Ah the soloist life…

No manager. No politics. No all-hands meetings.

No jockeying for promotions and titles.

No PTO requests. No expense reports. No Sunday scaries.

There’s a solid amount of corporate ‘stuff’ you just don’t have to deal with anymore when you go the self-employment route.

But one thing stands out as missing vs. corporate life.

Coworkers.

You know, those people who used to be in similar roles/teams as you.

The people who had a shared understanding of your company’s context.

The people who you could gab and commiserate with when needed.

But probably most importantly, the people who would challenge you and troubleshoot with you to elevate your work.

Back in my product manager days, we’d have a set time monthly where we’d critique each other’s A/B test designs to tighten them up before prioritizing them for development.

Our software engineers would have similar checks built in for code review by peers before pushing anything live to production.

Even outside of corporate, peer review is a critical step in publishing academic papers and medical journals.

Just because we’re now in an employment model that doesn’t afford us built-in peer review doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go seek it out ourselves.

In fact, a peer review can be just the thing to inspire you to get an early draft of your consulting IP on paper.

This doesn’t need to be overly formalized — just ask a fellow consultant from your network for a 30-minute zoom to get some feedback on a framework/visual/proposal you’ve been iterating on.

You might be surprised how willing people are to help.

Because we might be out on our own, but we’re out on our own together.

💡

-Wes