Stage 1: Do unpaid work for yourself
Stage 2: Use that as leverage to negotiate a position where you get paid to do work for others
Stage 3: Save up enough so you can be free to do more, higher-quality unpaid work for yourself <--- I am currently here
Stage 4: We’ll see
Stage 2: Use that as leverage to negotiate a position where you get paid to do work for others
Stage 3: Save up enough so you can be free to do more, higher-quality unpaid work for yourself <--- I am currently here
Stage 4: We’ll see
I have paid every intern that’s ever worked for me (both at ReferralCandy and @jibabom) and I would never do an unpaid internship myself - I personally can’t respect anybody who doesn’t pay their staff, and I can’t work for anybody I don’t respect.
That said...
That said...
... I have gotten a steady stream of paid job offers ever since I was ~17.
This is because employers know what I’ve done + they know what I’m worth. They know that bc of the work I’ve published in the public domain... that nobody paid me to do.
(I never did college/Uni btw)
This is because employers know what I’ve done + they know what I’m worth. They know that bc of the work I’ve published in the public domain... that nobody paid me to do.
(I never did college/Uni btw)
If you want cool and interesting jobs that pay decently, you have to be a cool and interesting person that can demonstrably create value. How fucked up is it that our education systems don’t actually optimise for this - and in fact disincentivize this? The game is rigged.
In April this year, I was bored and decided to organise an event on Facebook inviting people to scream at a public park. It got a bunch of media attention and I got a couple of job offers (events/community/marketing) because of this. Unpaid work! Fun!
I believed this at 17, as a scared and nervous teenager, & I believe it more strongly now as a moderately accomplished adult: if you want to make an interesting living outside of the classic guilds (law, medicine, etc), the most important thing to do is cultivate taste, publicly
There are employers out there who would love to hire (and pay) a driven, motivated kid who’s curious about things, good at figuring things out, and get things done. The problem is that there’s no way to know who these kids are unless they have a trail of output to show for it
Anyway this is just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
If you have time to argue about unpaid internships though, you have time to write an interesting essay about something you love, or code up a cute little site, etc, and use THAT to get yourself some paid work.
If you have time to argue about unpaid internships though, you have time to write an interesting essay about something you love, or code up a cute little site, etc, and use THAT to get yourself some paid work.
Definitely do rant about the injustice of unpaid internships in general, but maybe do that after you’re getting paid. It’s not *that* hard to get paid. It’s certainly easier than playing elaborate virtue-signalling games on Twitter. You don’t have to be broke! ✌🏾
When I was a teenager I thought of it like this:
If I make stuff I love, other people who like it will reach out to me, and some of them will offer me jobs. There is surely an older, successful, wealthy Visa out there who’ll appreciate my worth &pay me
If I make stuff I love, other people who like it will reach out to me, and some of them will offer me jobs. There is surely an older, successful, wealthy Visa out there who’ll appreciate my worth &pay me
I also did think that if this didn’t work out and there was truly nobody out there who cared, then I might as well kill myself. But the simple fact that art exists in the world convinced me that the odds of this were extremely small - ie success was/is just a matter of persisting
At a meta level I am still playing this game. I would like to be a successful writer by my own constantly-evolving definition of success. I‘d to eventually make a living doing this. I am willing to persist at this for 80 more years if I can. And if I fail, at least I tried, man!
(Wanna hear why? Because books are soul food, libraries are magic. I’ve gotten so much value from this global, atemporal parliament of hallucinations, & I desperately want to contribute before I die. If one kid reads a book I wrote & is inspired to do the same, it was worth it)
That’s actually it. That’s my whole life. One kid reads something I wrote and decides she wants to write a book too? I’m done, life complete. It’s all victory laps after that. Any job I do to pay the bills is just scaffolding towards that goal.
I suppose then I’d like to travel the world and have coffee with you weird fuckers. Maybe make a couple of humans if my wife is into that. Play in a jazz band. Tell some jokes. Nap in a small boat on a clear lake. Road trip on a motorbike. House parties with more weirdos
Anyway. We’ll see. Don’t forget to like comment and subscribe!!~~
Lmao just live your own best life okay? Okay. Back to writing for me
Tinyletter.com/visakanv
Lmao just live your own best life okay? Okay. Back to writing for me
Tinyletter.com/visakanv
Just gonna append some taste-related thoughts:
A set of notes about taste visakanv.com/taste
Btw, just to circle back: for a lot of people, Step 1 is “go to school”, and not only is it unpaid, YOU actually pay to do it, and the work that you get out of it often isn’t actually all that useful or interesting 🤔
