Asking for What You Want Without Sounding Like a Guru
Joshua Bandoch wrote a whole book on asking for what you want. The framework's useful - once you strip away the coaching cliches. Here are the scripts that actually work.
Hub · Freelancing
Freelancing & Career
The machinery of running a one-person business. And surviving inside someone else's.
You don't need another "follow your passion" essay. You need posts about quoting, pricing, scope creep, bad clients, contracts that hold up, and the actual machinery of running a one-person operation. That's what lives here.
Most career advice is written by people who left the trenches a decade ago, or never set foot in them. This shelf is written from inside the work. The months income drops out, the clients who turn weird in week five, the quiet rebuilds after a project blows up. It's also written for people who have a job and are trying to decide whether to leave, or have left and are trying to decide whether to go back.
There's no "five mindsets of highly effective freelancers" content here. The posts assume you already know freelancing is hard. The question they try to answer is: harder than what, in exchange for what, and how do you stop the small bleeds before they take a year off your runway?
186 posts in this hub ·Career & Work · Business & Entrepreneurship · Freelance
Start here
A short shelf to begin with
If this is your first time on this hub, these are reasonable entry points.
Epicurus on the Anxiety-Free Workday
Emily Austin's reading of Epicurus reframes pleasure as the actual goal of self-employment. Here are the practices that move closest to it, curated short.
Common Sense Is Usually Right (Even at Work)
Philosopher Michael Huemer argues that when smart arguments lead you to absurd conclusions, the arguments are wrong, not the common sense. That's a useful idea to bring to a pricing meeting.
Bloom's 5 Wealths Are Useful - Here's What He Misses
Sahil Bloom's five-wealths framework gets a lot right. It also collapses something important about how freelancers experience time. Here's the honest audit.
Why Your Business Problems Keep Repeating (It's a System)
Donella Meadows mapped out twelve places to push on a system to change its behavior. Most freelancers are pushing on the wrong six. Here's where the leverage actually lives.
Why You Can't Stop Working (Becker's Uncomfortable Answer)
Ernest Becker thought everything humans do is a strategy for dodging mortality. Apply that to the creator hustle and the picture gets very uncomfortable, very fast.
More in this hub
Recent posts
How to Spend Money Without Hating Yourself After
Morgan Housel wrote a whole book on this and freelancers still won't buy the nice chair. The FIRE shame spiral is doing more damage to your finances than the spending it's policing.
What to Do When the Business Year Goes Sideways
Bad quarters, lost clients, failed launches. Pema Chödrön has a gentler way of moving through these, and it actually helps. No five-step recovery plan.
Decision Quality vs. Decision Outcomes (Stop Conflating Them)
Annie Duke has a name for the move where you grade your business choices by how they turned out. It's called resulting. It's making you risk-averse in exactly the wrong places.
The Story You Tell About Your Work Becomes Your Work
Every freelancer is running a private narrative about what they do for a living. That story either opens doors or quietly bricks them up. Most people never notice which.
The Career Pivot You Should Plan Before You're 50
Arthur Brooks split intelligence into two engines - one peaks in your 30s, the other late. The freelancers who plan around that shift age into power. The ones who don't age into panic.
'Follow Your Passion' Is Newport's Favorite Punching Bag
Cal Newport's career-capital model is more interesting than his attack on passion. The model is what changed how I think about competence, career capital, and why most people pivot too early.
Why You and Your Client Aren't Actually Disagreeing
Kurt Gray's research on moral conflict suggests most disagreements aren't about values - they're about who got hurt. The same model explains almost every client fight I've ever been in.
Die With Zero Is a Trap for Most Freelancers
Bill Perkins wrote Die With Zero for hedge fund managers with predictable income. Then everyone else read it. Here's why the framework breaks for irregular-income workers - and what to use instead.
Spending Money on Happiness Without Lifestyle Inflation
Dunn and Norton's five Happy Money rules sound obvious. They are. Almost no freelancer actually applies them. Here's how to spend on happiness without your overhead quietly eating your raise.
Best Budgeting Apps for Irregular Income
Most budgeting apps assume a steady paycheck. Here are the ones that actually survive irregular income, from someone who's lived the lumpy months.
Build a Freelance Portfolio With No Experience
The chicken-and-egg of needing work to get work is fake. Here's how to build a freelance portfolio with no experience, using projects you make for yourself.
Freelance Discovery Call Questions That Filter
The right freelance discovery call questions do two jobs: they scope the work and they screen out the clients who'll wreck your month. Here's the short list to ask.