A common question people ask is: “did I do a good job?” After you do some work, it feels like the most self-evident question to ask anyone who is self-reflective. Right?
I’m going to suggest to you that that question, per se, is meaningless, at least in a client-professional relationship or a manager-managee relationship. Why?
Because you will never be judged on your work alone; rather, you will be judged on your work in relation to what your client is paying for it.
Let me explain with an example. There is one freelancer with whom I have been working for about six years now. She does a very particular type of specialized work for me; let’s call it knitting. She knits sweaters for me, and she knits fine.
But here’s the thing. I need lots and lots of knitting, and I pay her $10 an hour to knit. At $10 an hour, she’s a great knitter. I have no complaints, and I give her endless work and in fact, I’m effectively her full-time employer!
She has her challenges knitting. Although I’m happy with the result, I need to check in every 15 minutes to make sure her knitting is going well. For every pattern I explain to her, I need to show her dozens of photos and explain the pattern from many different angles. If she runs out of yarn, she would not go out and buy some but instead, just stop and wait for me to ask what happened.
But let’s say, hypothetically, she was to look for other people who need knitting done, and let’s say she raised her price and charged $40 an hour to knit.
Suddenly, in that hypothetical case, what I thought was previously good work suddenly feels like I’m being ripped off. If I’m paying someone $40 an hour to knit sweaters and she can’t figure out how to get more yarn or I need to waste my time making sure there are no problems every 15 minutes of the workday, I’ll feel completely ripped off. At $40 an hour, my expectations are higher, much higher.
The freelancer whose work I am happy with instantly becomes one I’m very unhappy with, changing only their cost.
This same pattern works itself out again and again on every level. Multiply the numbers above by 10, and change “knitting” to “software developing” or “UI design” or anything, and the same applies.
Just think about it in extreme cases. Someone gives you advice for free and the advice is just “eh,” not terrible but not great. You may not be excited over the advice giver’s wisdom, but you don’t complain. After all, it was free. And lots of old-time sayings capture this: you get what you pay for. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
But, of course, implicit in the ancient wisdom is the opposite. If you are paying for it, look it in the mouth, and complain if there is a cavity. And if you’re paying a lot for it, look it very closely in the mouth and make sure there isn’t even any dirt.
In other words: the more you pay for anything, the higher your standards and expectations will be. From the freelance professional’s point of view, this is useful to keep in mind, since the standard you will be judged by is the sliding one relative to your cost.
