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I attended a workshop this past weekend that involved several small public speaking opportunities. On one of my last turns, I performed a poem I wrote back in 2005. It’s a special piece to me, and one that I’m proud of.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and it felt great sharing it with those who know me just for my marketing and engineering sorcery. (The attendees of the workshop were all friends of mine, but none of them knew about my quasi-artistic past/interest.)

It doesn’t mean that I’ll be publishing poems on the blog every week or that I’m rebranding myself, but being in a posture of facing fears is always the right answer (despite knowing I wasn’t going to be booed off stage, the fear of embarrassment was real).

Yesterday, I wrote a recommendation for a friend on LinkedIn. It was my pleasure to do it, I meant everything I said, and I hope it leads to her securing some solid business in the new year. She in turn wrote one for me, so my profile was enhanced a bit in the exchange.

Recommendations are powerful, and not enough of us are proactive about procuring them from clients. Trading recommendations only took a few minutes, which got me to thinking…

Why don’t we incorporate recommendation-writing into our normal routines? I realize that not everyone has a LinkedIn account, but an email works just as well. So we could start by spending some time every week writing brief recommendations for individuals we’ve worked with recently, moving on down the line to those we’ve worked with in the past.

And once we’re all caught up, we can simply make this a part of the process following collaborations, contractor engagements, and the like. It requires little effort to accomplish, and can be used by the recipient for years to come.

Why not?

This is one really effective way to jumpstart your learning on something. For work that requires client interaction or customer development, there are a staggering number of things that can be gleaned from seeing a pro do what they do.

An example of this that we all have seen is in the food service industry, where a new, precocious server will hover alongside the experienced server to learn the ins and outs of taking chicken parmesan orders effectively.

So if you have access to a mentor or friend who has deep experience in a particular area that interests you, consider asking if you can tail them on an engagement to better understand the art of their work.

Two main components comprise the mastery of a craft: the act and the art.

The act is the mechanical piece: the click of the mouse, the tap of the keys, the strike of a hammer, etc.

The art is applying the magic to it.

Learning the act might take you a day or a week.

Learning the art is what takes the 10,000 hours.

The grace and posture and dedication and showmanship required to be a Michael Jordan or Steven King or ELEW might take you a lifetime.

Don’t wait for January 1^st, you’re already late.

It’s easy to live out a script and maintain a particular (personal and professional) trajectory. What I love about the idea of a true craftsman (a carpenter, web developer, glass blower, or what have you) is that they’ve made a conscious decision to commit to the work.

They know the work will not always be pleasant or immediately rewarding, but that it will always be important and worth doing. This mindset that exists in the successful craftsman and true artist, I think, is at odds with the cruise-control compliance that exists in many corporate automatons.

There is an art to solving problems with patience and curiosity that separates the greats from the generalists. This patience allows an artist to turn pro, and share their art with the world in a much more powerful way.

Sometimes the path to doing your best work, serving your community, and leading your tribe involves being selfish. It’s paradoxical to think like this, but operating in your most rested and present and mindful state often requires complete autonomy over your schedule.

This means that you’ll miss some dinners, parties, and events that you’d love to attend…but the result is greater control over your time and the space with which your creative work is given to grow and thrive.

A weekend spent planning and resting and creating can set up weeks of creative flow, whereas a habit of allowing external factors to negatively impact your schedule…can result in a contant state of stress and fatigue.

If most people you know sleep in on the weekends, use this as the time where you get ahead.

If your revenue is such that you’re operating from a position of power rather than scarcity, be more aggressive.

If everyone in your space is charging for a particular product or service, figure out how to give it away for free.

If something is generally created in what feels like an assembly line process, figure out how to inject love and care into whatever it is.

It’s not easy to rethink everything that your company does, but I think the exercise of trying to is critical.

I reached out to a friend for a quote on some graphic design work I needed. He came back with a quote that was 2.5X what I expected, and I let him know it.

He reminded me that I wasn’t paying for his ability to wrangle a few pixels or tweak the things I can do myself…I’m paying for his taste and design expertise. His art.

Touché.

He’s exactly right, of course. He isn’t participating in the race to the bottom: he drew a line in the sand, made something up, and takes his craft seriously enough to charge what he’s worth.

Aristophanes was a Greek dramatist and Athenian playwright who is often referred to as the Father of Comedy. Lysistrata Jones is a modern take one of his plays, and I attended the Broadway production last night.

It was a real treat to see talent across disciplines (singing, dancing, acting, etc.) in one place. The show was fantastic, and I hope you can catch it (shouts out to Shelah for making it possible).

During my time in the bowels of the corporate beast, I rarely saw anything resembling passion. Now that I’ve changed gears a bit professionally (understatement of the year?), I’m pleased to see inspiring stories of passion and dedication and purpose and conviction all around me.

I especially enjoy seeing artists pouring themselves into their work and not making excuses, so it’s always disheartening to see people with obvious talent (like, say, graphic design) sharing their work while simultaneously playing down their efforts with statements like, “This is just something I put together when I was bored at work.”

Is that the best we can do?

Starring on Broadway isn’t every performing artist’s goal, but it certainly represents a milestone in the career of someone on that path. It is unlikely that they reached their goals by casually auditioning over the years and making excuses as to why they weren’t fully committed to their craft.

The actors on that stage were singing the soundtracks of their lives, doing all the right things, and serving as an inspiration to artists who ship and courageously chase after their dreams.

Fun fact: two of my colleagues from The Domino Project were musical theater majors.

Herein lies the ultimate, foolproof plan for getting started when freelancing and trying to determine your pricing.

It is an exhaustive and comprehensive summary of everything I’ve learned as a freelancer, and what is perhaps the most effective path to financial success in this space.

Without further ado:

1. Make something up.