50% of your work is useless
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There's a joke about consulting that goes "50% of the work we do as consultants is useful. We just don't know which 50%."
As an aspiring 1099, you may be wondering what work you can do that will help you get your first gig.
In my book, I tell you that working on a nice website is a waste of time. So are most big networking events/conferences.
One-on-one networking, building your skills, researching other contracts/clients you can support, these are all useful.
However, even within the activities we know are useful, we don't exactly know how they'll pay off.
For example, with networking, it always surprises me which contacts end up leading to something useful like a lead on a gig or a referral to a new potential employee.
So I'd say at least 50% of my networking meetings are useless.
Once you can accept that only a percentage of your efforts will yield tangible results, you can keep making progress without getting demoralized.
If only 50% of your work is useless, you do are doing pretty well.
Want the full playbook? Check out Going 1099.