On Medium, I've been writing a growing series recounting some of the lessons learned from the mistakes I've made as a freelancer for 13 years (and counting).
Rather than writing with gravity, I thought it was more fitting to write with levity. I don't want to deter anyone from experimenting with freelancing if they feel like they want to break free from a 9-5 job. But I didn't want to sugarcoat that many of the safety nets that exist in 9-5 jobs aren't present in freelancing.
For example, you won't have an accounting team to manage your taxes as a freelancer unless you pay for it. Neither will you have an in-house legal team to recover money owed to you by errant clients who are delaying payment.
Thankfully, I'd always avoided relying solely on a single client. So, I came out of my unpleasant experiences with amusing anecdotes rather than permanent trauma.
In "How I Ended Up Consulting for a Human Trafficker" I told the story of the peculiar situation from my early freelancing days in which a client turned out to be a human trafficker! Instead of abandoning the assignment, I stuck with it until I found a beneficial solution for all parties involved. This experience taught me never to let my initial suspicions of a situation guide my decision-making until I found out a better way forward.
I won't give away all the details of my next story "3 Things I Learned from Carrying Russian Chemicals for a Polygamous Gangster". Let's just say I internalised the importance of being crystal clear about the scope of work before committing to any assignment!
Finally, "How This Indian Freelance Writer Makes $180K a Year Remotely" is a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of blindly aspiring to earn massive freelance incomes (like Alex Fasulo) without digging deeper into how they do it. My article delves deep into a freelancer I met a while back and exposes some of the Faustian bargains he made to get there.
What I’m Thinking About Next
I've been considering delving deeper into the issue of Southeast Asia's growing elderly population.
Some of you may know that my day job entails helping readers make sense of Southeast Asia's emerging markets. Southeast Asia's rising elderly population is ageing faster than almost any society in history. The effects of this rapid demographic shift are already being felt in every industry I cover.
However, the region's governments and economies aren't as prepared as the advanced countries to cope with this inexorable demographic shift.
I've only skimmed the surface of this issue in my day job but I plan to write a more in-depth article to address it head-on. I hope to publish it on Medium in the coming weeks!
What I Read This Week
I read two posts on Medium that inspired me last week.
The first is an insightful piece about Medium strategy for any Medium content creator concerned about how the platform is evolving.
The second is a brilliantly written essay about the difficulties of living in a developing country. It struck a personal chord with me, not just because of the author's sharp insights on life, but also because of her masterful writing.
Tony Stubblebine, who founded coach.me and the wildly popular Better Humans, Better Marketing, and Better Programming publications on Medium, wrote an insightful article entitled "Medium is completely and utterly predictable".
It's a must-read for current, or aspiring, Medium content creators. Tony's article highlighting how Medium will need to grow its revenues by 2-3x to be in the range of an IPO. Thus, Tony argues that there are only two optimal strategies. The quick-win approach is to be a content mill, churning out content hoping to score some viral hits.
However, for someone who is able to stick it out in the long run, the best approach is to "write in terms of a book", that is, to create more substantive evergreen content that will help grow the platform and evolve with the platform.
As Tony says, the idea is to "align your writing with the type of writing that will be rewarded when Medium is a $100M or $800M business."
The other post is "5 'Third-World' Problems Your Friends from 'Developing' Countries Wish You Understood" written by Cleo Kalista. In this masterfully written piece, Cleo discusses her personal experiences growing up in an unspecified developing country, and some of the expectations people develop in these countries that developed-world citizens might not appreciate. Coming from Malaysia, I can relate. Any Malaysian reading this quote will probably appreciate it!
I’ll close out this newsletter with a pithy quote from Cleo’s article.
We do not expect the traffic department to curb the poetic licence that taxi drivers — typically a loose network of organised criminals — take in interpreting road rules, and so we waste no time reporting it when an endless convoy of them speeds down the emergency lane during a peak-hour highway jam. When a taxi approaches us at a fast and furious pace headed the wrong way down a one-way road, we understand that our duty is to make the necessary manoeuvres to step aside, so to speak. Continuing our journey according to the legally codified right-of-way would be terribly wrong. We could expect a head-on collision, and, if the taxi and its driver had any life left in them, we could also expect this to be a hit-and-run.