https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

This Patrick McKenzie post (from 2011!) has been going around again and I'm here for it. I suspect there isn't a single better person to read and reflect on than him if you're trying to get a handle on this stuff. Let's call the above link required prerequisite reading for the following.

To borrow his intro and put my own spin on it, I want to write a Realities Of Your Industry 101 file for artists, designers and other creatives living in the tech industry and beyond.

I don't come from tech myself, in fact most of my career was not-tech - I started doing CAD design in a factory and freelanced for many many years doing everything and the kitchen sink (3D, 2D, logos, animations, AR, VR, video games, websites, a free-energy machine based on an ancient Egyptian artifact for a local kook once). I've worked for a handful of startups, I've worked for mom-and-pops, I've worked for myself and dabbled with marketing firms and only now in Big Tech. So, having spent enough years in these different worlds I feel like I'm starting to get a decent grasp on things, and it's time to start writing to a younger me.

The specific type of art medium isn't the focus here, I'm trying to make this just as useful for someone making Hollywood VFX or industrial design or logo illustrations or music or oil paintings of sexy Sonic the Hedgehog fanart.

The main thing is, this is advice specifically for the kind of artist who doesn't want to starve anymore.

There are artists who like starving, who see it as necessary - and that's great, all power to you - but I realized that it wasn't for me when my dentist prescribed me a mouth guard at night because I was stress-grinding my teeth to dust. That was the year when I did my freelancer taxes and realized I had made less than minimum wage that whole time, working harder than ever. I was so broke on that tax return the government gave me pity money for being under the poverty line.

I have earned in every tax bracket now, and I'm going to be honest here when I say: the high ones are much easier. Money won't solve all your problems, but it will solve the kinds of problems that money can solve.

Note from the editor, who is also me: it's weird to talk about money. Culturally, it's taboo. Socially, it's awkward. Personally, I think it's so fascinating and interesting and curious and I really genuinely like reading and talking about it. But typically it's a behind-closed-doors kind of thing, either in IRL or in the anonymity of a personal finance subreddit or something. You earn that trust and tailor your words to the context of the people, because that's what keeps the peace. It's hard, in the format of a blog, to be both honest and contextual. There's a million of you and one set of words on a page trying to do a lot of heavy lifting. But at the same time, the aw-shucks humble routine doesn't really help anyone either, so here we are.

Creative Terms

Much ink has been spilled about 'art' vs 'design' -- supposedly one is about baring your soul and one is about solving problems. One is felt deep inside you and is Real and Human and Raw and one is, uh, I guess, Refined and Thoughtful and Commercialized. Or something.

To point at Patrick's "don't call yourself a programmer" note, I agree fully, and it moots the debate of choosing either word.

The truth of the industry is that no one else knows or cares about the difference and so I would choose whichever one seems useful in the moment. Different people look up at / down at different specific words and so some part of your job is to keep your head on a swivel and use whichever one they respect more.

In general, both are just a word for 'the person who makes the visual stuff', or maybe 'the person supplying the pictures' or the sound effects or the videos or whatnot, only barely distinguished from 'the person who codes the app' which again points back at the other essay.

To borrow (and simplify, since art rarely ever reduces costs) his line: you are really only there to provide them more value than they pay you.

To the degree that your work makes the product better, that makes it sell more, that makes users happier to use it, that gets better reviews, easier to advertise, more likely to be shared virally, some ineffable 'cool' factor etc. is the degree to which you're useful to them at all.

This is not some failure of a moustache-twirling evil capitalism, this is just a mundane truth about what art is for in commercial endeavours. Leadership is not cutting you $10k cheques for fun.

The sales pitch isn't "I'm a designer, pwetty please hire me to make you some designs", the sales pitch is "I'm a designer, here's how good design will triple your sales."

That education is an important step, many business owners don't even realize that there's money left on the table to be made with such an investment. They make a product and the thing works at all? Good enough! They get 2% conversion rates on their Instagram ads and it's technically profitable to keep running them? Good enough! Why should I gamble on giving $10k to you, punk?

When you can reflexively answer that, you will be swimming in more offers to give you more cheques than you can physically commit to.

On That Note

A piece of advice I most often want to shake into the shoulders of people I see on the internet is: you can't sell art to other broke artists.

Perhaps THE primary failure point we see of people is that they try to make money from their community that are a) other artists who are trying to sell their art too, and b) also don't have any money.

This is a thought borrowed from Alex Hormozi, but it's simple: you can't make money from people who don't have any money.

And also: even if they do, it's simply harder to sell things to people who already can and do that thing. Technically it's possible to sell ice to polar bears, but it's way easier to sell ice to the folks who make and sell lemonade.

So your ideal network is as far from 'home' as possible, conceptually. You want to be the only designer in a bunch of programmers. You want to be the only designer who makes vector illustrations for garbage truck decals or whatever. There's a big, big world out there who know zero creatives and are underserved by that missing gap.

When I was in design school everyone wanted to be a furniture designer like their heroes, it's merely sexy to do "real" industrial design like the Eames or Dieter Rams, but like: there's already a million kinds of chair. It's extremely hard to make and sell a new kind of chair. Go design some new type of air compressor paint sprayer handle or something and you'll probably be the best one in the world by default.

Even altruistically: making the world a better place means finding the things that are crappy and making those better - there's nothing to do when you take an already pretty great thing and do it again. The net world-good-ness level of that is ~unchanged.

If you want all your friends to have your art in their house (which is a thing I love and recommend!) I guarantee you it's easier to sell work to a business and use the profit to print and ship a dozen free posters to everyone you know than it is to beg all of your friends to rustle up the couch cushion money to buy them for $35 plus shipping.

I want you to make so much money that you can simply mail for free your sexy Sonic the Hedgehog fanart oil paintings to your ex-boss, to your moots, to your parents, to your dentist, and to everyone because that's a hilarious thing to do with your creative spirit.

Which leads me to...


You Can Make More Art When You Can Afford To Make More Art

Honestly, this title might be self-explanatory, but there's two parts here:

- Artists seem to hate doing anything not-art, and then struggle because most of doing art professionally isn't actually art.

- Artists seem to think that employment is the thing that's holding them back from doing more art.

The unfortunate truth is that running a business that sells art involves a lot of verbs that aren't art. Sorry!

The good news is there are a lot of systems that help automate this boring stuff to give you more time to do art. Yay!

Maybe this is a whole other blog post, but suffice to say that if you're spending significant time doing anything with numbers or money or contracts or whatever, there's probably already a way to fix that. If you're willing, there's also a lot of ways to make said systems for yourself for ~free. I ran my years of freelancing from like two spreadsheets and a whiteboard, it doesn't have to be that crazy to be very effective.

But! You do have to do some non-art work sometimes. You have to eat your broccoli. You can't just have a career that is all jelly bellies all the time. No one does. Even your heroes don't. Sometimes you can maintain a 95% gummy bear diet, more realistically that impression is just when the cameras are on. Sometimes you realize that actually some broccoli is really delicious if you season it in the air fryer just right.

Maybe I'm just getting old, maybe I was always Factorio-brained from the start, but these days sometimes the broccoli is the part I look forward to the most, even.

To skip back up to the employment comment: having both been an employee who does art on the side and also an artist who does money-earning on the side, I really do see the grass is greener appeal of each.

I suspect it matters less than you think it does once you get there. I think humans are just sort of wired to think that everything would be so much better 'if only...' this or that, and I see people comment on this one a lot.

"If only my dang job wasn't holding me back, I could finally be a creative whirlwind to be reckoned with" meanwhile you've spent five hours a night every night this month watching Netflix and scrolling Bluesky instead of writing your novel.

I get it.

But also: having constant money be the default and art be the when-I-feel-like-it is awfully nice, as opposed to the opposite.

I'm not saying give up on your dreams and be a soulless wage slave forever or whatever, but I am saying that even full time work is only a bit more than 1/3 of your waking hours. Personally, I can't do 70+ hours of art every single week anyway, even given all the space and resources in the world.

So. Sometimes it's nice to be Einstein the patent clerk.


Navigating Freelancing

Now, since you read that last paragraph and promptly ripped it up in disagreement while singing 'not meee!', at the very least we should make sure you're a good freelancer and not a broke one.

The other thing Patrick has echoed throughout his writing career is 'charge more', and I remember when I read it and I remember when I've told other people to do it and I remember when they told me to do it and it's always been good advice.

Charge. More.

The unfortunate truth is that low end clients are generally low end clients for a reason.

The nicest, best, easiest to work with clients, the ones who pay on time, pay the full rate, have great ideas, have a lot of experience working with people, trust you, give you autonomy, are nice to be around? Those are the rich clients.

The thing about business is it's a sorting algorithm. I won't say it's meritocratic, because it's not, but it is a computer slowly chugging along over time. Every time someone does something good and nice and builds their network, their network remembers. Every time someone is late or frustrating or doesn't deliver, the network remembers.

It's easy to assume that rich clients might be the ones screwing people over the most, that they got rich by being evil, but that only works for a very short time and in movies. In general, the people who have made good earnings over long careers are the ones who are generous and take care of their own.

Naturally, you want to find yourself on the side of the network where the other winners are.

You want to be a winner, you want to work with winners, you want winners to recommend you to their winner friends.

I've been referred from one loser to another and then what, now I have two grumpy people cluttering up my emails for the tenth inane change at 9 pm and they're threatening to withhold my $500 invoice if I don't blah blah blah.

It sucks. Don't work for losers. They want the world and they want it for 30% less than even keeps your lights on. It's a lose-lose for you.

In the beginning I couldn't afford to fire clients, I needed to make rent and I measured my bank account in weeks of runway; that $500 was meaningful.

Eventually, and gleefully, you get to a place where you just get to say "I'm sorry that 12th revision didn't work out. Here's a full refund, have a pleasant day." and proverbially walk out of there forever. That's a good place to be.

As above, it's much easier to do good work in an environment that allows good work to be done.


The easiest way to self-sort clients is by charging more.

You can't always do this from the hop, sometimes you too need the skills and experience to justify yourself sitting at the table with the other high end folks, but over time it will come and I suggest that you should always be striving to be just a liiiittle uncomfortable at the table you're at.

Lift heavy to build muscle.

If they agree to your price without even a little hesitation, you need to charge more.

If no one has ever said no to a project for a price reason, you've never bid too high. Charge more.

If you keep over-bidding on projects, you might need to look for new rooms. It's possible you're just stuck in the shallow end. There's basically no limit on the price of projects, so you really just need to find the kinds of projects that command those prices, and figure out how to be the kind of person who delivers them.

The weirdest thing to realize is there's actually not as much of a skill or work effort delta as you might expect between a $50 commission, a $500, a $5k, or a $50k project. $100k+ you start needing a different vibe, but even that's not impossible to learn.

In general, I've never found it to be useful to be on those freelancer dot com type sites. Almost by definition those are clients who don't have a network and aren't good at this game. That, and your competition is a race to the bottom. You can't win against overseas prices. There will always be someone willing to work for pennies.

Much like regular employment, the best and main way to get work is through people who directly know people and get kudos for referring people to each other.

The era of my freelancing was the peak Twitter era, and towards my own peak networking breadth if I ever wanted more work I could send one tweet saying I was available and it would be filled by someone within the day. There were enough people who knew me, needed me, wanted me, knew someone who knew someone, etc etc. The network did all the work because being helpful in that way is in their self-interest too. People like helping their people. It's a currency as real as any other.

Likewise, I did a lot of referring myself: I knew other artists, if I had too much work I'd throw it to them. They're happy, the client is happy, I didn't even have to do anything, and they still remember me as the guy who hooked them up. Non-monetary cha-ching.

All the other negotiation tips are covered by Patrick and others. I mentioned Hormozi before and I do think he's a good resource coming at it from the sales side. You are a sales person too, in all aspects of life. It helps with basically everything to get even halfway good at it.


Showing Up Is Like, Most of It Somehow

The other reassurance I give everyone is that you have basically zero competition: I built such a reputation on things like 'not late' and 'showed up alive' and 'actually made some art' - this is, apparently, enough to put you in the top percent of freelancers. Everyone I know has a story about hiring some flake who promised the world, took half the money up front and then slept through their alarm clock for the next three months. If you can deliver on time and on budget, you're a hero. If you can smile and shake hands and seem like an expert who knows literally anything about anything, you're a hero. Your competition somehow just can't or won't do these things. I don't know why. I'm still astonished all these years later.


When You're Free to Do Anything, Do What Works for You

This is maybe more of a paragraph for myself, but at some point I realized my brain worked differently than many of the self-help airport books that want you to Do Business like this or that.

I don't have any advice on what you should do, except that you should do what works for you.

And that might well look different than what some book or blog says. Even this one.

I'm great at juggling contexts. I have seemingly very very low friction for task switching. In fact, I am my most productive when I have project A and project B (and C and D and E) that are different from each other, and then I can alternate back and forth doing what feels like different kinds of work, preventing and helping my attention wander, while making progress on all fronts. That works great for me.

A lot of advice is to focus on one thing: these people have one monitor, one window, one text editor and their wifi turned off. That's how they work, and if it works for them, great!

I work best alone. Some people like a crowded cafe or office. I'm easily overwhelmed by noise and distractions and think best while moving, so I do a lot of biking when the weather is able. A cheap voice recorder can directly attribute a lot of my most 'breakthrough' ideas and work to merely going fast on two wheels.

Contrary to many management books, I really just don't believe that chaining people to desks for entire blocks of the day results in good creative work (and most truly white collar work is creative work at some level), but obviously ours especially.

I can sit here and bang out 3-4k words for a blog post, but I can't make it through a 20 minute episode of most TV. I dunno!

All that to say: part of the work is trying and experimenting and finding out what works for you, and then building your productive practice around those patterns.

Often the metaphor for doing work is rolling something up the hill, grinding against it being difficult and scary and hard. Mostly I try to look for ways to make the work roll downhill. Sometimes it feels more like you're just steering than 'working', and that's a nice flow to achieve. Your brain and body probably have something they already want to be doing, are natural at doing, and so it's figuring out and aligning that with the direction and outcome you want.


In Summary

I'm sure I missed a million things.

It's so funny. When I was starting out it seems like the opportunity was so limited, that only so many people needed work, or had budgets or wanted me specifically, and I'd ask my mentors and they'd say "There's opportunity everywhere!" and I'd scoff and roll my eyes and think 'sure buddy, this isn't 1996 anymore' and now it's 2026 and I'm the old guy who thinks there's opportunity everywhere.

So maybe the challenge isn't whether this time or that era was more or less opportunity-filled, maybe it's us. Maybe it's how we see it and who we become.

And if that's true, maybe you can merely learn to see it too.

Go. Fight. Win.

Life is so rich.

Brennan.computer