This is a follow-up to How to Find People and How to Find Work
Everyone wants to do good work, with good people, for good money.
But not all money is good, and not everyone wants or believes they can bring their full selves to work.
Most accept the status quo, using phrases like "the nature of the beast." As a project, a configuration of work, people, and money is much more actionable than most people think.
The previous two pieces in this series covered the first two parts.
People come before companies, and work emerges from a generative system. Money arrives last because it is the most delayed: a trailing signal of value already created. If you make it your primary goal, you will inevitably grow bored with what you do, and your income will suffer.
Don’t make money being an expert
Expertise is a contract with your past.
It is your network telling you who you are and what you’re interested in, limiting the space you have to notice and the value you can bring to the people you care about.
An expert cannot change. Every new curiosity threatens the niche the market assigned it, so living ideas suffer. Experts–of the kind that get paid to give talks–will inevitably find creative surplus once they allow themselves to look.
Be believable
Believability is conviction without ego. The ability to say what you see, the value you can envision, plainly, and without convincing.
Most sales rely on drawing a risk and promising a remedy, normally with branded language (/crafted sales script). When we enroll people, we can use living language because our ideas are alive, and we are not beholden to scripted language imposed by bosses or industry.
Self-Author
In Berger’s taxonomy of adult development, the socialized mind takes its shape from the expectations around it. It is a stage everyone passes through and, economically, a ceiling.
A socialized mind prices itself by looking sideways: what do people like me charge, what do people like me do? It can only sell what has already been named.
A self-authoring mind writes its own economics. It holds multiple timelines, and meets with actions, large and small. The value around the corner, or the thing everyone is already asking for.
Retain your capacity to change
Clarity is a pricing decision. Total clarity–a fixed offer/niche/persona–is the easiest thing to buy and the most expensive thing to own. If the health of your practice is driven by current commitments, every new idea you want to share with others will have a material cost. The more innovative these ideas are, the higher the cost.
So choose how clear you want to be. Be precise enough to be trusted with present commitments, and open enough to have somewhere to grow.
That openness is the affordance through which future curiosities and the journey of getting to know yourself happen.
Lower the cost of change
The best, most sustainable way to make a living from the ideas you’re excited about is to configure an ongoing, sustainable balance between sameness and growth.
Dramatic reinvention every few years is expensive and daunting. Ongoing change is built of small actions compounding into a living, healthy practice. It is a yes-and operating system all the way down.
It is continuously helping people while tending to your ideas. It is a double bind between putting your language on your intuition in the back of the house and economic articulation in the front of the house.
Movement begets movement. Ideas that are alive and developing communicate excitement, which invites new conversations that inevitably lead to opportunities to do good work with good people. Stale, scripted language always brings with it sameness and transactional, circumstantial opportunities. Living ideas always find other living ideas, and thoughtful practitioners always find others who see more for themselves and for the world.
To-do
Print your LinkedIn bio or job description. Use a pen to circle the loudest words and strike out the stale ones.
Draft your economic articulation in your own words: what do you do for a living, and how is it different from everyone else who does the same? You can use this tool from AI Literacy.
Write all of the lanes you’re active in; if you can’t name more than one, answer what you’re interested in.
When you’re done, begin again.
This is the third post in a series.
Read the other ones below
How to Find People
Most outreach advice focuses on finding companies: make a list of targets, research them, pitch them. It rarely works because companies don’t hire you; people do. And people don’t respond to pitches; they respond to signals. If your outreach isn’t producing anything, the problem usually isn’t volume. It’s that you’re broadcasting what you think the mark…
