Life of a Freelancer – Part 1 – The Dream

I have decided to write a series of articles exploring the freelance business and lifestyle, each exploring its own subfield. It’s a hot topic nowadays, as more people are motivated to start their own business so I would like to share some of my own wisdom from being a freelancer. Some may find it useful, some may not, either way, it’s nice to write about this and know that it could help somebody one day.

This series will include articles on financial management, business generation, marketing, planning, managing work-life balance and many other topics that are a crucial part of every successful freelance business. The present article is about the dream of being a freelancer.

Personally, I have always dreamt of being able to work as one and to do so from anywhere in the world. Even though I’m not a big fan of complete detachment from a workplace, I do enjoy being able to stay in different countries without sacrificing my career a single bit.

I started freelancing during my university years and haven’t stopped since. With the emergence of internet and technology, the freelance job marketplace brought new possibilities and I seized that opportunity and found a place for all my passions—art, marketing, design and photography. Yes, there is a place even for traditional crafts in the remote work world.

So what is it like to be a freelancer?

Well, first, one must realise it’s no walk in the park and you have to work twice as hard as anybody else you know to make it. Even though living a dream is great, it takes a considerable amount of dedication, persistence and risk-taking to be able to drive business and complete successful projects while managing your whole life.

Freelancing has a lot of benefits like partial independence from restricted work hours, the potential for unlimited growth, a lot of freedom for innovation, great job satisfaction, etc. It truly is an exciting journey. Of course, it can also have a few downsides, like needing to learn a lot of things from various fields that come with managing a freelance business for example managing finances, administration, contract law, time management, etc. However, these downsides can become very stress-free if one learns to accept them and learn to find beauty in them.

We don’t need long articles about how to pursue a dream, so to skip a lot of crappy writing and answer the question of this article, I will borrow the words of Helen Keller:

[blockquote text=”Keep your face to the sunshine and you won’t see the shadow.” text_color=”” width=”” line_height=”undefined” background_color=”” border_color=”” show_quote_icon=”yes” quote_icon_color=””][:]