Late for a Meeting.

There are many issues you face when, after a lifetime of working for large organizations, you start working for yourself.

Issues as pertinent as loneliness.

And finding work.

And ängst. I'll add an umlaut, just for Teutonic's sake. 

And floating giant corporations your paycheck because though they're market valuation may be $10 billion or $100 billion, they have no issue making you wait 120 days to be paid.

Some people, I suppose, are natural entrepreneurs and know this shit. I sure didn't. What's more, I wasn't prepared for not having people around me at the agency to hold my hand, reassure me, and tell me to do shit.

I wasn't really prepared to fly solo.

For me, the biggest issue in working for myself is the "confidence thing." Often, work goes from my keyboard right to the people judging it and paying me. It rarely has the 38-stops along the way that most work goes through in agencies.

Though those stops can drain you of energy--even drain you of the will to live--but they can also serve as little nods of reassurance along the way. Bev liked it. Jill liked it. Liam laughed out loud. OK. That's good. They're not idiots. It must be ok. 

You can find reassurance in that sort of group-think.

Working on your own, as I do, often without even benefit of an art-partner, you don't get those little blips that tell you you're on course. It's like driving someplace unusual with your GPS down. You think you know the way, but...was it exit 41 you're supposed to take or 40? 

The second vagary that can bunchify your metaphorical panties is that often briefs are as vague as glaucoma. You get briefs, in other words, that let you see nothing clearly. Where everything is out of focus and fuzzy. 

Sometimes I read the brief 50 times and it's so amorphous and cagey I can remember nothing from it, even though I've practically memorized the thing.

It's normal in our abnormal world to just bitch and moan about glaucoma-style briefs. Most creatives spend more time complaining about briefs than they spend working on briefs. Working alone, you don't really have that luxury. For a number of reasons:

1. The client can't figure it out or the brief would be decent. That's why they've called you.

2. Sometimes the only way to figure out an answer is not writing a brief but instead writing ads. 

3. And most important, the quicker you crack the assignment, the quicker you get paid. 

Anyone who knows me I'm as money motivated as a golden retriever is food motivated. I ain't into mammon for mammon's sake. But as Rich Siegel of Round Seventeen says with some frequency, I don't want to spend my rapidly-approaching dotage in a dirty nursing home in Bridge Mix, New Jersey.

Once you learn all that--and you never completely do--work becomes infinitely more doable and, even, enjoyable. You might still not have the natural confidence you lack, but you have something more important to believe in. The tried and true track record you've piled up over the years.

As I write this, I'm finished with five client meetings out of my scheduled six today amid one of the three busiest days of my career. Somehow, I got to thinking of one day, long-ago, that I spent as a day laborer.

Somebody hired me and some other sinewy boys to clean out a small factory basement he was vacating. I think the factory made cleaning supplies, so of course it was dirty. And toxic.

We had to carry up case after case of buckets and corrugated boxes loaded with seeping liquids. There must have been thousands of them. And you could only carry up the stairs one or two containers at a time. 

That meant something that seemed like 500 flights.

I remember saying to myself at the end of the day when the boss was taking us out for a beer, that I must have carried out twice as much shit as everyone else. Not only had the chemicals burned through my jeans, I was still zombie-climbing steps in my sleep.

That's the other thing about working for yourself. 

Your work ethic matters.

Sweat is good. Muscle, too. Maybe stubbornness most of all. And as mules say, 'he's as stubborn as a George.'

If you're smart about things, you price the work you do in accordance with your work style. In every job I've ever had, twenty-percent of the people do eighty-percent of the work. However, they never make eighty-percent of the money. Working for yourself, you can correct that. At least somewhat.

At least you can try. It pays to.

That's all for today.

I'm late for a meeting.