Treat your craft like it matters even while nobody’s paying you for it yet.

Seriousness is not something payment grants you. It is the thing that eventually makes payment plausible, which is why waiting to care until money is attached keeps the money away. If you only do careful work once someone is watching the invoice, you never build the standard that gets noticed. Unpaid work is not practice for the real work; it is the real work, earlier.

Take what you are making and finish one piece of it to the standard you would want a stranger to see. Give it the extra hour. Keep it, because a body of work is built out of exactly these.