It was a normal Tuesday night. I was finishing up a ~3000-word article for a brand-new client. I wasn’t getting paid market rate for it, but I took on the job anyway to stay busy and, more importantly, to build up my client list if things were to get harder in the future.
I sent the client the first draft. As always, I expected feedback to improve the blog post. You can’t exactly know what each new client wants their content to be like without having this back and forth a few times. As an experienced freelancer, I always offer multiple revisions to truly understand their voice and hopefully establish a long, fruitful relationship.
The client reached out a few hours later disappointed, saying the article was unusable as it wasn’t detailed enough. This came as a surprise to me as I felt I had more than covered my bases when it came to the topic at hand.
It turns out I had misjudged the audience for whom the article was intended. It is usually one of the most important questions to ask when you are writing a blog post. This way you can assume the audience to have a baseline familiarity with the topic and then build on top of it, going as deep as you want to go.
This was completely on me. I should have been more specific when getting the requirements from the client. I was kicking myself over not getting this bit of information when I started the job.
So, all day Wednesday, I was pretty frustrated with myself as I had spent several days working on the piece, for below market rate may I remind you, just to get a negative response from the client. The frustration turned into a fit of depression as I had not been through such an experience recently.
The feeling got so bad that I questioned my choice of being a freelance writer. I dug through my One Drive folders and looked at all the work that I had done over the years (over 2.5 million words since 2018 for dozens of clients) and wondered how I had kept them interested in working with me all this time.
I was indeed in a very defeatist mindset that day. It reminded me of my days when I got started with freelance writing.
There is a subreddit called r/SlaveLabour. It is exactly as it sounds. Members can post work for dirt cheap prices, way below what is considered acceptable to pay for similar jobs, and then others can bid on it. I found a few clients through that subreddit for whom I wrote at rates as low as $5 per 1000 words.
I am telling you this because the pain I felt that day was as hurtful as working for those rock-bottom prices and still getting chewed out.
However, when I began, I was optimistic. I was reading several blog posts and watching YouTube videos from freelance writers online. I felt confident that if I worked hard and put my mind to it, I too could be successful. I could take back control of my time, earn a healthy living, and spend the rest of my time on my passions — writing books and making games. Freelance writing was the only option available to me back then to achieve my goals.
And it still is! I still feel optimistic about earning a full-time living as a digital creator known for my art and creations.
But that day, that single interaction with the client had left me demoralized and pessimistic about taking on my next job.
And here is where it struck me.
I was wrestling with two completely different ways of thinking at the same time.
I was still optimistic about my long-term future, but I was very pessimistic about taking on the work that I needed to do to get there.
So, on a macro scale, I am an optimist, but on a micro scale, I am a pessimist who lets the small stuff get in my way.
This realization was an eye-opener. And I believe that many people feel the same way!
We often tend to be very optimistic about our long-term goals — Someday I’ll write a book, Someday I’ll start a business, Someday I’ll be financially free — but we are pessimistic about the day-to-day work it takes to get to that point.
If we can’t be hopeful about completing the small challenges that form the stepping stones to our optimistic future, then what hope do we have to ever succeed?
In fact, the combination ends up being poisonous to our souls.
We are always optimistic that one day we will have everything that we’ve ever dreamed of. At the same time, we dread taking on the problems keeping us from getting there.
So, we end up lying to ourselves — thinking that we’ll do the work someday, but that day is not today or it may not even be tomorrow.
Then our hope for the future is not optimism anymore — It is delusion.
This delusion ends up being a comforting feeling that lulls us into a false sense of security. When you have convinced yourself that one day, things will be better, you tend to block out the reality that they will only get better if you make it so. Instead of taking action, you let go of the control you have over your life and chalk up your future simply to “it will take care of itself.”
It is like counting your chickens before they hatch but, in this case, you are procrastinating going to Home Depot and buying the materials needed to set up a chicken coop fence.
I understand the mindset. I wouldn’t be trying to be a digital creator, writing books and making games, if I was pessimistic about whether I could land my first client, the second one, or the one after that. I’m an eternal macro-optimist but my micro-pessimism is holding me back from making the most of the time I have.
This also reminds me of the most common joke told on writing subreddits.
“People want to be authors but don’t want to write.”
We want the satisfaction that comes with achieving something — like having written a book — but don’t want to go through the hard part of sitting down on the computer, thinking of a story, plot, and characters, and going through with it.
And writers have it easy. Writing a book can be considered to be completely in your control compared to the kinds of challenges that people have to face to make their other dreams a reality.
A surprise medical expense, racial and sexual discrimination, being a victim of a crime, and bad living conditions — these are all challenges that billions of people face every day. These problems are what psychologists call to be beyond an individual’s locus of control.
Yet they persevere. They overcome their suffering with optimism.
But that optimism is not the warm feeling that you feel at 3 AM at night after an unproductive day; when you are tucked in bed excited about everything that you will do tomorrow to get your life in order; when your immediate comfort tricks you into thinking that everything you plan to do will be exactly as easy as the feeling you are feeling right now.
People overcome bad circumstances by telling themselves that things will be OK while they are going through whatever they are going through. You have to be optimistic while you are sitting at your desk and your hands are firmly planted on the keyboard, not when you are stuck in a meeting at work and daydreaming about becoming a successful author.
In an earlier post on Medium, I shared how I got over writer’s block to finish my first book. The book was in limbo for over a year because I messed up the plotting. In the end, it didn’t magically finish itself because I had an epiphany about how to fix the plot. I completed it because I made the hard decision to throw away half of what I had written that wasn’t working and instead start from scratch with the little material I had that made sense.
Coming back to the incident that started this chain of thought in my mind, I acknowledged that I had made a mistake with the client and decided to take responsibility. So, I did what I did with my book. I calmed myself down and wrote another draft as the client wanted it.
In the end, I may or may not earn repeat work from the client but at least I made sure that negativity didn’t take over my life and throw a wrench into my optimism for a long and exciting career as a creative.
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