Pay your dues

Hear, hear. I spent most of yesterday afternoon reading Cal Newport's blog and the first few chapters of his book "So Good They Can't Ignore You". His thesis is basically that the idea of "following your passion" is incredibly misleading, and that you should instead focus on building "career capital" which will open up better opportunities over time. (Career capital as I see it refers to the combination of skills, relationships and unique insights that you get from working intently in a particular field for a length of time).

It's something that resonates a lot with me, after bumming around a lot asking "is this what I really want to do?" I eventually realised that the whole "do what you love and you will never work a day in your life" is simply a fantasy. Of all the infinite things you could be doing, you will never know if you are doing the best or most important thing. Doesn't matter. Your life is not that important. You will never be able to put an end to the questioning and self-doubt. Doesn't matter. You can learn to enjoy the questioning, and appreciate that you are one of the privileged 0.1% of humans who actually get to choose what they do with their lives.

One other thought: why do people believe they can do it overnight? I think it's because we see (what look like) overnight successes. On closer inspection they are no such thing.

I can't be the only Hacker News reader who, at the age of 19, thought "hey, that Mark Zuckerberg guy made a website that made him rich at age 19, I can make websites, ergo I can be the next Mark Zuckerberg!" But to emulate Zuck you have to look at what he was doing at age 14. Turns out he was building successful tech products for several years before he started working on Facebook. Then you get cases like Nick from Summly, which looks like a combination of rich parents, savvy investors and a desperate buyer (Yahoo). All that is true. Luck and circumstances did play a part in his particular success. But he's still a very smart guy who wouldn't have achieved what he did without intelligence and hard graft.

I feel like I'm running into this problem, to an extent. I'll revise what the OP said, though: I think freelancing right out of the gate is great when you're young and don't need a super reliable income -- you get to experiment and learn in a low stakes environment (because nobody is handing you million dollar accounts) where no one is constantly lookig over your shoulder. However, I'm starting to find that there are limits to how much I can learn on my own, and there's a limit to how successful I can be at this without any real industry ties.

This strategy will be much harder if you have to sign a non-compete agreement.

Can you try it again with some less "fuck" in it? Maybe I'll finish reading it that time.

Why is this proclaimed gentleman swearing so much in blog post?