Learning From - And Avoiding - Mistakes

Not all your work will be your best - that's true of everyone in every undertaking. But if you want to be good at what you're doing, you have to make a point to learn from the experience and do things differently the next time. If you don't get better, you'll get worse by becoming calcified in untreated mistakes.

Ultimately, you become what you do, because what you do creates the expectations of the people you deal with, and they start putting you into a box by asking you to do more of the same. If you're taking assignments on quick turnaround on every manner of topic to essentially fill column inches, then you'll find you continue to attract similar assignments until you start to do something else.

That's fine if you're happy with the work you're doing, but if you're not and you can't stand reading your own pieces, then something is wrong. The promises of money act like a trap to draw you back to doing work that you'd rather not meet again, like running into an ill-advised one-night-stand at a party later in the week. ("Oh, how are you?" "Fine .... fine." Uncomfortable silence.)

You generally need a certain base of time and budgetary resources to perform adequate work. If you haven't been getting them, then it's time to find other clients who will provide what you need. Instead of cringing at work of yours that you didn't like, you can actually start running across articles that you think are pretty good, only to find they are ones you wrote and forgot.