Humbling Yourself Constantly – A Lesson You DON’T Have To Learn The Hard Way.
January 27, 2011 
3 Comments
Hello my loyal readers.
This month, as you may know, we will be talking about working from home and making money from your writing. I made a couple bucks and received some work from people but I realized its tough. My friends over at Get Paid To Write will tell you that it’s not an easy business, in fact, my friend Dan who hangs out over there will tell you that he is pulling seventy hour weeks. That’s 14 hours a day!! Well, my story is that last week I pulled a 18 hour day workweek working my butt off to get my work done on time (and decently – so I thought); because I thought ‘Ag, let me bid $3/article on ten articles delivered in 5 days’. Haha!
I cannot tell you how tough it was, not only did I have a difficult taskmaster, but he is yet to pay me my dosh! Oh, did I tell you that on top of that I had full-on man flu (It’s a term I learnt from my buddy Dan). I was so sick that I coughed, my head felt like it was going to burst and I could hardly open my eyes (after three or so days). It was so bad that when I got to the local pharmacy, the pharmacist just looked at me from over her glasses with a ‘Ya, you wanted to eh?’ grin on her face. She immediately went to the shelf, took off some Corenza C and some sinus tablet. I pulled another one AM’er ‘that night (Fri/Sat).
‘Why?’ I hear you ask… Well, I figured I am working on my reputation, and if I can finish this (my biggest job to date) while I am sick like a dog, I will do well in this business in the future for sure. Well, in a sense I AM glad that I did that, because I believe it instilled in me the discipline and professionalism needed to make it in this business (whatever it may be 
) I worked out delivery time technically (Job accepted Monday 07h00 is job expected Saturday 07h00 right? That’s five days) and technically delivered on time.
Looking back out from the customers viewpoint I had a few slip ups (which I’ll discuss briefly) but he totally bowled me over when I was done. Before I tell you what he said, let me give you what might have been slip ups. First, he told me what he wanted. I did one example from the first link he gave me. Now, remember these are reviews. He gave me links from Amazon products (around four) related to each other and asked me to write professional articles. I struggled a lot, because the last couple months I got conditioned to writing sales copy. So, of course, I wrote like a salesman. Re-did the article and went on. Not a lot of feedback from the customer, but somewhere in the middle he told me to look out for writing sales copy in a professional review referring to an article I wrote where I started with a question (like an infomercial). Now you gotta remember, I am literally sick and tired and I am writing a new kind of writing – professional reviews. I delivered all of them and…
Somewhere in the middle I negotiated a better price, telling the client that what I was doing was hard work. He told me that I had quoted $3 and he accepted that. Another writer also worked on the same project got $6. So he settled on $5, but later, when the job was done, he decided he wasn’t going to assign me more work. Bummer.
Here is where the title comes in. I went into this job bragging to everybody that I got my first big assignment for $50 and then got the air blown right out of my tires. And here I learnt a hard lesson once again: You ain’t THAT good. I thought I was gonna do well in this business, and I probably will, but I think there’s a Bible verse saying you shouldn’t think of yourself more than you ought.
Thanks to this employer I learnt again, to be thankful you have work and do your very best doing it – even when it feels you’re dying. And not everybody is going to like your work or think your as good as YOU think you are.
I hope my personal reflection into a work from home situation helps you be encouraged to keep on dreaming the dream.
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Stop dreaming and make it happen!
Ivin Viljoen
the problem with other writers is when they ought to underestimate the possibilities that a certain employer would be able to find a writer far better for far less than the amount. Good thing to do is do not put a price on your head, give a sample and let the employer judge