From the course: Freelance Work Strategies for Video and Motion Graphics Creators

Is freelance life for you?

- One of the first things you need to ask yourself as you're getting started as a freelancer is, is the freelance life for you? So I've come up with seven key attributes that I think you can use to help decide this answer for yourself. The first is being self-motivated, being organized, not afraid to network, being nimble, always learning, risk tolerant, and someone who enjoys flexibility. Let's delve into each one of those. All right, let's talk about being self-motivated. This means you need to be able to manage your own time and priorities every single day. You need to be able to stay motivated with long-term and short-term goals without anybody telling you what to do. You need to keep those goals in front of you every day. That might be with using a digital platform like Trello or Basecamp or even just a physical whiteboard that has all of your projects on it. We'll discuss this more in chapter four, growing your business. Being organized. This means you're gonna have to be organized in lots of different ways that don't have to do with your creative work. You have to be organized with your finances, organized with how to meet your client's needs, organized with all the contact information and how to reach all your different vendors, and especially organized in your workflow. In our Business Essentials Chapter Three, we're gonna delve into some of the tools that will help keep you organized. But ultimately, you have to know yourself and if this kind of challenge of organization is for you. Being unafraid to network is another one of the traits that I think is essential to success as a freelancer. And for those of us video professionals, many of us are actually introverts, right? If you're a motion graphics designer or an editor, you often are by yourself in a room working and not really necessarily out there shmoozing with people. So knowing that you can push yourself and become an extrovert when you need to is really important because you're responsible for your own sales and growth. And you have to make connections not just for yourself, but help others network and make connections and build your community as you grow. So being an introvert can make this a little bit tough, but I know you can overcome it if you try. The next trait I like to talk about is being nimble and what I mean by that is when you're self-employed, you don't have a big training program that's put together for you by an employer so you need to stay up to date with all the tools of your craft, but you also have to be flexible and learn new types of tools. Always learning is another one of the key traits of successful freelancers. So if you love learning, you're going to thrive. And you're here taking this course so I know that you're interested in learning new things. You have to constantly be researching new trends, understanding new creative tools, sharing resources both with others in the industry and even with your own clients. So it's really like being in school every day for your own development when you're a freelancer. The next trait is being risk tolerant. Being self-employed is not for the risk averse. You're basically dependent on yourself for paying yourself and making sure you meet your overhead every month. So you really have to have a little bit of a tolerance for risk 'cause it's not always gonna be consistent especially when you're getting started or you're making changes. So it's really a little bit more than a career, it's a lifestyle and you have to be willing to take some risk to make that happen. So in addition to being sometimes uncertain about income, sometimes there's gonna be really intense time requirements especially if you don't have other people who can jump in and help you. You need to be able to make some boundaries around personal time, to try to take vacations, so things can definitely be up and down and you have to take your own pulse about how you deal with risk. Finally, the flip side of risk is flexibility. For example, I get to go grocery shopping not at five o'clock on a Friday with everybody else, but at two o'clock on a Wednesday or I can take summer vacations with my kids because I can program my work to allow me to do that or if you have to take care of an elderly parent or whatever it is that works in your schedule, you can sometimes accommodate that in a more flexible way when you're a freelancer. So that sounds great, but the lack of consistency isn't for everyone so it's a balancing act and you have to check through all of those checklist items and see if freelancing is for you.

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