We monitor countless quality sources on freelancing and choose only the best content to save your time.
Subscribe to our monthly Freeletter with a curated selection of world-class freelance news and subscribers-only content + get our free PDF guide How to become an international freelancer right now as a new subscriber:
Your privacy matters: We won’t share your email address with anyone else and you can cancel your subscription anytime. Also, we do not store anyone’s IP address nor do we track who opens and reads our newsletter.
“The number one asset that you will ever possess — and I say this to every single coaching client I work with: Your No. 1 most valuable asset is YOU. You are the biggest factor in your own success. When you look at it in terms of assets, your experience, your knowledge, your skills, your mindset and personality, your courage, your determination, your resilience… all of these are the qualities that you bring to bear on your next project, whatever that is. You can't create anything that you haven't somehow ingested, taken in from the world, or dreamt up within yourself,” explains Mark McGuinness the very essence of understanding so-called creative assets in this clip from his talk Forget the career ladder — Start creating assets!
This is awww-esome! Habitica app turns building habits and completing to-do’s into a role-playing game.
🐉 Fight monsters, collect items, rewards, compete with friends and join interest groups to gamify your work, education, wellness and life in general.
Once in a while, there comes a great book that lets outsiders comprehend an obscure profession. The Last Leonardo by Ben Lewis is that kind of book — a fascinating story of the most controversial piece of art in modern history: the recently discovered painting Salvator Mundi attributed to late Leonardo Da Vinci, sold for a record-breaking sum of $450M including auction house commission.
In the book, Ben Lewis explains how the inner world of art collectors, dealers, restorers, UHNWIs, auction houses, connoisseurs and experts (many of them freelance) works on the inside. If you are an art lover, artist or creative, get it!
Note: A film documentary The Lost Leonardo (perhaps inspired by this book) is coming out later this year.
Sigrun Gudjonsdottir is a well-known online entrepreneur and the host of The Sigrun Show, a popular podcast covering many business topics relevant to other female entrepreneurs as well as freelancers. To get an idea, listen to an episode on How women network.
Freelancers who use a mouse or a keyboard all day long can run into trouble. Typical mice aren’t made for such extensive use. They don’t leave your hand in the best position, and if you have to work all day long, you may start experiencing a strange feeling in your fingers, palm, or wrist. It usually means nothing, but it can be a warning sign for the start of carpal tunnel syndrome, which can develop into wrist problems that require immediate treatment.
Fortunately there is ergonomic hardware out there made precisely for long shifts at a PC. There is a large pack of companies making it, but Microsoft has always led that pack with years of refinement. Their Sculpt Ergonomic Mouse is special in that its support surfaces angle out towards the side, and so your hand rests comfortably on the outer edge of your palm, with a naturally straightened wrist and your forearm resting fully on your desk.
“Imagine waking up, and you are Stephen King or Kate Bush or whoever your favorite star may be. Are you worried about where your next gig is coming from, or your next paycheck, or your next exciting opportunity?” asks Mark McGuinness to introduce creative assets in this clip from his talk Forget the career ladder — Start creating assets!
American CNBC regularly covers freelance success stories in the Side Hustle section of their Make it business portal. Here’s one example: This 26-year-old quit her engineering job to pursue her side hustle full-time and brought in $170,000 in one year
Reddit ‘antiwork’ forum booms as millions of Americans quit jobs, Financial Times report. Antiwork “encourages followers to work as little as possible in traditional jobs or abandon them altogether for self-employment, with the goal of prioritising leisure time.”
The r/antiwork thread on Reddit surged from 180,000 members in October 2020 to 1.6 million as people reconsider their career options for the post-covid era — a major trend also covered by the State of Independence 2021 report.
Our take: Antiemployment would be a more precise term (though less catchy), but it is too soon to tell anyway. The boom of various forms of freelancing (including gig work) has been prophesized many times since the 1990s, but the numbers of self-employed were falling for decades or stagnating at best. Naturally, it is much easier to start freelancing than keeping at it successfully for five or ten years.
Unsplash is “the Internet’s source of freely-usable images powered by creators everywhere” — in other words, a growing database of images that any freelancer may use on a personal website, social media, etc. It is far from perfect but also far better than grabbing images without permission elsewhere. Good service!
It may be kind of boring for everyone else, but it made us jump with joy anyway: Logo of Freelancing.eu has just been registered as an EU trademark — a happy ending to a year-long process!
Many thanks to Mira Szkandera (who designed the logo and tweaked it to stand out) and Petra Dolejsova as the lead consultant and representative. There were also important contributions from Anna Drgova (on procedures and research), Michal Hanych (on risk assessment) and Thomas Kimpfbeck (on limitations, probabilities and adjustments).