Less than 1 minute, my friend!
On Learning
One of the things I love about being a freelancer is that I can learn a lot of new things and gain new skills. Of course, people who work at a 9 to 5 job can do that as well, but from my point of view, freelancers have two major advantages.
Firstly, weโre kind of forced to do it. Have you ever experienced resistance to doing even the things you like? I know I have. But if you want to run a successful business, you have little choice: either you learn, or you get behind.
Secondly, being our own bosses we have more flexibility to fit learning into out schedule. That means we have less excuses not to learn.
So today I decided to take an hour out of my day to learn and practice some new things. For me itโs been translating an interview form German and starting to learn html.
What are you learning?
Ronnie J Rigdon 
Jasmine Heesaker 
Mariann Makrai 
Today I learned how to create strong passwords.
Not on purpose. It’s that I just translated a tutorial on corporate IT security.
And I’ll get paid for that. For my own learning ๐ I’m lovin’ it!
Yes, that’s another great advantage of our profession! ๐
I completely agree that one of the greatest advantages of being a freelancer and being a translator is that learning all the time is part and parcel of our profession.
I’ve enrolled in quite a number of fascinating MOOCs (for anyone who doesn’t know what that means, it’s Massive Open Online Courses), either free or inexpensive ones. They are helping me to develop new sub-specialties in my translating fields. I also sign up for many one-time webinars in my new sub-specialties that are about current developments and news in those arenas. I firmly believe that an expert translator needs to be as knowledgeable in a field as those for whom he or she is translating. Along with that comes premium rates, faster translating speed, and greater pleasure.
I’ve also been following some online courses that are inspirational (like Seth Godin) or give solid advice about being in business for oneself. For instance, I know I need to learn much more about marketing my services, about which there’s a lot of educational material. Other courses I’ve taken help me improve my computer and software skills.
Finally, a few of the online courses I’ve taken were for pure pleasure and irrelevant curiosity, ones I stumbled across while looking for work-related ones. At least I take them in my non-native working language — helping me improve my translating skills as a nice side benefit. ๐
The main problem is scheduling all these class sessions — I mean, if I weren’t careful, I’d spend all day indulging in learning, but I do have to translate too ;-). So I’ve set up specific times in the day to watch these online classes AND do the associated reading or writing.
Thanks for raising this topic!
All the courses I’ve taken so far are in English, so I get the double benefit of practicing my source language, too. ๐
I faced an unexpected problem last Black Friday. There’s been a huge sale on Udemy when you could get lots of $300 courses for $10. I wanted to buy so many of them that it was obvious that I would struggle to find the time to take them all later, so I had to hold myself back. ๐