Working from home has now hit the spotlight and a lot of people are becoming curious about the so-called "freelancing". You can see about freelancing on television shows, news articles and social media discussions. Many people want to leave their corporate jobs and shift to freelancing because they are already aware of the benefits of working from home. But I have to tell you this - freelancing is not for everyone.
Freelancing is not for you if:
You ask even the very basic questions
"How to start? Where to apply? Can you give me a job? If you ask these questions to people who are working from home for years, they may feel annoyed. Seriously. If you really want to become a freelancer, these questions are very basic so you can just go to Google and find answers there. If you can't do a simple research like this, freelancing is definitely not for you. We hate spoonfeeding and so do the clients. Oh come on! You have to be independent and be capable of doing things on your own.
You want easy money
There's no such thing in freelancing. Just because most freelancers earn dollars doesn't mean that we get them easily. We work hard just like any other employee. In fact, other freelancers work more than 8 hours per day just so they can earn more. It's not like we're doing something illegal to have easy money. If that's what you think, then most probably you have a very wrong impression about freelancing.
You don't have enough patience
So you want to work from home but you can't find a job or a client? Just be patient, do your best, and be persistent. You need more than enough patience in freelancing. Work from home may sound easy but it's really hard at first. To tell you honestly, from the day I decided to work from home, it took me several months to get my very first online job. I've got many rejections because I'm a newbie but that didn't stop me from applying for jobs. And here I am now. Clients keep pouring in so there's no need for me to apply and there are times that I have to reject other clients.
You're not willing to learn new skills
Let's admit it, most people who want to work online only want data entry jobs because they think it's easy. It's just typing right? I'm telling you, if this is your target job, there's a very little chance that you will succeed in freelancing. There's already a high competition on this field and millions of freelancers are competing against each other to get data entry jobs. So what to do then? You have to upgrade your skills and learn new things to expand your knowledge and get other job aside from data entry. If you're not willing to learn, then good luck on your job hunting!
That's it. If you ever feel that you're like this, you may think again before you enter to the freelancing world. If you still want to be a freelancer, there's still time to set things straight. You may join in the Facebook community called Online Filipino Freelancers where you can read and learn a lot of things about freelancing. But bear in mind that we don't tolerate spoonfeeding.
Some thoughts to ponder before I end this post....
Many are called, but few are chosen. -Matthew 22:14