This piece over at journalism.co.uk on rookie freelance mistakes reminded me of my friend Brian's brilliant Law of Negotiated Misery, which asserts that the "self-managed classes" have a way of negotiating themselves into lives of permanent misery.

It's conclusion: if you are a bad negotiator, unable to repress your natural desire to do what you love and to avoid what you hate, you get paid bad money to do work you love, and good money to do work you hate (read the full argument here). Interestingly, I recently talked to someone who said he always charged too much for talking gigs he was contacted for because when they'd paid that much people never dared to call it a bad talk. Funny how that thought never occurred to me.