Back To Basics: Avoiding The Common Mistakes of Self-Taught Freelancing

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 250

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome. Thank you for checking the show out. This podcast is for creative freelancers who are trying to earn more from their creative skills without selling their souls, while admitting to themselves that you probably got a few things to work on as a creative, as a freelancer maybe.

If you're a returning listener to the show, welcome back to the show. Thank you for coming. This is a big show for me because it's episode 250 This is almost five years straight of podcasting every single week. We are a quarter of the way to a thousand episodes, and I've only seen a few different podcasts make it to the thousand episode mark, and most of those are like daily shows.

There's only like a handful of weekly shows that I've seen make it to a thousand because it would take, I guess, 20 years to do so. I don't know if podcasting's really been in the full swing for that long, but I'd love to make it to a thousand episodes. We'll see what happens there. But whether this is the first episode you've ever heard from the show or the 250th episode for the show, you picked a really good episode to listen to because we're going to address something that I think a lot of us struggle with. We're going to go back to the basics. And before all you experienced high earners run away right now, don't because I've earned multiple millions over my career, and I still mess this stuff up.

So I'm going to go to one of my favorite double negative quotes, and the quote is, successful entrepreneurs never don't do the basics.

Easier way of saying that is they always do the basics. But for some reason, the double negative is what sticks with me. Another way of saying that is, if you want to be as successful as possible, you always have to make sure you do the basics, and not just do them, do them well, and not just do them once, do them always. To this day, I'm still guilty of this stuff, of ignoring the basics, forgetting the basics, skipping the basics, and for most of us, as self-taught freelancers, we skip over a lot of the basics.

And a lot of this stuff I'm going to cover in this entire series, because this is going to be a series, by the way, spoiler alert.

The stuff that I'm going to cover in this series is stuff that I still haven't addressed myself.

As a person who's been an entrepreneur for 13, 14 years now, I still have skipped over a lot of these things. So some of this is me going on the journey of going back to the basics to fix and figure out some of the stuff that I skipped and I looked over as somebody who started out probably like you, as a passion led freelancer. I found a creative skill that I loved, which for me was music production.

I learned everything there was to learn about it. I figured out I could actually monetize a skill, surprise, and I made a lot of money doing it, but I skipped so many steps along the way. And a lot of those steps were the bare bones basics of freelancing. And in this series, I want to tackle all of those things that I skipped over and that I still need to go back and implement. And no matter your income level, no matter your experience level, you have probably skipped some of these things that I'm going to cover in this series. And I'm not going to pretend like every single thing in every episode on this series is going to be of equal importance because some of the things that I've skipped over are just now starting to catch up to me. You know, I've put it off, and now it's time to really take my business seriously years and years later.

But it still doesn't diminish that for you, it might be even more important than it is for me. So a lot of these things hold different weight for different business types, for different types of people, for different niches, to different industries.