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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Working for someone else is not scalable.

"Trading time for money"

My creative/artist friends amaze me because they have mastered the art of income diversification (freelancing, multiple P/T jobs, selling stuff on CL, babysitting). While not in the realm of Pavlina's success, they seem to be unafraid of the two things most white-collar professionals may be most afraid of: 1) being laid-off or fired and 2) quitting your job (because they have done so many gigs). Yes, they squeak by but they get by.

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As a freelance designer myself, I can see exactly what you mean @wallflower. One of the up sides of all the economic woes of late is that it's helped me build a resistance to the normal fears that creep in, ie. being laid off or fired. Lose a few clients and you'll quickly learn how adept you are at filling the gaps. Trading time for money is just working for someone elses dream.

Since you're new here... @ is unnecessary and generally frowned upon since HN is displayed in a hierarchy.

Not to mention that dumping on Twitter is a national sport on HN

Freelancing is still trading time for money. Just a diverse set of sources of that money, but its still not scalable.

You could build parts of your income via selling advertisements on content site, and then suplement the rest with freelancing.

I was able to bootstrap my game development website that way. $70 from ads revenue and $50 from a freelance work.

However, a site that generate passive income from advertisement still require maintenance work to grow (and maybe to keep). Even so, it does make money while you sleep, eat, and work.

Shouldn't it rather be wallflower@ ?

Except they probably work every waking hour. There's no reason (especially if you're creative/artist) that you can't get the security of a 40 hour a week job and be creative the rest of the time.

In my experience, having a regular 40-hour-a-week job really destroys my creativity. There's more to being creative than just having some time to spend on creative projects; after doing lots of monotonous things for someone else I used to find myself completely unmotivated to do anything. I think this relates to the feeling among creative types that some business management types don't understand that creativity isn't measured in hours.

To tie it into YC, think of the manager's schedule vs. the maker's schedule. A few hours a day after working eight hours for someone else isn't really enough time to get into creative mode.

Some notable counterexamples - Wallace Stevens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens) and Albert Einstein's time in the swiss patent office. Creativity is often defined by constraints, like lack of time.

Though my experience tends to agree with yours.

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