You are a freelancer. Maybe you started by writing words, or writing code. If you are a writer, maybe you learned some special types of writing. You wrote essays, research reports, and maybe fiction in school, but had to learn copy writing, or writing for websites. If you learned computer programming in school, and then transferred that skill to the workplace, you learned some of the techniques to code faster, maybe using subroutines from a code library instead of starting from scratch.
As you took these skills from the workplace, working for someone else, to working as a freelancer, also working for someone else, maybe you struggled with finding a steady stream of clients who didn’t pay peanuts. You realize that your full time job is either to be working or to be looking for clients. Maybe you decide to build up your portfolio so that you have more to show to prospects.
Working on your own projects is fine, but without a deadline and the prospect of making money, you may lack motivation. Then you may come upon a quote which might nudge you out of your inertia. Something inspiring. Maybe “If you don’t build your dream, some one else will hire you to help them build theirs.” Dhirhubai Ambani said that. He is an Indian businessman.
You realize that that’s what you are doing, building someone else’s dream. Especially when you are working for what works out to be a low wage compared to what you could be earning if you hadn’t left a full time position. After you come to this realization, you may watch a webinar on how to hire someone from a freelancing platform for $150 to write a 25-page ebook that you can turn around and sell on Amazon and use to earn several thousand dollars. Or you can hire someone to write content for a website and then sell ads on that website and earn money while you sleep. Or you can hire someone for $10 an hour to build apps that you sell to local businesses for a fixed fee plus several hundred dollars per month.
Is it difficult to get the item up on Amazon, or put the content up on a website or sell a company the app services? It is probably easier and certainly less time consuming than doing the writing or coding. (Some of these webinars may claim that you can earn thousands of dollars a month effortlessly. Some claims are just too good to be true, or they ignore the fact that it can take years of effort to build up to the point where it is effortless.)
When you realize that yes, you can make your own money from your own work directly through a variety of methods—writing or coding or building websites to name just a few— then you might be like a kid in a candy store. (Not that there are candy stores anymore. Are there retail candy stores anymore? Do kids still eat candy?) The world opens up to you and you realize that you could do this or that or all of the things. You could write books, start a blog, learn new programming languages, design websites. You have so many ideas that could turn into something big, or at least as good as what other people seem to be doing. Now the problem is what to focus on?
Focusing on one or two things means saying no, or later, to all the rest. Which is sad. It is sort of a mourning period. For a creative person, having an idea is sort of like giving birth. You can see the finished product in your mind. You have thought about it, know it intimately, and sort of fallen in love with it. It is hard to cast it aside. The creative process is so joyful, so energizing, and feels like part of you. Focusing on just one or two things can feel like your are literally sawing the rest of your limbs off.
But if you want to actually get anywhere, the ideas that are already fully formed in your head have to get out into the world. And then that is just the beginning. They have to be promoted and re-promoted. The people who appreciated what you created will want more of the same or similar. How often have you read a novel or watched a TV show or used an app and wanted to find the next one in the series?
Narrowing down to one or two focal projects can be really hard. But it is the next step in the journey from freelancer to entrepreneur. Even if you keep freelancing, and want to keep freelancing full time, narrowing your focus to just a few services will make it easier to create packages of your services and sell the same thing over and over to multiple clients, allowing you to make more money with less effort.
What comes next after focusing? When you have that clarity and can say no to distractions, you can become much more productive. After you gain a little foothold, you will find people who can help you find the next foothold, who are a few steps ahead of you. As the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
