When you become self-employed, it forces you to face a lot of truths about yourself and your habits. This leads to a lot of introspection, which leads to a lot of lessons and learning experiences, some of which require getting real truthful with yourself, but most of which you can laugh about later and vow to never learn "the hard way" again. Here are some of the biggest lessons I learned in my first year of business.
It’s OK to do something that doesn’t revolutionize all of mankind. I love being a copywriter, but if I stopped doing what I’m doing today the world would go on just fine. That doesn’t mean my work has no value or doesn’t give me purpose – it does, and I get so much passion and joy out of writing for businesses. However – I’m not curing cancer, just doing what I know how to do in a way that lets me pay the bills and travel Delta (a girl’s gotta eat, right?). At the end of the day, that’s all any of us have to do – make enough to pay in exchange to live on Earth. There might be chunks of time where it feels like that’s all you’ve done, and that’s fine. Take a breath, drink some water, go for a walk, keep on living.
If you no longer like what you’re doing, it’s OK to burn it all down and start over again. There’s a difference between procrastination as a result of laziness and procrastination as a result of resentment. If the joy has been sucked from a project you once loved and you find yourself putting it off out of dread, burn it down and start over. Nobody gets to make that decision but you, and that’s powerful.
Nobody cares about what you’re doing as much as you think they do. Like many of us, I have people-pleasing, approval-seeking habits. Over the past year, I truly realized how many decisions I placed into the hands of other people, often without them even knowing it. If I took a few hours off during my "regular work time" to run errands, it took me awhile to realize my clients wouldn't even know, and even if they did, they wouldn't care as long as I turn stuff in on deadline.
Delayed gratification is imperative to success. Sometimes, if you’re not at a point in business where you’re sleeping on stacks of $100 bills for fun, you might want to go to Target even though you don’t have any money to justify a Target trip because you don’t know when your client is paying and you need to make rent without dipping into your emergency fund. When you work for yourself, sometimes you have to be OK with not getting what you want right when you want it. That is unless you want to constantly panic about your brokeness while desperately writing mind-numbing articles about toilets for extra cash.
Delayed gratification is also essential for when you’re super excited about building your business and want everything to come to fruition NOW but lack the money/resources/time to do it all now, which can be very frustrating when your motivation is has been kicked up to eleven. Which leads me to…
Progress, not perfection. This was my mantra last year and will be my mantra this year. I’ve found so much truth in the idea that you have to just start doing things, despite the “buts” and “what ifs” of your inner voice. Nobody starts a successful project with all the answers. They find the answers as they go because there are more answers in doing than in sitting and thinking about getting it right the first time. Get started now and use whatever resources you already have, even if it’s just your brain, a pen, and a notebook. Just begin.
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