Career & Work
The Story You Tell About Your Work Becomes Your Work
Every freelancer is running a private narrative about what they do for a living. That story either opens doors or quietly bricks them up. Most people never notice which.
The story you tell yourself about how you ended up doing this work isn’t just narration. It’s steering. It quietly decides what you reach for next and what you rule out before you even consider it.
Ha-Joon Chang, who normally writes economics, wrote a novel called Arrow that keeps circling back to exactly this question: what is the story a person tells about why they ended up where they ended up, and how much of that story is determining where they go next.
I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while, mostly because I keep noticing it in myself. Not the big public story you tell on your About page. The smaller, quieter story you tell yourself at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday when you’re deciding whether to send a pitch. I’m not really that kind of writer. That’s not the level I work at yet. I’ve always been better at execution than strategy. That story.
We treat these narratives like neutral descriptions of reality. They’re not. They’re load-bearing.
A friend of mine has been freelancing as an illustrator for nine years. She’s very good. She also believes, deep in her gut, that she’s “the reliable one, not the brilliant one.” This is a story she didn’t sit down and write. It assembled itself over years - a comment from a teacher, a few rejections from the agency she most wanted, the comparison to a friend who blew up on Instagram while she was just paying the rent.
The story isn’t crazy. There’s evidence for it. There’s also evidence against it that she somehow never collects.
Here’s what the story does. When a brief comes in that calls for risk - something stranger, more original, more her - she defaults to a safer version of it. The client gets what they asked for. The work is fine. She gets paid. The story is reinforced: see, I’m the reliable one. The brief that would have stretched her never gets the version of her that would have stretched it.
This is the trap Chang keeps circling. Stories are self-confirming machines. They’re not lies - they’re filters, and filters get more efficient the longer you run them.
The narrative isn’t the cause, and it isn’t the effect
It would be neat if we could say: change your story and your career changes. That’s the LinkedIn version of this idea, and it’s wrong, or at least incomplete. The story isn’t a switch you flip. It’s woven into the actual decisions you’re making, the rooms you walk into, the conversations you have with yourself before you write the pitch.
But it’s not just a passive description, either. That’s the part that gets lost. The story actively edits which actions even occur to you. The pitch you don’t send isn’t a missed opportunity - it’s a non-event. It never registered as a real option, because the story said it wasn’t for you. You don’t experience the alternate path you didn’t take. You only experience the one you did, which the story then claims as evidence of itself.
This is why “just believe in yourself” advice fails. It assumes the issue is a confidence dial you can turn up. But the issue is structural: the story has been pre-filtering your inputs for years. Your sense of what’s “realistic” is downstream of a narrative you didn’t audit.
How the story locks in
Watching this in myself, I notice a few recurring patterns. They’re worth naming because they’re harder to interrupt when they’re invisible.
The story decides what counts as evidence. Two clients say you do beautiful strategy work; one client says you’re great at execution. The story you already hold decides which two of those three you remember vividly six months later.
The story decides what feels like ambition vs. delusion. A peer raising their rate by 40% reads as “good for them” or “out of touch” depending on what your story says about what kind of operator you are. Same data, opposite interpretation.
The story decides who you compare yourself to. If your story is “I’m a craftsman, not a businessperson,” you’ll compare yourself to other craftspeople and feel fine about your numbers. If your story shifts to “I run a business that happens to make craft,” suddenly the comparison set changes, and the same numbers feel either inadequate or motivating, depending on the day. I wrote about a version of this in why your personal brand feels fake - the brand and the private story aren’t separate things, they’re the public and private versions of the same narrative.
The story decides what you call a coincidence. The client who pushed you to do bolder work, you remember as “lucky.” The client who slotted you into safe deliverables, you remember as “typical.” The story explains both, and reinforces itself either way.
The half-real escape hatch
Here’s where I haven’t fully resolved my own thinking. The standard move people recommend - rewriting your story - is half useful and half a trap.
It’s useful because, yes, becoming aware of the narrative is the first thing. You can’t edit a draft you don’t know you’re carrying. There’s real value in writing your private story down literally: Here is what I tell myself I am. Here is where the evidence for that comes from. Here is what I leave out. That exercise alone is jarring in a clarifying way.
But the trap is thinking you can flip the story by sitting in a journal and rewriting the sentence. The new sentence has no evidence behind it yet. It’s not load-bearing. The old story has nine years of confirmed instances; the new story has a paragraph you wrote on a Sunday. You’ll revert by Wednesday.
What seems to actually shift the story, in the people I’ve watched do it well, is something less elegant: taking an action that the old story didn’t authorize, and then watching what happens. Not a huge leap. A specific, mid-sized one. The illustrator above eventually sent one set of mock-ups that were the version she wanted to do, not the safe version, to a client she suspected would say no. The client said yes. That single piece of evidence didn’t rewrite her story - but it created a crack the story had to account for.
Stories revise around accumulated counter-evidence. They don’t revise around resolution.
What this means for the next pitch
I keep coming back to one question, which is the thing I’d ask anyone who’s been freelancing for more than a few years. What’s the story you’ve been telling about your work that you haven’t questioned recently?
Not the official version. The one that decides whether you raise your rates, whether you pitch the bigger client, whether you call yourself a writer or a writer who’s also doing some consulting, whether the project that scares you a little goes on your list or stays off it. That story is doing more shaping than your skills, your portfolio, or your network. It decides what you let those three things touch.
I don’t think you can escape running a story about yourself. The mind doesn’t work that way. But you can occasionally check whether the story you’re running was actually written by you, or just assembled by accident from things other people said about you in your 20s.
The version of your career you’re currently living is one of many that were available. The story is what closed the others. Sometimes that’s fine - closure is how a life takes shape. Sometimes the story closed off a version you’d have preferred, and nobody mentioned it, including you.
That’s the part worth sitting with. Not “what story should I tell.” Just: what is the one I’m telling, and when did I decide to keep telling it.
If this thread feels familiar, the conversation that changed my career is the same question from a different angle - what happens when someone reflects your story back to you in a sentence you can’t unhear.