You Don't Clean Your Boots?!

Imagine you're mingling at a party and start chatting to someone about the weather:

You: "Awful weather we've been having recently."

Other guy: "Yeah, it's like we're having a monsoon season or something. The game yesterday was a nightmare. Slipping and sliding for 90 minutes!"

You: "Oh, you play football? I had a game yesterday, too. Took me half an hour to get the mud off my boots afterwards!"

Other guy: "I can imagine. Though I didn't clean mine so I wouldn't know."

You'd probably wander off with a pretty negative impression of this guy. After all, cleaning football boots after a game is essential for keeping them in good condition for the next game, so you'd probably conclude that he's a pretty lazy and sloppy individual.

But what if you later found out that this guy was a top professional, earning tens of thousands of pounds a week?

The penny would drop, and you'd be feeling pretty daft about the way you'd jumped to conclusions instead of digging deeper to find out the full story - and perhaps walking away with an autographed napkin!

"Of course he doesn't clean his boots," you'd think to yourself enviously.

"Someone else does it for him!"

This is pretty much what happens when someone is exposed for the first time to the approach to freelance-translation success I set out in my bestselling Amazon/Kindle ebook, 88 WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR.

Someone sees some post, comment, or Quora answer from me in which I mention that I don't check my work before submission, and launches into an adrenaline-fueled smackdown despite having never read the ebook or any of my articles and without knowing anything about me or my background.

88WAYS is a brand new strategy, and it's something that I figured out on my own.

I now have a win-win arrangement with my agents whereby I skip the checks (which are performed by a reviewer employed by the agent) in favor of taking on more work from them and studying my specialist field and obtaining professional certifications in it.

But this wasn't something that the agents came up with and proposed to me.

None of them ever said, "Hey Matt, you've got great promise as a financial translator, so we'd like you to stop checking your work. We'll take care of that for you. Instead, we want you to use that time to accept more jobs from us so you can further hone your skills and so that we can count on a capable translator like you to do the lion's share of the finance-related jobs that come in for a reasonable rate. We also want you to obtain financial qualifications, as we can tell our clients about them and win more business."

And the idea didn't come from other translators, either, as back then the success advice was all about finding high-paying direct clients.

I developed this business model all by myself.

I had a video-game translator the other day naysaying about how my approach wouldn't work in game localization for blah blah blah reasons.

I get that sort of thing a lot.

Well, maybe it wouldn't actually work in game translation. How on earth should I know? The last time I played a video game was when I was still using Clearasil.

The point is this:

If you want success, you're going to need to figure out your own success model.

No one else (not even me) is going to come and hand it to you on a plate.

Everyone's circumstances are different, so you'll need to look at your situation objectively, analyze it, come up with hypotheses about what might work, try them out, retain ones that are working and discard those that aren't, and then repeat the process over and over again until you arrive at your own 88WAYS.

But even though you're going to be coming up with your own formula, you're also advised to be open to the ideas of others rather than dismissing them out of hand before you really know what they are.

Best of luck on your journey.

Matt