Lamentations of a Faultfinder

 It is another Friday, and I am obliged to provide yet another commute or toilet seat read. After the CEO’s speech on Tuesday, I was tempted to write about acceptance and denial; and it took a lot of energy for me to write on this topic. Well. Here we are.

Back in 2021 I received a calling to be a freelance editor and it was no less of a call than the call I got to be a doctor or that our religious leaders get to be ministers. At that point I had realized that I had a skill that other people could benefit from, so I went for it. I sat down with a good friend of mine who is particularly good at business and money making. From our discussion, I realized that there was a need for the service, and I could make more money than I imagined if I were willing to work hard and play dirty. I will explain later.

Within a week after the discussion, I called two friends of mine to design a poster or something of the sort. After minimal revisions in the designs the posters were on my WhatsApp and RK Edits was up and running. This was in July 2021. To this day, there are some people who have gotten local and international admissions and scholarships after using the RK Edits service. While it is not as much as I should be making, I have made some money from it too. That money comes in handy sometimes when friends and family have urgent needs in Malawi. The beauty of it all, however, is the satisfaction of getting a WhatsApp call from a +44, +1 or +234 number from a client you helped with a scholarship application. There is great satisfaction in seeing a company whose business plan and policies you helped contribute to and there is so much joy in seeing someone get a job or graduate from school following your contribution. You may be tempted to think that it is all rosy. It isn’t. Let me get to it.

Right from the start I knew that this work would be trouble. A friend who had a short stint in a similar venture had told me that while there was a serious need for editing and proofreading services in the country and all over, people were not willing to pay the services’ worth. The result? You spend hours and hours perfecting someone’s document and they use it. Once the fruit of your labor gets them what they want, they somehow lose their ability to remember their obligation to pay for the service and in some cases begin to trivialize it. And just like that, you do not get paid after spending hours of your time reviewing things. I have been through this several times, and ironically these things are done by the so-called friends who I know for sure will need the services again. I am talking about the same people who don’t pay but always ask you to pick the tab saying, “you are making money from RK Edits, after all”. Which money? The one you did not pay? Useless!

There is a general lack of understanding of what this editing entails and that can create problems. I am privileged to have a good client base that understands the value of my services, but occasionally I meet this person who has no effing clue of what editing entails. They would have gotten my number from a friend who would tell them of a CV guy who helps people get jobs. When they are told about how it is a paid service, they will complain saying that the reason they are contacting is that they need money which they hope they will get if they get a job. I would understand that. But then there are these cocky ones who blatantly come in and question where I get the credibility for editing someone’s personal statement for a master’s degree in a South African university. I don’t know if that is a normal question that service providers get, but I feel insulted when I get it considering that I have worked on applications that have gotten people into Ivy League schools. Life goes on, though.

The interesting bit about all this is that my work is mostly appreciated by people who can do without it. It is always that holder of a master’s degree who would come with a two-page document for review with a second pair of eyes. There will hardly be any work for me beyond moving a few full stops and comas, but they would appreciate and pay beyond my expectations. Then there are those on whose documents you spend hours. When you send their work back, they would hardly appreciate the work you have done and will negotiate the rate heavily. The painful thing is that these negotiations are not conceived from lack of money but rather lack of appreciation for the service which can potentially make them thousands of times over in monetary value.

There is another catch to this work. Sometimes you get applications from ambitious people who do not have a befitting profile for the post they are gunning for. In such cases, I am torn between letting someone know that they under qualify and hurting their self-esteem or to just doing the editing and getting paid. What I have found to be the most intuitive thing to do is to let people go through with the application which I edit at a subsidized fee. To date, there are some people who have ended up receiving alternative job offers after applying for things they did not qualify for. In the case of scholarships and university admissions, I would take the same approach too because I believe that going through the process of applying for a school or a scholarship to the end is in itself a win. The applicant learns valuable lessons that they take into the next application process. I sometimes wonder whether these are things that I just say to myself just to sleep better at night after chopping somebody’s money for editing a scholarship application when I think they are not going to get it. This work can be emotionally exhausting.

It has occurred to me that while all the money I make comes from editing, I have been providing coaching and guidance services that are equally valuable, but for which I am not paid. Here is an example. Someone comes to you asking for a review of a Chevening application. They probably have the essays drafted but probably have no idea of what program to apply for and how they should pick a UK university. Choosing a university happens to be a tough job in its own right and you help them through it, spending hours in the process. At the end of the day, you are hoping that they will send you drafts of their essays and you will be able to make a bit of cash from editing only to hear that they have changed their mind. In between the times you talked, they have realized that they are too busy to be applying for the UK things and they will be considering the next round. What that means is that the hours of coaching and guidance go down the drain. With the lack of respect for time, I am sure people who walk away from applications like that do it without any remorse. It is hard to blame them.

There is the ethical debate on editing academic work. Out here, there are guys who choose to tow the middle line between studying for a program and getting a paper legitimately and buying one from a diploma mill. These are the sort of people who have ghost writers who do all the assessments for them including the thesis. I am told that this is hot business and working on one document could cost as much as half a million in Chakwera’s currency. I have found myself wondering whether that is the sort of work I would want to get into and I lean towards a big fat NO. I feel like there are some unwritten ethical rules about the business of freelance editing and they have to be followed. If someone is to have a paper, they should earn it. On the flip side of things, the few theses I have edited have shown me an unmet need in the supervision of postgraduate students in some tertiary institutions. Here is the thing. If someone writes some things that are not up to the standard, the supervisor is obliged to point out the areas that need fixing. What I have observed is that some supervisors tell students their work is poor without telling them how they can make it better. What I pick from there is that there is still a role for freelance editors in academic work although the lines are blurred.

There we are then. The work is satisfying but it has its own challenges. In the same way we do not appreciate doctors and lawyers who we ask for medical and legal opinions without expecting to pay, some ask for editing services, with no intention whatsoever, of paying. The services you provide are life-changing but there will be people who will hardly appreciate you for what you do, and that can be frustrating. When you look at monetization, the money that comes in does not match the work you do. You get to provide services like coaching and not get paid for them when you should. The closest solution that comes to mind is that of closing shop, and resorting to doing it for free for the people who come steal your time from RK Edits in the name of friendship, anyway. Somehow it is an extreme one so I chose to take the middle line and stop advertising the service. That comes with an advantage. People don’t just come to you because they have seen a flyer. They come because someone recommended RK Edits to them, and they believe you can make a difference. The catch? People refer friends without telling them it is a paid service, and you have to look like the bad one when you tell them such work costs 25K. They leave you saying you are expensive only to find that the other providers of the same services are charging 3 times as much.

So what does one do? One raises the prices, of course. And then he begins billing people for the hours spent on coaching. Know your worth, mesa?

You probably do not use my editing service and I don’t even know why I am telling you all this, komabe chakukhosi chaphulika. I feel better now. That being said, I should mention here that RK Edits does some amazing work. You probably won't see much of advertising on my end but the amazing work is still being done mwakachetechete... despite the delayed, defaulted and heavily negotiated payments. Do try it out when you need it, but you will pay even if your surname is Kamwezi for some reason. 

Anyways. Happy weeks.

 

Planning: a Personal Reflection

It is a Friday. This is the sort of day that I am obliged to write a two-pager for my blog. Having kept a consistent record of over forty articles a year, 2022 humbled me as I could only manage a meagre nine. In as much as the things that kept me from writing were beyond my control, I have made a deliberate decision to write more this year. And here we are.

There was a time in Richie Online when the end of the year would be marked with an article urging you, the dear reader, to take stock of your life and evaluate the year in line with the goals you set. That would typically be followed by another article reminding you to plan the next year in reasonable detail. The articles received mixed reactions because while some agreed with me on the need for planning, others felt like the more practical approach to life is one where you take every day as it comes. No plans, nothing. Just a human trying to make it past the next 6 o'clock. While I am more inclined towards planning life to the hour, I would understand why others feel like the whole thing is unnecessary as I was in the same boat before a life-changing day some 10 years ago.

January 12, 2013.

On that Saturday I attended a seminar organized by Henry Kachaje, who then was running a consulting company called Business Consult Africa. This seminar was about personal finances and planning and I remember paying a subsidized fee of K7000, having taken advantage of the student discount that was on offer.

You may wonder why I am claiming that the seminar was a life changer when all you know Henry Kachaje as is this MERA CEO who was sharing motivational talks on how to make K1 million from K1000. As I mentioned, this was a seminar about planning and personal finances. It was the planning bit that changed my life. I cannot recall much of the planning session’s content. One thing I remember, however, is that Henry told us to get practical. In his view, attending the seminar was just the start but putting it into practice was where it was at. In what was a thinking and planning challenge, the good man gave us twenty-two paged A4 planners with specific questions on where we wanted our lives to be in 2023! We had about 2 hours to fill those planners.

A bit of context. By the time we did this I was a 19-year-old second year student at the College of Medicine. I was yet to get into the clinical part of my training and my first relationship. There I was, with a planner trying to visualize my life beyond the 20s. In that planner, we had to write about our career lives, finances, spirituality and family. In one section we were asked to write how we envision people introducing us at a formal gathering in 2023, and boy did I fill that with pleasant things. As the naïve me, unaware of the complexities of the medical profession and the hurdles of studying and practicing medicine in Malawi were, I envisioned a clinical career in which I would specialize in cancer medicine. Family? I wrote that I would be married by now.

I cannot recollect the rest of the nonsense I wrote in that planner. The reason I remember these bits about family and career is just that I value my career and love life above the many things that go on with my life. One thing I am sure of is this that whatever life I envisioned then is not the one I am living now. 10 years ago, in that garden at Mount Soche I thought by now I would be busy treating some patient from Thyolo at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. As I type this, I am on a break at some lonely desk having spent some hours writing code for analyzing data. Tonight, I would have hoped for dinner and a cold drink at some fancy place in the company of my wife. Know what will happen instead? I will spend another cold lonely night alone half a globe away from Blantyre. With this huge deviation from the planned life, you would wonder why that day was the day I think of as life changing. I will explain.

When I sat in that seminar, a certain part of my thinking opened up and from January 12, 2013 I gained my ability to think in the long term. It was at that time that I realized that it was not only possible but also great to have some sort of idea of what you want your life to be like in 10 or 20 years. There is one advantage to it. Once you have set your mind and put up a detailed vision of your life on paper, you make deliberate efforts to make that a reality. As such, every time you make your yearly, monthly, weekly or daily plans you try your best to feed them into that bigger plan. In other word, that long term plan becomes the pacesetter of your activities.

There have been a lot of changes in my life plan over the years. The 10 year vision I had in 2013 was completely overhauled as of 5 years ago but the change only affected the specifics. The original thinking that brought me the plan stuck around. As I started the year 2013, I realized the need for planning the next 10 years with a reasonable level of detail, and I will attempt to do that sometime within the year.

Some have expressed skepticism about the whole idea of stressing what life should be like 10 years from now. To some, the whole idea of tying goals to calendar years does not just resonate and to others it is the extended period of 10 years that they cannot work with. Others have suggested 5 years as a more reasonable alternative for a planning period. Whatever period you think is a bit realistic, I would recommend scribbling a set of goals and a bit of a plan on how to get there.

Back in November 2018, I was invited for a job interview. I did not do much in terms of preparation as I felt like I wouldn’t take the job even if it was offered. The only reason I went in there was that someone had told me that it is better to decline a job offer than to turn down an interview. An interview, she said, gives you more “interview experience”. When I walked into the interview room in with my dirty blazer, not so clean shoes and unkempt hair, I found a serious panel of young scientists. After the pleasantries, the first question I got was that of where I saw myself in two years. When I had tackled that one, the 5-year, 10-year and 20-year versions of the question followed. The rest of the interview was typical, and I left the room glad that I had taken the challenge.

A few days after the interview, I got a call that I had done well in the interview and the team was offering me the job. The start date was just a few days away. In what was an unexpected move, I ended up taking the job. One day I happened to have a casual chat with my boss who told me why I was picked in the job. “When we asked you what you want to do and be in two, five, ten and twenty years, your answers were solid. It showed that you had an actual plan and were not making things up on the spot like the other candidates. I like that kind of focus.” To be fair, I had a two and five-year plan in my books but the rest I made up on the spot. It was easy for me to cook up that information because all I had to do was extrapolate my short and intermediate term plans. That got me a wonderful job and subsequently launched me into the phase I am in my career.

While respecting the “aliyense azipanga zomwe zamusangalatsa” catch phrase, I would like to challenge you to think 10 or more years into the future and let that guide your yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily plans. It may sound like a nerdy thing to do but it is as practical as it is beneficial.

Mr Kachaje took pictures of all of us writing the plans in the garden on that Saturday morning. When we were done with the writing, he took all the planners and told us he would keep them and remind us about them in 10 years. The 10 years between January 12, 2013, and yesterday have been bittersweet. I do not have the career path and family I imagined, but I am glad I attended that seminar. I am looking forward to getting an email of that picture and the hard copy of that planner from Mr Kachaje, who still has my respect to this day. There was a bit about business and making big bucks, but I don't think I paid much attention to that. Perhaps that is why I am still broke to this day. 

Assuming that he is not too busy keeping the country from spiraling into a bunch of fuel queues again; and that he will be kind enough to return those 10-year plans, I will be glad to laugh at those things I wrote before the clinical years messed up my handwriting. I cannot wait to see what the naïve, teenage me thought life would be like pushing thirty. Whatever it is that I find in that notebook, I am glad I went to the seminar. I look forward to writing another 10-year plan. This time it will be realistic.

Happy weekend!