Knowing the value of your time, the limitations of your abilities, and how much creative mojo you have left to spare makes it easy to decide when to pay others.
Wow, Kyle If I could earn 40,000 for an entire year, this would subsidize my social security. I have been working from my home studio as a freelance graphic designer for over fifteen years. Additionally, I’ve written, illustrated and self-published five children’s picture books. Still, I struggle with finding the balance to the time equals money equation. The ONLY time I’ve paid for a service related to my creative endeavors is when I had one of my books translated to Spanish. That book has not sold even one printed copy. Your article triggered me for sure. Especially when I sold myself to a best friend of more than 40 years only to have her take advantage of me, refuse to pay and sever the friendship I so highly value.
This is a subject I've been thinking a lot about lately. Since I've made a living mostly from IT jobs (regrettably so given my Arts degree) when I decided to set up my current illustration portfolio at alzamon.art I was confident I could take it on from scratch due to my professional coding/design skills, and so I did, moonlighting over the course of several months. It runs on a flat file CMS system I had to learn all by myself since I didn't want to use Wordpress for it. And I think it's okay for now — but setting up a site like this is a high maintenance compromise since I'm the only one who knows how everything is set up, how to update/fix it, fix or replace web services and scripts when they change/fail over time, and so on and on. Sure enough part of what moved me to take the matter in my own hands is the personal pride on doing it myself - but I'm doubtful it would be worth my increasingly limited lifetime to go over it again — I'd rather delegate this task to a younger talent who is more enthusiast of messing with code than I currently am. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do absolutely everything by yourself — this has been a lesson long and hard to come by.
Wow, Kyle If I could earn 40,000 for an entire year, this would subsidize my social security. I have been working from my home studio as a freelance graphic designer for over fifteen years. Additionally, I’ve written, illustrated and self-published five children’s picture books. Still, I struggle with finding the balance to the time equals money equation. The ONLY time I’ve paid for a service related to my creative endeavors is when I had one of my books translated to Spanish. That book has not sold even one printed copy. Your article triggered me for sure. Especially when I sold myself to a best friend of more than 40 years only to have her take advantage of me, refuse to pay and sever the friendship I so highly value.
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This is a subject I've been thinking a lot about lately. Since I've made a living mostly from IT jobs (regrettably so given my Arts degree) when I decided to set up my current illustration portfolio at alzamon.art I was confident I could take it on from scratch due to my professional coding/design skills, and so I did, moonlighting over the course of several months. It runs on a flat file CMS system I had to learn all by myself since I didn't want to use Wordpress for it. And I think it's okay for now — but setting up a site like this is a high maintenance compromise since I'm the only one who knows how everything is set up, how to update/fix it, fix or replace web services and scripts when they change/fail over time, and so on and on. Sure enough part of what moved me to take the matter in my own hands is the personal pride on doing it myself - but I'm doubtful it would be worth my increasingly limited lifetime to go over it again — I'd rather delegate this task to a younger talent who is more enthusiast of messing with code than I currently am. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do absolutely everything by yourself — this has been a lesson long and hard to come by.