The "aircraft emergency" example
A common rule on flights: Put the breathing mask on yourself first, then help others. Because if you have no air to breathe yourself, you cannot help others, but will suffocate.
What does this have to do with development and code?
I speak from my own experience. When I started offering my services as a web developer around 2005, I had no real concept, just skills. I thought that was enough to get started. Well, it is enough, but you have to learn a lot if nobody taught you how to do business.
I took every job and got tangled up in way too much work with way too many different requirements. And the worst: Because I thought I was a "beginner" I took too little money for it.
You could say that in the first years I permanently helped others to save money, to be more successful and other things. In the process, I learned a lot myself, but I did not really focus on what I actually wanted.
What did I learn from that?
Of course, an enormous treasure of experience has grown through this way of working.
Falling down is the best way to learn how to get up!
And so I quit my first attempt to be a freelancer after about 2 years because I was simply burnt out! Burnt out from sharing a ton of skills with a ton of clients for too little money.
I looked for a job as a developer in a really good agency and worked there for another 2 years. There I had the opportunity to fully specialize.
This was our great office in Essen, Germany
At that time we were one of the few agencies in Germany that could deliver 100% Flash websites programmed in ActionScript with good performance and CMS backend. I became an ActionScript expert there in 2 years and had a monopoly position in the company. This inspired me and I realized that my work had a completely different purpose than before when I was just creating "normal websites".
Hirarchies suppress skills
After a while, I didn't like the job at the agency anymore. The work was great, the team and the colleagues super, everything totally stylish and big clients like Volkswagen, Daimler or other corporations.
My main problem was that I couldn't really do 100% what I wanted. There was a hierarchy in the agency that often suppressed my real expert knowledge. I wanted to do what was best for the client or the project, not what some inexperienced marketing guy in a higher position would come up with.
Time to be a (better) Freelancer again!
And so, for a second time, I got out of my employment and became a freelancer again. Admittedly, in the beginning I didn't specialize here either, since Flash (ActionScript) was practically banned from the Internet and I had to find something else to become an expert in.
But there was this TYPO3 CMS that I was actually always in contact with. Already at the very beginning when it was released I used it privately. In the first years of my second attempt as a freelancer, I used TYPO3 more and more, and got better and better at it.
Over the past 8 years I have now steadily become fully specialized in TYPO3.
Conclusion
Today I can fully use my skills, and really help my customers. The higher hourly rate as a specialized expert and the permanent demand since 8 years, gives me enough time to educate myself.
It's really like this: clients pay less for me now than when I was employed at the agency, but they get better services and I earn more. Crazy, isn't it?
I knew back in 2002 that I wanted to be self-employed one day. I never lost that focus, but kept trying. You have to learn a lot, some things take a lot of time.
But if you pursue your goals, and above all take care of your own improvement, you can help others much easier and they will appreciate your achievements quite differently!
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