A conversation between two creatives Gautam & Adom Woods about the pros and cons of working for others and yourself.
Left, Adom Woods (Head of Animation and Creative Director), right, Gautam Narang (CEO Of Visual Smugglers)
Question
What are the pros and cons of working for others and yourself?
Adom Woods Pros of working for others, I'll start with stability. That's the main reason I went back to all of my day jobs because I felt a lot of instability in my freelance work. And that was usually coupled with a lack of process in the freelance stuff that I was doing, which is what we're trying to address with visual smugglers to try and bring the best of both worlds together.
Less freedom and less creativity, but at least you can make a steady amount of income
Sometimes with freelance, you're still just working for other people, doing things that aren't necessarily creative, but you don't even get the benefit of having a steady income.
The pros of working for yourself in the correct situation are that you can set things up to be exactly how you imagined a work situation to be. Which is pretty much just making money off of what you love, but this is a very tough thing to do. This is why a lot of creatives either work in other fields to make their living wage or go to a day job and sacrifice some freedom and creativity.
What are the pros and cons of working for others and yourself?
Gautam Narang Your whole life, you were pretty much told what to do from the moment you went to school. You were given a schedule and you were told, this is when the deadline is. You need to be in this classroom at this time at this location, and that's how we all spend our lives. Then you go into a workplace and you're told what to do, you're given a brief and told what is expected of you.
So for me, I've never really thrived understructure. I've tried working for others, but one of the biggest issues is I'm always questioning. How do you have this job? You're not as qualified as you think you are or your title.
I would go home and I would just research.
How do you set up a business? How do you progress forward? Put a lot of effort into figuring out things, because I would say, there's someone in this workplace and all they're doing is this one job. Why can't I figure out what they're doing?
I was teaching once and this student asked me. Should I go to school or should I freelance? And I told her, if you don't go to school, you better be disciplined because if you want to be a freelancer, the most important thing is to have discipline.
Working as a freelancer, you have to figure it out all for yourself.
Working for others, you get all that structure. You get told what to do. It makes life easier because you just come home and don’t think about your work. But working for yourself, you're constantly thinking of new ways to expand your business, new ways to improve your skills.
You have to wear all the hats. You're all the departments. You have to be a student of life. You have to constantly read and figure out how to do things because somebody is out there doing the job that you dream of. You just have to figure out how they did it.
Freelancing or working for yourself is pretty much similar to working for someone else, but you just have to work. All the time and you just have to be very disciplined and no one's going to tell you what to do.
How do you balance work and personal life?
Gautam Your priority goes down lower and lower. The moment I get clients, my clients become my priority, the moment we grow as a company, the employees are a priority.
There is no balance. You're either on one side. Really busy or the other side, really quiet.
We talked about Mamba Mentality, you have to be focused on exactly what you're doing. Makes more sense than having balance, because it'll never happen.
How do you balance work and personal life?
Adom I would say it's definitely been tough. Having open communication with clients because when people hire someone as a freelancer, it's very easy for clients on their end to communicate with a freelancer as if they're always available with unlimited hours.
