Are you resisting marketing/selling yourself or your business?

If the answer is yes, ask yourself this: “Do I feel nourished (financially and emotionally) by my transactions with my clients/customers?”

If the answer is no–if your interactions with your clients are leaving you drained, wiped out, or overwhelmed, without adequate nourishment coming back in return (in the form of payment which values the energy you’re putting out)…

Then OF COURSE you’re not going to market or sell yourself… why would you want to go out and get more business for yourself which ends up leaving you feeling even more drained, spent, and undernourished?

In this case, your resistance to marketing yourself more is *self-protection* from more enervation and frustration. Honor that self-protective mechanism within yourself. It is keeping you sane.

And… if this applies to you… then it is time to raise your rates. So that they reflect the energy you are putting out, and you feel *excited* to get more work, because you are being properly honored and respected in your work.

And, if there is no way to raise your rates to a point where you will feel nourished and supported by your work and clients… and/or if no amount of higher rates help you feel nourished in your current line of work or by your current clients…

Then it’s time to find new work.

#AlwaysMakeSureYouAreNourished…

You have no one to blame for your burnout but yourself.

So step up and stop burning yourself out. You can get yourself out of this.

Charge an amount that won’t burn you out–for burnout is not sustainable.

First-order sanity is when you believe only one thing on a topic, despite there being many possible beliefs about it. This is a very grounded way to live. (Fundamentalists, for example, are deeply grounded in their belief system.)

Insanity–e.g., extreme ungroundedness–comes when you realize that there may be many opposed things to believe on a topic, and you can’t pick any of them, and you are lost and confused and bounce from one thing to the next in your mind randomly (i.e., bi-polar, etc).

Second-order sanity comes when you are able to believe multiple opposing, mutually-contradictory things at once… Hold them all in your consciousness even though they all conflict with each other…. and still act in the world with groundedness and coherence.

While I don’t advocate quoting your freelance services by the hour (project-based or monthly retainer are much better models), it is still useful to know your “hourly rate”–roughly what you want to get paid per hour of client work.

Even if you’re an entrepreneur, this is also useful to know, so you can make decisions about how to use your time, what tasks to outsource to freelancers, etc.

So how do you figure out your “hourly rate”?

It’s simple.

Pretend I called you and said, “Hey, I want to pay you X dollars to sit in front of the white pages for an hour and read it aloud to me. I’ll PayPal you the money immediately after you’re done.”

What would X have to be, so that you’re response would be, “Wow, that sounds great. Let’s start now.” That’s your hourly rate.

In response to an earlier version of this idea, one of my readers, Lucas Pellan, asked me, “But would you take a million dollars a year to sit in a completely empty room from 9-5 every day?”

Good question. My answer, of course, is “Of course not!” I wouldn’t take a million a year (or any amount) to sit and do nothing all day.

(Sadly, many people in unsatisfying jobs make a different choice–and for a much lower rate–to sit around and do nothing satisfying or productive all day. This rate is called their annual salary.)

I have chosen the life of a freelancer, precisely because I value my time. However, I need *some* money to live, more to live comfortably. But once I have that amount, I’d rather do other things with my time, such as spend time with my wife, or write. 

So the question becomes (and my thought experiment isolates…), what is the marginal $$$ rate at which I would trade 1 hour away from doing things I love such as writing or spending time with my wife, for money?

The “white pages” conceit is put there specifically to isolate the time -trade component. I.e., in this thought experiment there is no inherent value in the activity being traded. It is purely a time-for-money consideration. That does NOT mean I’d trade 10-hours a day at that rate. But I’d trade an hour or two a day reading the white pages at that rate if that’s all I had to do and the rest of the time I could write and be with my wife.

The White Pages test is designed to help you understand what an hour of your time is worth to you at the margins. For me, that # is around $500. For me what that means is, for example, if a direct flight costs $300 more than a flight with layover, but saves me 2 hours, that’s a huge bargain and I go for it.

Do this thought exercise yourself… and tell me, what is your White Pages rate?

(Note: this figure is primarily useful for “internal” decisionmaking about how you spend money and allocate time. The “external” figure you quote clients will probably be higher, as it has to cover cost of customer acquisition, sales, marketing, etc. Not every customer calls you out of the blue with offers of work. Usually, you have to work to get the work–i.e., sales and marketing–and that work needs to be covered in the rate you charge clients.)

If you hang out with a bunch of hippie freaks or New Age spiritual people most of the time, you’ll learn more about life by going and hanging out with some hard-core rationalists sometime.

If you’re a hard-core rationalist, you’ll learn more about life if you go hang out with some New Age woo woo people sometime.

We don’t need to travel to foreign countries and cultures to have our minds expanded.

All we have to do is travel to the outskirts of our social circles.

Here’s the one fucking thing you should do before you die:

Open your heart so wide it could kill you.

The more I hang around people who are successful in various ways, and the more of the success I dreamed about in my 20s comes into my life now, the more I am convinced of the reality of “victim of one’s own success”

Before I say any more on this topic, let me assure you I’m not seeking any sympathy with this post- (First World problem, right?)

And yet, precisely because people are afraid of looking as sympathy-seekers, or just plain arrogant, for writing about this topic, I think it’s one of the most under-reported areas of the human experience.

Take any kind of success you could imagine… financial, business, artstic, fame, romantic, sexual, social…

Now, take a person who is at a certain level of success in each of these areas in life… and rapidly add a large increase in success, in one or more of these areas, as if “overnight”…

The system easily gets overwhelmed and things start frying.

This is analogous to businesses which grow too rapidly, and then have problems delivering, managing, and executing- and implode. Think Friendster (before the time of a lot of these young’uns, I know…) which before its bust was having 1 minute load times per page, because it couldn’t handle its bursting user growth.

The success in demand the company experienced, was beyond the capacity of the leadership, capital, business structures, processes, company culture, etc., to stretch, and the system simply got overwhelmed and failed.

Just as businesses can grow too rapidly, now that so many people are self-employed in one way or another, it’s important to note that “the business of you” can grow too rapidly as well.Read More

Nor does a fat wallet.

Emotional maturity attracts emotional maturity.

Replace it with “create value, which someone else is willing to exchange for money.”

A longer phrase- but more likely to get you what you want.