Dave - I'm on Linkedin, but the only time I ever look at it is when I get a request from somebody wanting to link with me. My thoughts about it are "Not another bloody network I'm supposed to keep updating all the time." As with all of these social network things (and a lot of other things for that matter) I suspect that what you get out of it is in proportion to how much you're prepared to put in - the more you engage the more you reap the rewards of engagement - but there's always a danger of spending loads of time engaging with the networking side of things to the extent that you're not actually getting on with your work (which is exactly what I'm doing now).
As regards the creative work/earning a living balance, I've been earning my living doing administrative/managerial work, and working creatively in my spare time, ever since I left college. Only in recent years has the creative side of things started to earn anything, and we're only taking a few hundred pounds a year. But I do agree with Joel that working in the 'real world' makes a big difference to your creative output. Of course the main negative is that you've got less time and energy left with which to be creative, and I'd certainly like to be in a position where I could work part time (and in a more hassle-free environment) and devote more energy to the creative stuff; but the positives are a considerable enrichment in the breadth of experience on which you draw in terms of inspiration, and the breadth of reference that ends up in your work. There's also a payback in the other direction: a lot of the skills I've learnt through trying to be creative have ended up being employed in my job - knowing how to type being the most obvious example when I first left school, and website design being the most obvious in the last couple of decades. I might add that the way in which I've tried to square the circle of earning money on the one hand and doing creative stuff on the other, in recent years, has been to set up a company and actually try to market the Dr Hairy series as part of a suite of 'alternative' training for doctors in the NHS. This has cost virtually nothing apart from effort, and it does earn the few hundreds of pounds per year that I mentioned before. My point being that 'employment' doesn't always have to mean working for somebody else, if you can come up with an idea or a product, then find a niche of people who like your stuff and develop a way of marketing it. Which brings me back to the value of social media, which I'm not very good at... - Edward --
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