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Here’s our question of the week:
How would you describe the outlook of your freelance business for the next 6-12 months in just one word?
There’s a free online e-book entitled The Self-Improving Developer, written mainly for developers. However, one part in particular may be relevant for all freelancers:
The chapter You’re not building a career argues against the stereotype of career building, claiming that “Success is always a product of two things: luck and effort.” It then argues for embracing uncertainty and placing various small bets while also playing it safe — good advice.
Few people realize that professional sports(wo)men are also independent professionals. As freelancers, we can learn a lot from them. One of the greatest sources of inspiration in sports is definitely Rafa Nadal, who is now competing for his third Grand Slam title of 2022 in Wimbledon. As CNN puts it in a recent article, Nadal is a world-class athlete who “talks like Aristotle and acts like Confucius.”
Note: Another tennis player who has been a huge role model is Andre Agassi. His autobiography Open even made it into our selection of the best books for freelancers.
Adam Zbiejczuk is one of the best-connected social-media experts in Central Europe. His Czech-Polish roots and German peers have helped him search for clients, organize events, and connect people across neighboring but surprisingly different countries and cultures. Let’s hear about his experience with international work in a very localized industry of social media:
If you sell services to multiple countries as a freelancer and tend to have the same prices for everybody, Jakub Res has written an excellent article to dispute this one-size-fits-all practice: Same product, same price? Here is why this pricing strategy is excellent and terrible at the same time.
Here’s a new quote about selling our time as freelancers, from The Freelance Way, chapter Pricing:
“As freelancers we are generally selling our time in some form, no matter what our prices are or how we set them. And this even applies for celebrities, for example when Robbie Williams asks £1.6 million to perform at the wedding of the daughter of a Russian oligarch, or Ian McKellen refuses $1.5 million to marry off businessman Sean Parker while dressed as Gandalf. Or when the unbeatable boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. leaves early retirement to rake in an estimated $300 million for a single fight with Conor McGregor and, through a technical KO, raises his number of wins without a defeat to an even 50.”
OpenAI’s Dalle 2 (aka DALL·E 2, perhaps as a reference to Pixar/Disney’s WALL·E) is an AI tool hugely debated among freelance creators, designers and visual artists: Will AI soon take over their work?
A deep review with well-chosen examples, published by Less Wrong, offers some clues by showing What DALL-E 2 can and cannot do.
Freelancers work and travel a lot as digital nomads, but paying for mobile data can be quite expensive in faraway holiday destinations. Luckily, there’s an app for that: Airalo enables you to purchase local eSIMs worldwide from local operators and have them installed on your smartphone. It’s fast, cheap, and only requires having an eSIM-enabled phone.
Adam Sandler plays a basketball team scout who quits his job and goes freelance to bet his career on a talented player. The new acclaimed Hustle movie is available worldwide on Netflix, and it once again reminds us how vital freelance experts are in professional sport. A good flick.
Payal Dhar has reviewed 3 AI writing tools (Jasper, Rytr, and GPT-J) for The Future-Proof Freelancer series and came to a sobering conclusion in an article titled Will AI Writing Tools Replace Us Lowly Human Freelancers?:
“Ultimately, in my opinion, AI is only a threat to writers in the same way that Photoshop ’wiped out’ artists and Squarespace did away with web developers. I don’t think that we lowly human freelancers are going to be replaced by robots—but some of us might take one on as an assistant in the not-too-distant future.”