Your Last Gig

As you shape a freelance career, remember that your last gig helps determine your next one.

Don’t want to write music for show choir? Sooner or later, you have to say no to gigs. Actually, make it sooner: the best time is the fist gig, no matter how hungry you are. Once you start taking them, it gets ever-harder to stop.

Or consider: a brilliant colleague left an illustrious conducting job that she enjoyed because she didn’t want to become pigeonholed with that kind of choir.

Listen: to hire you, people want a story about what you do. You can’t sit down with every potential client and tell them your life story, interests, and passions. There isn’t time.

So the story they get is the list of jobs you’ve done that they’ve heard about.

Next time you consider an offer, ask yourself: do I want 100 of these? Because every gig opens a path to the next one.