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Skynova surveyed 397 freelancers and 508 traditional employees to compare and contrast their work lives. On Big Five Personality Test, freelancers tend to be more extroverted, open, agreeable, and less neurotic than employees. You can read the highlights in their report Top Personality Traits of the Most Successful Freelancers — or Elaine Pofeldt’s summary on Forbes.
“The two most attractive aspects of freelance work were deemed to be autonomy and flexibility. Freelancers work for who they want and where they want, which is a huge perk for many. A lot tended to work weekends too and didn't really mind — a more relaxed work environment presents itself when a significant portion of the world is out of the office.”
Our take: Countless successful freelancers are quite introverted, so take this finding with a grain of salt. The business universe is so diverse, and there are such vast differences between industries that being an extrovert is no guarantee for success. Other things usually matter more: competence, business know-how and contacts, diligence, work ethics, hard work, professionalism, or luck.
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If you’re young (20-35 years old) and don’t mind some US-specific financial advice, then I Will Teach You to Be Rich book and blog by Ramit Sethi will teach you a thing or two about personal finance. The book is partially outdated (written before the crypto and fintech revolution), but still offers some solid guidance for youngsters on how to manage finance and grow wealth.
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Once in a while, independent professionals change the world (journalists, for example). But once in a lifetime, a bunch of freelancers may even help to change the world order. That seems to be the case with the chain of events described in Bill Browder’s new book Freezing Order — a bombshell story of upsetting Putin’s regime to a breaking point with the West.
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Chance plays a major role in business, and David Perell explains how to maximize serendipity as an independent professional in a freewheeling article. These are the highlights:
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Many freelancers and influencers in the creator economy are not working directly for clients. They are atypical independent professionals. Some seek a different kind of funding or income, which is an obscure and sensitive topic. Respected blog Arm the Creators offers a comprehensive overview in an insightful article titled How to Invest in Creators?
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Since we started compiling our list of European freelance platforms, we’re getting all sorts of suggestions. The best tip so far, however, came from Finland. Jere Immonen from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health sent us a link to their comprehensive list of platform companies that mediate work in Finland. (We picked those focused on freelancers, and added them to our list for Finland.)
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Tools For Freelancers is a new project whose goal is to list all tools freelancers need to succeed in one place. So far, they have gathered over 200 of them: freelance platforms, timekeeping and time tracking apps, freelance management systems or CRMs, freelance invoice generators, time management tools for freelancers, etc.
TFF seems to be a helpful project where anyone can suggest a new tool. Good job!
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The article How to Make Yourself Indispensable as a Freelancer by Sarah Duran outlines three elementary long-term strategies for winning clients and upselling your services:
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The founder of Freelancing.eu Robert Vlach has been a guest of the latest episode of BW Dialogue — an established Indian business talk show hosted by Dr. Annurag Batra and fellow journalists from the BW BusinessWorld magazine.
The debate covered the latest freelancing trends and other themes from Robert’s book The Freelance Way, recently published by HarperCollins. The full recording is available on YouTube:
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Have you seen the new DALL·E 2 [Dali2] AI image generator that can create realistic images and art from a text description?
If not, you absolutely have to because its outputs are quite breathtaking. It sure looks like a microstock killer from the future, not to mention its disrupting potential for the wider creator economy. “Dali” may eventually put some microstock companies and less-skilled illustrators, photographers and designers out of business.
DALL·E 2 is developed by OpenAI, the company behind the famous GPT-3 AI language model for producing human-like texts. You can currently sign up to their waitlist for earlier DALL·E access.
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