’t enough, on their own, to build sustainable self-employment. A collection of skills, hot or not, does not add up to a portfolio that wins clients.

It’s not the technical skills you offer a client that win you the work. It’s what you do with those skills, to help the client achieve their goals.

That’s why lists of hot jobs are misleading, for those hoping to offer what potential clients really need: when you’re seeking clients, not a job, you must bring more than the actual skills to win the clients. Plain skills might win you a job, but you need more to win and keep clients.

Sources:

https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/fastest-growing-flexible-jobs-v2/?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=sendgrid.com&utm_medium=email; https://blog.udemy.com/the-10-hottest-technical-skills-in-2020/#:~:text=The%2010%20Hottest%20Technical%20Skills%20in%202020.%201,4.%20OpenCV.%205%205.%20Neural%20networks.%20More%20items

It’s so true it’s a cliché: successful self-employment is grounded in work ethic, commonly crystallized as the discipline of self-starting.

But for sustained self-employment, self-stopping is just as important.

Boundaries dissolve when you work from home. You change up the location: desk, sofa, porch.  You change what you wear: business casual  or just casual. You change hours according to the urgency of the project and clients’ and co-workers needs.

And without the discipline of walking away, work attaches itself to you like a label that just won’t scrape off, as I and others discussed in this Bloomberg Businessweek story.  

Suddenly, commuting, in a car, on the actual road, starts to look pretty luxurious. The distance and time separates you from work. You have a chance to clear your thoughts, shift gears, cleanse the palate.

The traditional advice is to draw clear boundaries, but especially now, in a pandemic, that’s hard to do. Rapidly shifting client needs and a trembling economy force rapid response.

Here’s one trick that can help you make a clean break. It’s counterintuitive, but that’s why it works.

Typically, it’s a good habit to finish a section of work to close out the day. You need that sense of finality, of crossing an item off the list.

But try this: open tomorrow’s work. Start a sentence or a design or a line of code.

Walk away.

Breaking the compulsion to finish is integral to sustained self-employment.

The work is never done.

Never.

But you must be done, at some point.

As hard as it is for self-starters, practice stopping. Pausing mid-thought or mid-sentence is a good place to pick up the next day. It’s not really stopping. It’s suspending that thought and resuming it. This process makes it easier to walk away and walking away makes it easier to come back, day after day.

This pandemic-induced recession is especially cruel to people ages 55 to 65 – those on the cusp of retirement.

Millions will lose current and future income, right when they need to be stoking savings for retirement. The choices are plain: accept the financial losses and downscale retirement accordingly, or pivot to continue earning.

A new study by the New School   outlines the double whammy for middle-income earners who have retirement savings and who are hoping to continue working:

• Older, middle-income* workers are more likely to be laid off. Up to 22% of such workers are likely to lose their jobs in this recession.
• Retirement savings will erode as markets flail. Though middle and upper-income families have retirement savings, their portfolios are likely to lose value. “A household earning $100,000 a year would lose $10,000 in annual retirement income,” according to the study, and “A household earning $200,000 a year would lose $20,000 in annual retirement income, falling to $86,000 from $106,000 before the recession.”
• As the Federal Reserve pledges to stay in low-interest, emergency gear for the forseeable future, interest rates on safe, insured savings vehicles, such as certificates of deposit,  will continue to hover around 1%. That is below the inflation rate.  Families will have to choose between putting savings in investments in a highly volatile market in an period of unprecedented risk, or see their savings erode as the interest earned is overtaken by inflation.

Not a pretty set of circumstances. And that doesn’t take into account the cost of medical care, especially for the nearly retired forced into the private insurance market because they haven’t yet aged into Medicare.

Lateral career strategies can provide direction for a late-career pivot. The key is to start plotting next steps now.  If you are concerned about having  a looming job loss, start scooping out possible moves now. Here are three considerations that can help you see potential ways forward.

• What market opportunities have you detected in the pandemic chaos, that might tee up either a lateral move at your job or potential self-employment?

• Who have you met through working remotely and on pandemic projects, that you might not have otherwise, either within your current workplace or business partners? If you’ve made a new work friend, would that person be open to brainstorming lateral or self-employment moves with you (and you, for them?).

• Has working from home or on a pandemic-adjusted schedule been a change for the better, the worse, or neutral?  Figuring out what you would like to keep and what you would like to change about a dramatic change in work place and conditions can yield clues as to how you might pursue lateral moves or structure self-employment.

*(The study defines middle income households as those with $48,000 to $137,000 in annual earnings.)

There’s no escaping the come-ons flooding our social feeds and inboxes: lost your job? So what! Work for yourself!

Sounds great, doesn’t it? You’ve always thought your boss should do things your way, anyway. If you work for yourself, you’ll have the best boss ever. If you even count yourself as your own boss.

It’s all a lie.

Unless you were born independently wealthy, there is no such thing as not having a boss.

Sign up for the The Career Lattice newsletter for news about courses and resources for translating your career experience and expertise to self-employment.

When you become self-employed, you trade one boss for a few – if you have clients – or a lot – if you have customers.

And if you think bosses are demanding, try clients and customers.

The truth is, the person who pays you is your boss.

Clients, who buy services, are bosses for the duration of the project, and if you like your clients, as I do, you get to renew your contract with that form of boss.

Customers, who buy things or commodity services, such as utilities, are bosses of the transaction. They can return something that isn’t what you promised. They reasonably expect you to stand behind what you sell. If they like you and become repeat buyers, you get them as bosses again and again, for each transaction.

The ‘be your own boss’ mythology is deeply rooted in American culture of independence. The framing view of the Revolutionary War was preponderance of colonists telling King George III that he wasn’t the boss of them.

The trouble with today’s pitches that appeal to those of us who don’t do well with traditional bosses, is that they perpetuate the myth that self-employment is all about you.

It never is. It’s all about the relationship. And relationships go both ways.

Let’s take a look at one pitch that fell into my inbox this morning. “Tired of the corporate grind? Four career ideas where you work for yourself”

Why, yes, I am tired of the corporate grind! Let’s get to these ideas that will spring me from the evil eye of the boss.

Here goes:

• Blogger – about what? Who knows?
• ‘A career in health care,’ perhaps as buying a health care franchise (whatever that is)
• Consulting ‘in a specific area’ – and by area, the writer means, geography, not area of expertise
• Freelancing – as what? You decide

This is spectacularly unhelpful advice and not just in the lack of specifics. It’s unhelpful because these are business models, not professions. And these four options are presented with zero reference to clients or customers, who are the other side of the equation.

Self-employment is a completely different mode of work. You have the chance to build equity in your own name, to choose whether you have clients or customers, and gain much more control over your daily schedule.

But don’t buy into the lie that you will be your own boss. Your customers and clients put the ‘employ’ in self-employment. Without them,it’s just you, alone by yourself.

Sign up for the The Career Lattice newsletter for news about courses and resources for translating your career experience and expertise to self-employment.

Looks idyllic, right?

Who doesn’t want to work from home, if their job allows?

Nobody, which is why so many people are so giddy with the prospect of starting the day in pajamas, working all day in pajamas, and working from bed in the same pajamas. Every publication, online and in print, is rife with advice on managing your time, not eating at your desk, communicating with co-workers via teleconference and Slack, and wearing pants.

Mastering your time, taming the refrigerator, maintaining boundaries with family, neighbors and pets: that’s half the battle of working from home, right?

No. It’s not.

If you’re working a traditional day job from home, you are transferring your corporate culture to your personal space. You will learn invaluable skills for virtual collaboration, managing by results, and prioritizing tasks.

But you will not be tackling the single most important thing you must have to be self-employed, and that is, winning clients.

To be self-employed, you have to have clients. It’s that simple and that scary.

Clients are great. I love mine. But they can harsh the mellow of working from home. Deadlines, and all that. Invoicing. Calls. Finding new ones. Keeping old ones. They’re high-maintenance.

By all means, make the most of your time at home. But don’t think that you can expense your pajamas as a start-up cost. To be successfully self-employed, you’re going to have to put on pants. And leave the house. And get clients.

You can do it! The upcoming Career Lattice online course, Staff to Self-Employment, will show you how.

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Do you have what it takes to start a company or employ yourself? You can “try before you buy” by taking on a self-contained side hustle.

Making fancy cakes just for graduation season or dog-sitting as a backup to an overbooked dog caretaker forces you to think like an entrepreneur. If your Career Lattice skills inventory turned up worrisome weaknesses, a small, short-term side hustle will make you backfill those weaknesses. Hate bookkeeping? You’ll get over it quick when you realize you won’t get paid for your side hustle unless you invoice and manage the related paperwork.

Side Husl is a terrific source for pickup work that can enlighten you about your entrepreneurial abilities and potential gaps you need to fill. It’s run by a longtime business journalist whose no-nonsense approach to work, career and income is a real-life as it gets. Use the Side Husl tools to zero in on a gig you’d like to date before you commit to entrepreneurship as your sole occupation.

How much power do you have, really, over your time when you are an employee?

You don’t set deadlines. You often report to more than one boss (thanks a lot, “flat management structure,” for all those dotted lines on the org chart that mean you have to get sign-off from people who technically aren’t your boss but somehow have veto power over your work, amirite?) .  Often, deadlines are set by outsiders – clients, customers, the IRS. 

All these forces can collide in your calendar.  But to free up time for a side-step that can give you new skills and help you meet people essential to networking to a new job, you’ll need to master time management skills that prove you can handle the lattice assignment.

Here are three ways to do that.

1. Group like work and functions together. The temptation is to tackle the project for Client A, finish it (or, at least get it far enough along to dump it on somebody else’s desk), then pick up work for Client B. Look under the lid to find similarities so you can do similar work in a single pass. For instance, if you have to get signoff on a few paragraphs from legal, bring legal all the sign-offs at once. You’ll have more leverage to push to the top of legal’s priority list when you’re doing so on behalf of three clients, not just one, and you’ll move ahead with all the projects at once while driving for the first deadline.

2. Analyze your “flow state” so you can protect productive time.  The “flow state” is your groove: when you’re clicking along, ignoring the clock, getting the coding or writing or analyzing or calculating done in a glorious, sparkling steam of productivity. Some people can turn their flow on like a tap  (I’m one of those lucky ones). Others find their flow in a quiet office before others have arrived or after others have left. Chances are you love the work you od in the flow. Treat yourself and block out the flow on your calendar for uninterrupted, closed-door, flow. Save the petty, annoying, paperwork and inbox-pecking for your door-open time.

3. Track your time so you can identify bottlenecks and barriers, both human and technical. Your boss(es) gives you work to do so she doesn’t have to do it. Build trust by documenting the amount of time you spend on each task. An easy way to do this is to use a time-tracking app designed for freelancers who charge clients by the hour.

If the time reports don’t seem to line up with your boss’s priorities, review the reports with her. She may not realize how much of your time is taken up by those doted-line relationships or by technical problems you have to work around. Let her run interference in blocking and tackling the barriers – that’s why she’s paid more than you are. And – bonus! – if you are thinking of transitioning to self-employment, you will become conversant with time-tracking so you can more accurately estimate how long it takes to do key elements of the job you envision creating for yourself.