To those who have chosen a freelance job because “I have a lot of confidence in my work” it will surely have happened at least once in their life to be asked “but who makes you do it?”. Sometimes it is the older colleagues who ask this question: “But do you really believe that this is a job in which you’ll earn enough money? You don’t earn anything! There are so many things to do… I don’t know: we have to be a plumber, a cabinetmaker, a bricklayer, a machine guard, a smuggler… smuggling! Why don’t you be a smuggler? You can make a lot of money.”
If you have grown up, like me, with the films of Renato Pozzetto then you can not help but smile with a look of bitter understanding in front of this segment of the film “Agenzia Riccardo Finzi…praticamente detective“, a 1979 film directed by Bruno Corbucci and based on a 1978 novel by Luciano Secchi.
And then, who makes us do it? Maybe the good Pozzetto was right when he said, “I do it by vocation.” This is my first ever tweet (What was yours? You can see it with this tool, that Twitter released on his 8th birthday, in March 2014), November 2010, two years before choosing a freelance life:
…Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free…— Patrizia Frattini (@rock_copy) 4 Novembre 2010
Perhaps, instead it is that being a freelancer does not allow you to study continuously, update yourself, always face new challenges and new projects: it forces you to do so. And it forces you to discipline and exercise your ability to choose, to avoid “The Irresistible Attraction of Mediocrity” that Oliver Burkeman talks about in his article on Internazionale, an attraction to which we are all subjected and to which it is vital for a freelancer to escape.
And you, who makes you do it? Wasn’t it better to be a smuggler?
