Ask HN: Selling one's self
I lack the skills to sell myself.
I have a hard time communicating, even this post. It feels like I'm looking through 100x zoom, I can't find a clarity of message. I used to sit to write résumés for hours and hours, to come up with nothing of value.
Lack of schooling and lack of real-world experience contributed. I didn't get interviews, and when I did, they weren't impressed. Mia culpa.
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While others worked publicly and sent out hundreds of résumés, I worked privately and sent nothing for years. Years!
Now I'm trying to be practical and freelance, which I've tried twice before. There are a lot of jobs that I have the skills for easily, but when I try to write my profile, or my past projects, I spin out endlessly.
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Concretely, although I don't have any major projects shipped, I do have a lot of previous software with relevant problems I solved. I can show the problem, the code, and the results. For example, extraction from a PDF -> Script -> SQLite database. I don't have to say:
"This was part of an unfinished project I did, blah blah blah."
I can just show it and say I worked on it. Whether contracted or my own code, it does what it does, and as I'm contracted for jobs, I can show those results too (if the client is ok with it.
But I just. Can't. Get. Moving.
It's been so many years. It's like an asymptote, I can't break through it. I just need to break through it once, get some momentum. For this concrete (freelancing) problem, any advice?