![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I read Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambition with the hope that it would help me plan out how to transition from an unsatisfying full-time job to a freelance career. While Rubin has some good advice about following your passion, it ultimately wasn't useful in answering the questions I had, and because the book was published in 1999, some of the information came across as a bit dated.
Rubin spends much of the book discussing how to reinvent yourself and your identity outside of the corporate model, how to discover the work that truly inspires you, and how to generate the courage to pursue that work. While there's some great content here, it's not as useful to someone like me - I know my passions (writing, editing, teaching yoga and teaching writing), I just need to figure out how, financially, to build those passions into a viable career. In this area Rubin is lacking. The cover blurb notes that Rubin, a high-powered publishing executive for many years, now works with "leading CEOs" in her solo career, and this comes through in the content. Although Rubin strives to interview a wide variety of professionals in researching this book (including a master bonsai gardener and a corporate guy turned race car driver), her target audience is the dissatisfied exec looking to build a consulting career (and with a lot more cash in the bank than I have). For example, Rubin states that, when leaving your corporate job, you should be able to negotiate a retainer, exit package, or continued Cobra health insurance, which just sounds laughable to any average cubicle jockey. In general, employees in the lower echelons of the corporate world just don't have that kind of bargaining power, and Rubin doesn't seem to know it.
Rubin states repeatedly that a soloist can make far more on her own than her previous corporate salary, and with only a few clients, but she never addresses the practical concerns of how to identify and market yourself to your client base and find those lucrative clients. As a yoga teacher, I guess "clients" in this case would mean starting my own yoga studio and identifying private clients, but that's not as feasible for a brand-new teacher just starting out when there are plenty of more experienced yoga teachers around. I have some ideas about looking for clients as a writer, but I don't really know where to start as an editor. Either way, making ends meet just doesn't seem possible, letting alone turning a profit, and how do you get through the months or years of financial struggle to get to the point where the ends do meet? I did appreciate some of the practical information Rubin provides - how to calculate expected business expenses and the income needed to pay the bills, what legal advice and insurance you should invest in. I also liked Rubin's discussion of proposals, which will be directly useful to me as a writer/editor and possibly also as a yoga teacher (proposals could be useful if I do want to start my own studio, if I want to propose a special workshop or class, if I want to sell myself to a corporate client that wants to offer yoga to its employees, as a few examples). But overall I wanted more on the practical side of things.
Rubin spends a long chapter discussing how to set up and structure a website and what sort of content to post there, and here's where we see how far technology has come in the past 10+ years. No longer must you pay a web design firm to create a site for you (again, an expense the little folks can't really afford) now that there are plenty of websites that help you easily design a professional-looking personal site and blog for free. It's also cheap and easy to buy, register, and use your own personalized domain name. Rubin details the conversations she had with her web designer about how her site should be structured, and while it's interesting, most of this just isn't applicable anymore.
Overall, Rubin gives some great advice to the soloist, and the book is still valuable and worth reading. However, it didn't have everything I was hoping for, and I never really felt like I was the target audience.
Rubin spends much of the book discussing how to reinvent yourself and your identity outside of the corporate model, how to discover the work that truly inspires you, and how to generate the courage to pursue that work. While there's some great content here, it's not as useful to someone like me - I know my passions (writing, editing, teaching yoga and teaching writing), I just need to figure out how, financially, to build those passions into a viable career. In this area Rubin is lacking. The cover blurb notes that Rubin, a high-powered publishing executive for many years, now works with "leading CEOs" in her solo career, and this comes through in the content. Although Rubin strives to interview a wide variety of professionals in researching this book (including a master bonsai gardener and a corporate guy turned race car driver), her target audience is the dissatisfied exec looking to build a consulting career (and with a lot more cash in the bank than I have). For example, Rubin states that, when leaving your corporate job, you should be able to negotiate a retainer, exit package, or continued Cobra health insurance, which just sounds laughable to any average cubicle jockey. In general, employees in the lower echelons of the corporate world just don't have that kind of bargaining power, and Rubin doesn't seem to know it.
Rubin states repeatedly that a soloist can make far more on her own than her previous corporate salary, and with only a few clients, but she never addresses the practical concerns of how to identify and market yourself to your client base and find those lucrative clients. As a yoga teacher, I guess "clients" in this case would mean starting my own yoga studio and identifying private clients, but that's not as feasible for a brand-new teacher just starting out when there are plenty of more experienced yoga teachers around. I have some ideas about looking for clients as a writer, but I don't really know where to start as an editor. Either way, making ends meet just doesn't seem possible, letting alone turning a profit, and how do you get through the months or years of financial struggle to get to the point where the ends do meet? I did appreciate some of the practical information Rubin provides - how to calculate expected business expenses and the income needed to pay the bills, what legal advice and insurance you should invest in. I also liked Rubin's discussion of proposals, which will be directly useful to me as a writer/editor and possibly also as a yoga teacher (proposals could be useful if I do want to start my own studio, if I want to propose a special workshop or class, if I want to sell myself to a corporate client that wants to offer yoga to its employees, as a few examples). But overall I wanted more on the practical side of things.
Rubin spends a long chapter discussing how to set up and structure a website and what sort of content to post there, and here's where we see how far technology has come in the past 10+ years. No longer must you pay a web design firm to create a site for you (again, an expense the little folks can't really afford) now that there are plenty of websites that help you easily design a professional-looking personal site and blog for free. It's also cheap and easy to buy, register, and use your own personalized domain name. Rubin details the conversations she had with her web designer about how her site should be structured, and while it's interesting, most of this just isn't applicable anymore.
Overall, Rubin gives some great advice to the soloist, and the book is still valuable and worth reading. However, it didn't have everything I was hoping for, and I never really felt like I was the target audience.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-04-20 01:34 pm (UTC)From:you probably have already thought of all this stuff, but it's good to type it for my own brain. when i get back this fall, i want to have at least 2 classes that i teach & be on the sub list for a couple of studios.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-20 05:27 pm (UTC)From:J is also a massage therapist; N also does holistic food counseling. They have private yoga clients, and they have a nice teaching gig at IKEA's corporate office (which is at least twice a week, maybe more). The studio does get them good community exposure, which is possibly what made some of the more lucrative gigs possible. I also discovered that the guy who co-owns Enso in Media, another of my favorite studios, is a tax lawyer by day. Man was THAT disturbing to find out.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-30 04:57 pm (UTC)From:i'm guessing the marketplace in PA is different from MA - for example, i didn't get free practice with my TT (although i did get some free workshops). and my training cost about $3200. i've heard the hoop-jumping is pretty intense for yoga alliance, but i don't think it's so arduous once you've got it set up?
i'm excited to follow along with your adventures in figuring all this out. it feels like i'm on a far less trod path in not wanting to teach yoga full time (or near full time) and i'm finding that that creates an unusual set of hurdles.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-30 05:51 pm (UTC)From:I'm be interested in hearing more about the unusual hurdles you're encountering. Is it that studio owners ask or expect you to teach at times that you're at your 9-5?
no subject
Date: 2012-05-03 06:39 pm (UTC)From:boston is getting kind of saturated - not sure what it's like in philly. there's an abundance of TT programs (back bay yoga, alone, is offering 3 this summer!) and many of the people getting into teaching are very young, like college or just out of. none of those things are qualitatively negative, but it means that there are lots of folks with lots of time on their hands with newly minted certification, so it's very competitive. evening classes are primetime, so they are less likely to go to new teachers. there's a cultural feeling that i'm not "serious" because i'm not pursuing teaching full time and i'm not taking every single workshop/training offered at every single studio. i have low-visibility and limited availability, which makes me kind of undesirable from a scheduling perspective. i think there are ways around this, but i need to wait until i get back from my travels to really dig into it.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-03 08:38 pm (UTC)From:I'm also waiting until after this summer to pursue more yoga teaching opportunities. :) You could always move to the Philly 'burbs, you know.