To explain what I mean by this, let me tell you a story.
Back in the late 70s I was a student at the City and Guilds of London Art School, in England.
Back then the school took a pretty traditional approach to teaching art, and as first-year students we had to do a lot of drawing. In particular, we did a lot of life drawing.
We had a teacher, whose name I unfortunately forget, who used to make sure we didn’t become too “precious” with our drawings.
What is being “precious” when you are drawing? It’s when, instead of seeing the entire form, and drawing the figure as one whole, you start fussing over the eyebrows or toes. In other words, it’s when you play around with the details before you have penciled in a working drawing of the entire form of the figure.
One day, about 20 minutes into the class, he came around, looked at what we had drawn so far, and then turned our drawings upside down, took away our erasers, and told us to keep drawing.
Using just our pencils, we had to keep drawing on top of the partly completed, upside down version.
It drove us nuts at the time. And it took me a little while to figure out what he was up to.
In essence, he was preventing us from fussing over the details.
Instead, we had to draw in new, bold strokes to incorporate the old image into the new.
That was an important lesson learned.
In our lives we sometimes have to turn our world upside down in order to create something that works better for us.
And, if you are getting too tied up with the details, you can do the same with your freelance business. You can turn it upside down in order to create something new and better.
In both our lives and our work we can get too tied up with the little things, and fail to see, address and improve the bigger picture.
As with my drawing exercise, we can’t erase our past, but we can turn it upside down and use bold strokes to create something new and much more interesting.
Related Resources:
My ebook – Affirmations for Freelancers
My coaching service for freelancers…
About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…