The “Strength” in Earning by Your Own Strength Divides into Three, and the Route Is Needed First

You want to earn by your own strength. Not under the company’s sign but under your own name. Begin looking into it with that thought and what comes up is a list of skills. Which one to pick, and in what order to learn them, becomes the question.

And some years on, a person can be standing in the same place. The skill has certainly risen. More can be made, and the same job goes faster than it did last year. And the figure written on the invoice has barely changed.

The conclusion generally reached at this point is strength is still short. Stand on the premise that skill and income are one continuous thing, and the only reason left for income not moving is a shortage of skill. So the next course gets looked for, and that decision is faithful to the premise it rests on.

The same state shows up in someone several years into working for themselves and in someone who began something on the side while still employed. The years differ and so do the fields, and only the place where things jam is the same. What is shared is that the time put in has gathered in one place. And the place it has gathered is usually the one the person has worked at most keenly.

This conclusion contains one untested premise, though: the premise about what the single word strength points at.

That one word gathers up at least three separate things. Being able to hand over what has been made. Holding a route by which it reaches the people who need it. Deciding for yourself what it is handed over for. The three differ in nature, in how they grow, and in how fast they grow. Bind them into a single word and there appears to be a single way of working at them.

And the three do not tell in the same way. What the lists of skills handle in most detail is the first, and what tells where income begins to move is the second. This is not about which of them matters more. It is that no single way of working at them grows all three. That mismatch is what produces the state of raising and nothing moving.

What follows divides the three and looks at what settles each of them. It then puts the state of getting better without the income changing into another form: which of the three is blank. Once the state has an itemisation, the place to put a hand next changes.

One thing is left out here. Which skill to pick, and how to learn it, is not covered. That part has already been written about at length, and written well. What gets looked at here is the side those lists leave out. Why it is left out becomes visible once you look at who assembles those lists, and on what basis.

The Lists Answering “Earning on Your Own” Exclude the Variable That Tells on Income

Search for earning by your own strength and the answers are almost uniform. A list of skills.

Programming, web marketing, writing, video editing, design, languages. Streaming and reselling are sometimes added. And under the article there is generally an entrance to a course or a set of materials.

The writers are businesses teaching those skills. That the list is composed of skills is only to be expected. What is sold is skill, so skill is what gets listed as necessary. This is not dishonest.

There is another construction common to articles of this kind: the encouragement that nobody could do it from the start. A storyline of building up from inexperience in small steps is attached.

The encouragement contains a factually correct part. Skills do grow by accumulation, and everyone begins inexperienced.

Read through this construction, however, and one causal relation gets placed implicitly: skill rises, therefore income arises. So where skill rises and income does not, the cause looks like skill is still short.

The causal relation is partly correct. With zero skill there is no income. Up to a certain level, rises in skill and rises in income correlate.

The question is how far the correlation continues. Past a certain level, raising skill barely moves income. And that level sits lower than expected, because what exceeds the level the market is asking for is unlikely to be reflected in the figure.

What tends to happen then is this. Plainly better things can be made than a year ago. The work is faster. And the figure on the invoice is the same as last year.

The list of skills holds no answer to this state, because answering requires holding a variable other than skill.

The skills set out are all selected on the shared property of being learnable.

As a criterion of selection this is natural. To make a teaching business work, what is taught has to be teachable. Select on this criterion, however, and what is hard to teach drops off the list.

Foremost among what drops off is whether a line by which things reach people is held. This is not something a course can hand over. What can be handed over goes as far as an explanation of how to build one; the line itself can only be accumulated over time by the person. So it is hard to make into a product and does not appear on the list.

The list, then, is a list of what can be taught and not a list of what is needed. The two overlap and are not the same. And in the part that does not overlap sits the variable deciding whether income arises.

The Word “Own Strength” in “Earning on Your Own” Gathers Three Things into One

The strength in earning by your own strength points at at least three different capacities.

First, the strength to make. To make, write, design, teach. What the list of skills handles is almost entirely this alone.

Second, the route that reaches. The line by which what is made arrives at the people needing it. This is measured less as a capacity than by whether it is held.

Third, the right to set the figure. Who decides what value attaches to what is handed over.

These three have entirely different properties.

The strength to make rises with practice. Pour in time and it grows almost reliably. And the growth is legible to you.

The route that reaches does not grow with practice. It is not something made but something accumulated. And it takes time to accumulate, with the interim hard to see.

The right to set the figure is not even something that grows. It is closer to binary — held or not held. And whether it is held is independent of the level of skill.

That the three have different properties means the same way of applying yourself will not grow all three. Bind them under the single phrase build strength, however, and the way of applying yourself looks like one thing. So most people go on raising only the first.

And one more thing. Growth in the first is confirmable. Where there is confirmable progress, time gathers. Progress in the second and third is hard to see, so they get postponed. This allocation is not weakness of will but the natural tendency for time to gather where things are visible.

What results is this. One of the three becomes very high and the other two stay blank for years. And income is dragged down by the lowest of the three.

This relation has the shape less of addition than of multiplication.

With the strength to make at ten and the route at zero, the amount reaching is zero. With the route at ten and the right to set the figure near zero, the figure sticks to their level. With any one near zero, the height of the other two barely appears in the result.

This shape makes the allocation of effort hard to judge. In multiplication, raising the lowest term has the largest effect. The lowest term, however, is also the one with the least experience and the least visible progress.

So the place with the largest effect and the place easiest to work on are the opposite way round. Allocate time by ease of working and time gathers where the effect is small. This is less an error of judgement than the result of the criterion of allocation being what is easy to do.

The Work the Company Was Absorbing Comes Straight Back

Why was it possible, while at a company, to get by without being aware of the second and third?

The economist Ronald Coase explained in 1937 why firms exist (Coase, 1937, Economica, 4(16), 386–405). Conducting every transaction individually in the market incurs the cost of finding a counterparty, of negotiating terms, of contracting, and of verifying performance. The form of the organisation is used in order to lower those costs.

Review this perspective from the individual’s side and the outline of the situation becomes sharp.

While working as an employee, the work of finding counterparties is done by the company. So is the work of negotiating terms, of contracting, and of collecting payment. What you do is only the part concerning the first strength.

The company, in other words, takes on the second and third wholesale. And as consideration it takes a portion of the amount produced.

Earning by your own strength means returning that undertaking to yourself. It means not taking the skill out but holding everything other than the skill yourself.

This is the part the list articles do not say. The list sets out skills, and skills were held by you while at the company too. What newly becomes necessary on going independent is not skill but the side the company was undertaking.

Make this rereading and the substance of the difficulty of independence changes. It is not is the skill sufficient but can two pieces of work never once done be begun at the same time.

And the reason they have never been done is not a shortage of ability. It is having been long in a position with no need to do them. Someone who worked ten years as an employee holds ten years of experience of the first strength and may hold next to none of the second and third. This asymmetry arises independently of how able someone is.

If anything, the more able the person, the larger the asymmetry can be, because work using the first strength gathers around those high in it. The more it gathers, the fewer the occasions of touching the second and third.

And this asymmetry is invisible until just before independence. While at a company, the absence of the second and third does not appear as a shortfall. It appears as a shortfall at the moment the undertaker disappears — the month after leaving.

Here is one shape of failure in independence. Judging independence on the grounds of skill, and jamming on the part skill does not fill. The only material to hand for the judgement was skill, so the judgement was faithful to its material. The material simply never contained the other two.

Understand this structure and the material for judgement can be increased in advance. Before leaving, move the second and third at least once. The judgement then rests on measurements of all three.

The First Strength Is the Easiest to Measure and the Quickest to Saturate

The strength to make has two properties the other two lack.

One is that it is easy to measure. Look at what was made and the level is legible. It can be compared with others and with yourself a year ago.

The other is that how to raise it is established. Every field has a path of learning, people who teach, and materials. In the sense that pouring in time raises it, the relation between input and output is stable.

Because of these two properties, the first strength is easy to work on. And most people do raise it steadily.

This strength has a ceiling, though. More precisely, the range reflected in income has a ceiling.

The reason lies in what the buying side can judge. The buying side is not an expert in the field. So the range within which differences of level can be judged is limited. Past a certain line, both look good from the buyer’s side. A difference not discriminated is not reflected in the figure.

And another. As the strength to make rises, the time per job falls, because you get faster. Under a contract where the figure is tied to time, there can even be an inversion in which getting faster lowers what is invoiced.

Overlay these two and the state of getting better with income unchanged is complete. And the first response taken by someone in this state is generally get better still. It amounts to pushing further on a variable already at its ceiling.

The position of the ceiling differs considerably by field. Where the buying side can judge good from bad, the ceiling sits high. Where it is hard to judge, it sits low.

Differences expressible in numbers, such as speed or accuracy, can be judged by the buying side. Here differences in skill readily become differences in the figure. Differences requiring experience to judge, such as texture or composition, are invisible from the buying side. An invisible difference has no way of being reflected in the figure.

So the same rise in skill produces entirely different responses in income depending on the field. That someone in a field with a dull response reads it as still not enough is natural, and in fact it is not that it is not enough but that it is not reaching.

There is a way of checking this reading. Have you ever explained the difference in the quality of your work to a commissioner? And on explaining, did the figure move? If it does not move on explanation, the difference is outside what is judged. Accumulate differences outside what is judged and the figure will not move.

That there is a ceiling does not mean raising skill loses its value. Raised skill tells once the second and third have moved. It is only that alone it tells little on income; combined with the other two it tells. This is a question of order, not of necessity.

The Second Strength Is Not a Capacity but Something That Accumulates

The route that reaches grows differently from the strength to make. What makes this item difficult is that it gets spoken about in the vocabulary of capacity. Sales power, publishing power, marketing power. Each carries the word power, so it looks like something practice raises.

What actually tells, however, is not the amount of practice. It is the amount placed and the time since placing.

Concretely, it comes to this. A piece of writing from three years ago still brings people in from search. Someone who saw something made two years ago gets in touch now. This route is not the result of doing something now but the result of what was placed in the past still being there.

So this item is closer to stock than to capacity. It is measured by whether it is held, not by how good you are.

And being stock also means that the later the start, the greater the disadvantage. Skill grows the same from thirty or from forty; a route has time itself as its raw material, so the date of starting tells directly.

This item has a further property that is hard to see: there is a delay before it begins to tell. Several months to a year between placing and reaching is not unusual.

The delay throws judgement off. Place for three months with nothing happening and the conclusion is that it is not working. In fact the period at which it tells has simply not been reached. And stopping partway halts the accumulation, including what came before.

More awkward still, nothing happens immediately after stopping. What was accumulated goes on telling for a while, so the effect of stopping appears months later. The cause being distant, stopping and income falling do not get connected.

There is one advantage to the delay too: what is accumulated first is unlikely to be overtaken later.

What is placed accumulates evaluation over time. With the same content at the same quality, someone placing it now and someone who placed it three years ago will not reach people equally. Three years of difference is a kind of difference that skill does not close.

So this item is the worst possible fit for start once you have got good. While waiting to get good, disadvantage accumulates for the length of the wait. What was placed while you were still poor takes the profit on the side of time.

Resistance to placing things of low quality is natural. What is placed, though, can be swapped later. Swap it and the period during which it sat there does not disappear. Thought of as the operation of taking the place in advance, the resistance falls a little.

There is, though, no guarantee that continuing to place will tell. Continue placing while who it is directed at remains unsettled and the quantity alone may rise without becoming a route. It tells only where what was placed and the people needing it overlap.

The Third Strength Cannot Be Obtained Through Skill

The right to set the figure is, of the three, the least spoken about. Of your income, what proportion had the figure presented by you? For an employee it is zero. Pay is decided by the company. For a freelancer working through an agency, the going rate and the commissioner’s budget decide it.

This item does not transfer automatically as skill rises, because the right to set the figure is not a function of skill.

A function of what, then? Of whether you are replaceable.

Where others can hand over the same thing, the figure is settled by their budget and by the figures other candidates present. However high your skill, if another candidate suffices, that figure becomes the benchmark.

Where nobody else can hand over the same thing, how the figure is settled changes. With no object of comparison, the other party has to judge whether to accept at this figure.

And no substitute cannot be built out of a high level of skill, because there are others with high skill. What can be built is on the side of the combination. Handed to a particular counterparty, in a particular context, in a particular form. Overlay these three and substitution becomes difficult.

Here the relation to the second strength appears. A state of no substitute holds most readily where the route is on your own side. Where the route sits with an agency or a referrer, the other party lines you up against other candidates on that route. At the moment of being lined up, comparison occurs.

Where the route is on your side — where people come having seen what was placed — the entrance to comparison differs. Those who came came having seen what was placed. At that point the comparison is already done.

So the third strength does not move alone. It follows on as a result of the second having moved. In sequence, the route comes first and the right to set the figure after.

This item carries a psychological side as well: the operation of presenting a figure has itself never been experienced.

Ten years as an employee and five as a freelancer, and it is not unusual to have zero experience of being the first to name a figure. Only the form of researching the going rate and answering within it has been experienced.

And the first time a figure is presented, it generally comes out low. For two reasons. Wanting to avoid refusal, and not knowing the value of what is being handed over.

The latter runs deeper. The value is unknown because a value has never been set. While at a company, the value of your work was rounded into the single figure of pay. That figure is not the value of your work; it is a term of employment.

So holding the right to set the figure has an aspect of practice too. The second time comes out more accurately than the first. The occasions for practice, though, have to be made by you. Occasions to present a figure do not arrive by waiting.

Reaching a state of being able to set the figure does not mean being bought at the figure set. The right to decide is the right to present, not a guarantee of conclusion. Being able to present and being accepted are different.

Earning from Skill Has Two Itemisations Behind It

There are people who did acquire skills and do earn, so is skill not sufficient? That question needs answering first.

As an observation the objection is correct. People who acquired a skill and built income do exist.

Look at what happened to them, though, and it is generally one of two things.

First. The case where the second strength was being accumulated at the same time as the skill. The record of learning was being published, what was made was being placed, questions were being answered. The person believed they were acquiring a skill, and a route was accumulating alongside. And the direct cause of income arising was, in most cases, the latter.

Second. The case of riding an existing route. Agencies, crowdsourcing, referral. Here the route belongs to another. Income arises, and the right to set the figure sits on the side of that route. So income built in this form tends to stop at a certain level.

The observation I acquired a skill and earned is therefore not evidence of having earned by skill alone. Either the second of the three was being satisfied without being noticed, or something belonging to another was being borrowed.

And these two have different outcomes. In the former, the route being yours, conditions improve with time. In the latter, the route belonging to another, the conditions are decided by its owner.

There is a question that distinguishes them. By what route do the enquiries that come to you arrive? If that waypoint is not your property, the second strength is still blank. It may look like earning by skill, and the route doing the earning belongs to someone else.

This distinction matters because a borrowed route has changes of terms. Revised commission, changed ordering of listings, changed rules, discontinued services. All of these occur independently of your skill, and without prior consultation.

And the effect when terms change is proportional to dependence on that route. If nine in ten enquiries come from one route, a change there tells on nine tenths of the income.

This is where skill will see me through is weak. The skill remains, and the destination the skill reaches disappears. And beginning to build a route after it disappears leaves income blank for the length of the delay between placing something and its reaching anyone.

So this check carries more meaning the better someone is currently doing. For someone not earning, the route is a missing item; for someone earning, it is an item whose owner should be confirmed.

The Three Do Not Grow in Sequence; They Are Needed at Once

The three strengths do not grow in the order of mastering one and then moving on. Master the first before moving to the second, and the second starts far too late. A route has time itself as its raw material, so the delay is lost outright.

Nor is advancing all three evenly realistic. Time gets split three ways and none of them gets anywhere.

The allocation that actually functions is this. Use the first strength to accumulate the second.

Concretely, place what has been made. Write and place what became clear in the course of making. Give form to and place what has been explained to someone repeatedly. It is an allocation in which making and placing are not made into separate things.

The advantage of this allocation is that the first strength becomes the material for the second. Without making there is nothing to place, and without placing what was made does not remain. Think of the two separately and time skews to one of them.

The third strength can be considered once these two are moving. Assert the right to set the figure alone while the route is thin and it will not pass. The condition under which a negotiation over the figure holds is that a substitute is hard to find, and that is made by the route.

Next month’s deposits do not move when you change to this allocation. What the change raises first is not income but the count of things standing outside you.

From the point one placed thing stands outside you, there is more to look at. Until then the only material for judgement was whether skill was sufficient. From here, the observation of who responded to what was placed becomes available. While the count placed is one or two, though, there is not much to read from whether a response came. It becomes readable once several placed things stand side by side and what the responders have in common shows up.

One note about the proportions of the allocation. No figure is given here for what share should go to placing. The right ratio changes with which item is currently blank, and with the field.

Instead, it is practical to decide the amount placed as a function of the amount made. Make something, and place one thing that became clear in the making. In this form, as the amount made rises, the amount placed rises automatically.

The advantage of deciding it this way is that placing does not become an independent task. Made an independent task, it is the first thing cut in a busy period. Tied to making, both fall in the same proportion when cutting is needed.

What is placed does not have to be newly made, and that pulls in the same direction. It is taken out of a process already carried out, so the material is already to hand.

Checking Which of the Three Is Blank

The material for the answers sits in the record of the past year.

The first question. Over the past year, did your skill rise? Many answer yes. The first strength tends to rise as long as you keep working.

The second question. Over the past year, how many things did you put where people’s eyes would fall on them? Produce a number. Zero, and the second strength has passed a year at zero.

The third question. Of what you received last month, what proportion was at a figure you presented first? Near zero, and the third strength sits on the other party’s side.

Set the three side by side and a strong skew generally appears. The first at ten, the second at zero or one, the third at zero. This skew is the breakdown of a case where only the skill grew.

And once the distribution is known, what to do next settles. There is no need to stop the work of raising the first. Rather than stopping, connect what has been raised to the work of placing.

The second and third being blank is not because ability is low. They were work the company was undertaking, so there has never been an occasion to do them. After ten years of working, the years of experience in these two can be zero.

Judging I have no talent for it about something being begun from zero is premature. The first strength was also zero in its first year.

The strength in the sentence earning by your own strength is written in the singular. Against a state where the skill rose and the income did not move, reading it as strength is still short is a reading faithful to that singular. Nothing was moving, and something was indeed short. What the singular concealed was the name of the thing that was short.

The view that lays out skills handled one of the three, accurately. The other two, not being spoken about, looked as though they did not exist. While the three sit inside one word, they look like one thing. Undoing the bundling is not a matter of adding a new capacity but of counting again where the time already spent has gone.

What counting again requires is already inside this past year’s record. Answer the three questions and each of the three strengths comes out with a proportion attached. Once the proportions are attached, the question of whether to stop raising the first strength disappears. What remains is the question of where to connect what has been raised.

How the second strength — the route that reaches — decides the ceiling on income is handled in What to know before earning on your own: the ceiling on selling time, and how the figure is settled is taken apart in Before you negotiate a higher rate, look at who is setting the figure. The whole picture of how the three mesh with the form of income is gathered in Getting out of the labour-intensive form; the side where skill rises without time opening up is in Why raising productivity does not leave you with free time; and beginning to accumulate the second strength while still employed is in Preparing to go independent. Where the same territory is being thought about in the phrasing turning what you love into work, What “turning what you love into work” actually is sits nearby.