September 14, 2007 20:33
On the verge of leaving for a week on a cruise through the Caribbean, I began to prepare my laptop for a lack of connectivity.
After installing the newest version of Thunderbird, which I did not have installed before, I fired off the request to download a couple thousand emails to my harddrive.
I watched as the subjects scrolled by on the screen, starting from the oldest to most recent, and a year of my life played before me. Each email reminded me of a host of thoughts, experiences, and feelings of that time. Interactions I had with close friends, some useless forwards, and quite a few freelance jobs that turned out to be far more trouble than they were worth.
In all of the web work that I’ve done, the jobs I enjoy the most are the ones I do for myself. However, like all freelancers will tell you, it doesn’t pay the bills.
Sure, there are some people that can bang out a killer site that takes off and shoots them into instant fortune, but most web startups are created in the Valley, by a team of skilled geeks.
Working for myself, alone, I don’t have the ability to separate tasks based on skillsets, and I have no one to tell me which ideas I have are stupid. It’s hard, but there’s no one to blame but myself.
Recently, I’ve been learning what I am best accustomed to doing, and have conceded certain areas of expertise to friends or coworkers. It’s very refreshing, and much more satisfying than I had thought.
However, I write this with the knowledge that I will spend a week working on my own projects, all by myself. That’s also satisfying, in a way.