Frontlines

How ‘Smartcuts’ Can Make You a Better Freelancer

By Shane Snow June 25th, 2014

What do Woodrow Wilson, Lady Gaga, and Air Jordan’s most unlikely shoe designer have in common? For one thing, they’re all characters in my new book (the existence of which I was excited to announce this week!). But more importantly, they each worked like freelancers. And they used their freelance status to beat the norm.

In today’s economy, we’re all essentially free agents. Before we know it, half of the workforce will be freelancing. The average worker will switch jobs a dozen times before she retires. And though the freelance territory comes with extra burdens that have little to do with our craft (e.g. finding work, collecting fees, marketing, cash-flow management, small business taxes), my research from the last eighteen months shows that many of the fastest-moving and most successful people in history leveraged their unconventional, untethered situations to grow and accomplish more than their peers who followed linear paths.

I became enamored with this idea after spending several years reporting on startups that used “hacker thinking” to achieve incredible things in implausible amounts of time. I applied what I learned to grow my own freelance career, rising from an unpaid blogger interviewing homeless people to a WIRED Magazine regular and New Yorker contributor. Eventually, I co-founded and grew a startup of my own. And that led me on a quest to find the patterns of smart work employed by great entrepreneurs and overachievers who I could learn from not just in tech, but across industries and throughout history.

On that quest, I found myself standing in a pool of water in front of a deafening speaker stack the size of a New York City block last summer with Skrillex, just a couple of years after he discovered electronic music while living in a warehouse with only a crappy laptop to his name. It’s how I ended up meeting Jimmy Fallon’s first manager and learning how Jimmy went from a nameless kid from upstate New York to one of the youngest cast members on SNL. It’s how I began studying improv comedy schools and serial entrepreneurs to learn how they turn out success stories so quickly and consistently.

I set out to write a book because I wanted to boil those patterns of behavior down into something useful for business builders and career hackers. The project turned into a series of intellectual adventures, often counterintuitive, with lessons I believe can be applied to entrepreneurship, better marketing (e.g. content instead of ads), and, especially, succeeding as a freelancer.

But as anyone who’s made a freelance career knows, the more birds you can kill with one reporting trip the better. I wanted to leverage the hundreds of hours of research for my book to do something special for my fellow freelancers, so I’ve decided to put together a free bonus chapter called Smartcuts for Freelancers (regardless of whether you end up checking out the book at all). Smartcuts for Freelancers is about maximizing your return on effort as an independent worker, based on lessons from the book. I think you’ll like it! Sign up for your free copy here. (It will roll out a few weeks ahead of the book launch, and it’s exclusive to readers of The Freelancer!)

I’m donating all my royalties from Smartcuts pre-orders to nonprofit investigative journalism, so if you feel inclined to check out the book, a million thanks for supporting a good cause! But either way…

Join my Freelance Strategy class this summer:

This summer, I’m personally teaching a free online class, Freelance Strategy For Journalists & Independent Storytellers, based on the book and the best practices we’ve learned here at Contently about managing a smarter freelance career. Email erin@contently.com for details on signing up, or keep an eye on this site for specifics in the coming weeks. (Tentative date is July 21.)

Topics include:

  • Pitching hacks: how to access editors and clients and make more successful pitches
  • Reporting hacks: how to get tougher sources and interviews as a freelancer
  • Marketing and self-promotion hacks: how to get more Google traffic to your portfolio
  • Contently hacks: how to leverage Contently more effectively to build your freelance career
  • Live Q&A for anyone who tunes in
  • Private access to the course videos

We’re all entrepreneurs today, regardless of whether we set out to be or not. I’m hoping Smartcuts can help us all get a little better at it. What can botched heart surgeries, champion race car drivers, amateur rocket scientists, and Cuban revolutionaries teach you about freelancing and business success? I was surprised to find the answers when writing Smartcuts, and if you get to check out the book, I think you’ll be surprised, too.

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