Embracing the Uncertainty of Freelancing




Greater than 3 minutes, my friend!

Committing to a freelance career can be a scary prospect, particularly if you already have a full-time job.

The uncertainty of freelancing can raise doubts in our minds:

Do I have enough clients to freelance full-time? What will I do if there’s a quiet patch? How can I guarantee myself a certain level of income?

The fact is these doubts are very real and very serious. It’s important not to dismiss them in the excitement of becoming your own boss – particularly if you have a family to support. (Full disclosure: I don’t.)

So, preparation is key.

Try and get a feel for freelance life before quitting your current job. Is it right for you?

Use any spare time you have to source the clients you’ll need. Can you realistically expect to receive enough work?

And ask for advice from anyone who is already doing what you want to do. How will their experiences influence your own strategy?

 

But once you’ve prepared as much as you can, you’ve got to take the leap, bite the bullet, grab the bull by its horns and hastily seize any other idiom that comes to mind. That is, leave the relative safety of your old job behind and become the freelancer you’ve dreamed of becoming.

It’s not easy, but you have to decide whether you’re going to commit or not.

 

Some of us freelance translators, myself included, didn’t have the luxury of excessive preparation.

For me, I had chosen to leave a stable job I realised I couldn’t happily continue. And in my eagerness to move forward with my life, I had neither the foresight nor patience to plan my prefect entry into the world of full-time freelancing.

The time came to burn the boats. There was no going back.

I would besiege the gates of my freelance aspirations or be left defeated on the shores of disappointment.

Of course, by removing any sense of comfort or choice, I deliberately committed myself to making my vision happen.

Is this the perfect strategy? Probably not. Am I now at a position in my freelance career where I can be glad I took my decision? Absolutely.

Now, by burning the boats, I do not mean to burn my bridges. Let’s not confuse our pyrotechnical metaphors here.

Former colleagues may be able to offer advice, leads or words of encouragement – and in turn, we may also be able to help them in our own way.

 

Once you’re in, however, I personally believe freelancing can offer more stable employment. If only you’re willing to embrace short-term uncertainty.

In his highly recommendable book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that a self-employed person undergoes short-term uncertainty in favour of long-term stability of income. Consider the following:

A freelance trainer who underperforms, may lose a regular customer (and thus revenue) and is prompted to invest time and energy into improving her skills, professionalism, advertising and so on – thereby ultimately becoming more productive.

The market provides the self-employed trainer this signal, and she keeps her job.

Whereas, if an employee at a company were to underperform or lose an account for instance, he might not be so fortunate as to have the opportunity to develop his skills or work ethic and thereby become more productive.

The contrast is a freelancer’s drop in revenue to the employee’s dismissal and all the serious consequences that entails. The freelancer develops herself and improves; the dismissed employee stagnates and spends his time looking for a new job rather than building his resume.

You must only embrace the daily uncertainty of freelancing. It’s both liberating and empowering.

 

How did you become a full-time freelance translator? Was it a gradual and meticulously prepared transition? Or did you also have a similar experience?

Lewis Dale

About Lewis Dale

Freelance German to English translator specialising in blockchain, finance, gaming, online content and business localisation.

8 thoughts on “Embracing the Uncertainty of Freelancing

  1. Having been a freelance translator since 1996, I know the most difficult part of being a freelancer. I frequently think if my path is right. However, whether the answer is right or wrong, in fact, I am still a freelance translator. Now, I am a 20-year experience freelance translator in English-Indonesian and Russian-Indonesian language pairs and still ask the same question. IMO, “long-term stability of income” never exist in the freelance world, in which the only certainty is uncertainty…
    and God.

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  2. I was working as a part-time (occasional) translator for around 10 years, studying and working at the same time in different places (more or less liked). Then, my husband got the job at the university in a small town in the USA, where I could not find any job and then I thought that translator job could be a solution. However, it took me about 2 years after that (we became parents meantime; I think this kind of job is also very good when you have to spend more time at home) to decide to pursue this career full-time. During, this years I was trying to find a job that would make me happy but in fact self-employment and freelancing is this job for me. It really fits my personality. Maybe, I had to try sooner. Unfortunately, not all of us know at once what is the best for them. Now I am still in the beginning of my road.

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    1. I too didn’t know what my path was at first. But I started feeling a lot happier once I started down this road; I’m also excited to think where it could lead. And, as freelancers, we have more control over the matter than we realise. Thanks for your comment!

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  3. Thank you very much for this article, Lewis. I think that the uncertainty is basically what a life is made of, just because it is so tough to predict anything, especially the future:). And as a freelance translators we are simply more aware of this true and better prepared to deal with it in a good way. In my humble opinion, people with so called “stable” job and-/or “stable” income are just living in a kind of bubble, because the stability is a huge illusion in most cases: they can always lose their income or their job, no matter how impossible it seems to them right now or how hard they try to keep it. And we – the freelancers – are better equipped to face this kind of situations, as you rightly pointed out in by quoting the case made in favor of self-employed people by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the book “Antifragile” (I read it and loved it, just like I read and loved the Black swan of the same author, also highly recommendable), because unexpected changes don’t catch us (so much) of guard. For instance, there is very little chance that we will lose all of our clients at the same time: some of them can abandon us, that’s very true, just pursuing better price or for whatever reason they might have, but if we doing well our job it’s very unlikely that all of them will decide to go elsewhere, and it’s almost impossible that they will do it at once, leaving us completely workless and without any source of income. So yes, I prefer to embrace the incertitude of freelancing than to live in a sort of illusive stability.

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