What do you do when you're a 30 year old with no in-demand skills, a lack of confidence, little motivation and a resume consisting of just 3 or 4 irrelevant jobs over the last decade with each one mostly lasing no more than a matter of months?
It's pretty true what they say about the 30 year milestone in one's life = a time to reflect and assess. I am a fully qualified adult now! Or at least I should be. In reality I'm in the same financial situation I was after just leaving school. How the hell did this happen?
Being in employment has never been easy for me and I'm sure anyone who has a long history of anxiety, avpd, depression and so on can relate. I STILL don't know if there is a job out there or some way of working I can do and feel comfortable with. My preferred option has been the idea of working for myself, being a freelancer and entrepreneur. I get to escape the constraints of working to someone else's rules or working with people I hate BUT then I lack the self motivation and real world knowledge to make a success of things.
So far as going it alone, I have tried:
- Spending several months creating a personal portfolio and promotional website for myself from the ground up. It's allowed certain customers to find me, but now only generates a dozen or so hits per day and next to no substantial work. I don't know how I can substantially promote it. With insufficient knowledge and resources I find myself spending weeks just to get a dozen or so crappy back-links in place.
- Spending months promoting myself via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Deviant Art, Youtube, Blogger, Squidoo, Forums, Google adwords. I followed the advice I was given by creating decent content on these sites but couldn't figure out why I would get next to no traffic to these sites, let alone be able to funnel that traffic to my personal portfolio and then convert into real money-earning business opportunities.
- Entering several art and design competitions. I'd win or place in small $20 prize pool competitions, but it's hardly worth entering if each takes an average 20 hours of work. For substantial competitions I realize my work is often just not near being good enough to place. There was one exception where I won a $5000 prize.
- Selling stuff online. Over the course of 5 years on and off I made nearly $18,000 profit selling video games until the competition muscled me out business.
- Creating two Zazzle Stores. One with 500 products, the other housing over 3000 products. I must have pumped like 500 hundreds of hours into this project, but so far it's only generated $250 or so!
- Creating a line of greetings cards and pitching these along with my own design services to over 50 card companies. Unfortunately with no success.
- Asking over 30 illustration agencies to represent me / find me work. No takers
- Asking several fine art galleries and art agents to represent me and my work. No takers
- Taking art and design commissions via Devintart and Crowdsourcing sites like Freelancer.com. I got several very small jobs, but in the end they'd typically work out at like $2 an hour! Not enough to bother with.
- Creating custom Tshirt designs for Designbyhumans. My submissions were not ranked high enough to be made, so no luck there.
- Sent dozens of self promo letters out to potential online stores and businesses, but these generated no work or even replies!
- Sent several letters to design agencies asking to work with them on a freelance basis, but these generated no work or even replies!
- Spending 3 months on creating a high quality, professional 10 page mock-up art manual book for a book project and pitched it a Publisher I knew, but with no success.
- Tattooing! I bought $2500 worth of equipment and tried teaching myself on and off over the course of 2 years. I earned enough to pay off the cost of equipment but could not get the hang of it enough to start charging anywhere near what a professional would. I spent weeks visiting and writing to over 40 tattoo shops in the area in an attempt to get an apprenticeship, but had no luck.
- Attending several networking meetings to promote myself. I talked to people who couldn't really find a use for my skills and ended up with no leads from this.
- I found a semi-regular paying client! I freelanced for a company I was employed with for a short time as a web designer, they only helped to generate me $3000 of income over the course of 3 years.
- Spending months applying for about 100 employed roles as a designer. A few interviews, but no job. Not sure I would want to work in that capacity anyway?
I give myself credit for making an effort despite my problems and no one else to help me. I had a few prestigious one-off freelance jobs. One with a very high profile client. It only lasted 3 days, but earned nearly $1000 a day! If only I could get that every day! And I worked with another client for 18 months which earned me around $70,000. I'm happy about this, but after 10 years I would have liked to have earned a fair $500,000 total, like many of my peers. The actual real figure is closer to $150,000. I'm now at a stage where I don't have my own place and not even earning enough to run my car. I don't know how to earn a decent wage. I've mostly worked for myself and relied on luck to get by, but I want more than to just exist while living with my parents. I'd like to be financially free to move out, support myself and a family one day. I'm 30 now and it's about time I considered how I'm going to do this.
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