If Shakespeare was a budding entrepreneur, then he may very well have asked: “To work for free, or not to work for free? That is the question.”
And what is the answer? It depends.
No-one likes working for free. We all have bills to pay and food to put on the table. Some experts tell us that we need to demand our worth or else no-one will ever pay it. There’s some truth in that but I suspect that demanding our worth is the next step in the journey. First, we need to get some runs on the board.
If we look to the journeys of some of the most successful people in the world, they all talk about a period of time when they were doing the work that they were passionate about (which would in time make them rich and famous), even though they were getting paid nothing, next to nothing, or the cost of doing business (after transport, accommodation, etc) meant that they were effective working for free or even losing money (which is the same as paying someone else while you do the work).
If you want to read about the early struggles of some household names, try some of the following books:
The first step in deciding whether to work for free is understanding what’s in it for you. Working for free doesn’t mean that there is no reward, it means that you don’t get paid in money. Yet. We all know that we reap what we sow. People who put the hard yards in now for free, will reap the monetary rewards in the future as long as they are using free as part of a strategy.
When you’re working for free, it’s up to you to figure out what the rewards are and whether the reward is sufficient for your effort. Unpaid internships are popular in some countries (US) and illegal in others (Australia) but the value proposition of an unpaid internship is that you get experience and contacts in an area that can be incredibly tough to crack into if you are looking for paid work with no experience on your CV yet.
Another reason to work for free is exposure. Are you a performer who is trying to build a fan base? Then doing some free gigs or posting content on free platforms like Instagram and YouTube is an obvious way to build a following before you convert people to paying customers.
Take this blog. If you have a blog you know that it takes time to produce content, especially if you have a certain quality level that you want to maintain. I get paid nothing for producing content, and I have no idea if anyone will ever read any of it. However, the chances of people reading something I haven’t written are non-existent. The chances of being paid for something when I’m unknown to the world are also non-existent. So, a better way to frame the situation is that I don’t get paid for writing this blog – yet.
In the meantime, there are a number of benefits that I foresee coming from writing a blog, even though none of them are in $$ – yet!
1. Honing my ability to produce quality content more quickly. The first few blogs may take several hours, even a couple of days, but after a while the words will flow faster. Dame Barbara Cartland, the prolific author of 723 romance novels, honed her writing skills as a journalist to support her family after the death of her father in WWI, writing up to 20,000 words a week. This clearly provided excellent training for her later career as a romance novelist where she would write a 45,000 word novel every 2-3 weeks.
2. Writing is like any other skill: it gets better with practice and persistence. I’ve always thought that writing is somewhat like singing. Some people are naturally phenomenal singers, but that doesn’t mean they become superstar recording artists. Some people are average singers who can carry a tune but are not otherwise memorable, yet with a lot of determination and practice (and probably a lot of coaching and vocal training), they get much better and go on to be tremendously successful. (Jennifer Lopez, anyone?
Some people are naturally better writers than others and are brimming with stories to be told and the words flow out of them. Other writers (me) can string together a grammatically correct sentence but aren’t going to wow people with their brilliance. Meanwhile, we’ve all read books, magazine articles and content that didn’t excite us yet those authors are getting published. So why not me? The best way that I can get better at writing is to write a lot. Having a blog is a way of doing that. The fact that what I’m writing is publicly available and therefore may be read by another person is an immediate incentive to increase the quality of my content.
3. The ability to write on demand. Ask any author on the planet and they aren’t just blessed with a bevvy of muses that make the words flow every time they pick up a pen or sit down at the computer. They have days were everything they write is rubbish, but they just get in and get on with it. They don’t wait for the inspiration to strike, they sit down, start writing and see what happens. The more they write the easier it comes to them and it becomes easier to produce quality content on short notice.
4. The opportunity to clarify my thoughts. Many a thinker in this world regards writing as the best way to organise their thoughts. When you just think about things, thoughts bounce around your head and it can almost be a mental herding of cats to create a clear conclusion. However, when you actually write each thought down you are effectively capturing that cat. The magic of word processors allows us to shift the thoughts around until we see the narrative we like. It can also result in new realisations and epiphanies. In fact, sometime the process of writing the essay makes the author realise that they don’t agree with their initial premise at all, but at least this time they have an ordered and structured argument for what they now believe.
5. Eventually I would like to publish a book. Whilst the title and subject remain unchosen, the hope is that eventually I will have honed my writing skills to a point where it might even be half decent. It doesn’t matter what the task is, the first time we do it is likely to be one of the worst attempts at that task that we ever have. By practising writing outside of the book sphere, I hope that my first published book (not if, when!) will not be as cringeworthy as it would have been without the practise.
If you do it right, you won’t be working for free forever. If time is passing, you’re getting your experience up, your LinkedIn connections are rising steadily, and you are still working for free, then it’s time to pause and reflect. If people that have benefitted from your free work aren’t willing to start paying for it, you need to ask some hard questions about the quality of work or have a look at your sales and promotion strategy. Sometimes people aren’t paying you yet because you haven’t asked them to. Sometimes it’s because what you’re doing or producing sucks. If people won’t pay, ask them why and see if it’s something that you can solve. You may even discover that there just isn’t a market for what you’re offering. Finding out why people won’t pay can bruise our egos, but it’s valuable information that can stop us from wasting more time.
Working for free can be the difference between staying still and achieving your goals as long as you can clearly articulate what the non-monetary benefits of doing the work are.