The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
I know what a pound is, and I earn my £12 an hour, and that's great.
As a private lawyer, I could bill $750 an hour, but I don't.
How much is an hour of your time worth? It's worth whatever wage you would get if you spent that hour working. If you work for an hourly rate, this is an easy calculation. Even if you work for a salary and a fixed number of hours, the principle is the same: It's whatever your salary works out to per hour.
Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.
I mean, when I started out I was billing per hour, like a shrink because you would sit with somebody and work. But most of it, if it's for a live show it's usually a buy-out. A flat fee.
One thing I disliked about being a lawyer was billing for my time.
I was a manual labourer. I figured out really early on that the value of my life could be determined by my hourly rate as a manual labourer digging holes.
From the law firm's perspective, billing by the hour has a certain appeal: it shifts risk from the firm to the client in case the work takes longer than expected. But from a client's perspective, it doesn't work so well. It gives lawyers an incentive to overstaff and to overresearch cases.
I charge by the hour, or I am on a retainer. We try to work with the client.
I think my first client other than my brother was this kid named Tallent. I was charging him eight dollars an hour to record in my room. He kept coming back, then I went up to ten dollars an hour.
Offers for me to play dances, society parties, even churches, were now coming in regularly. For most dates I was paid the sum of one dollar per hour, and they always tipped me at the end of the night.
I can earn more in a single weekend of convetioneering than I would in an entire month drawing comics. And I get a pretty high rate drawing comics.
