About Me: 10 Awful Habits That Kept Me Stuck As An Online Freelancer
Online freelancing has become one of the most lucrative business ventures of today.
With loads of services being sold and bought every passing second, online freelancers are making millions of money by leveraging their unique skills to dictate their income generation.
My online freelancing journey began in 2020, when COVID-19 hit and prompted to a global lockdown to control the deadly virus.
I was hungry and in a hurry to make money and so I dived all in looking for the fastest way to bag the paper.
Within the first two months of freelancing curiosity, I had taken tons of online writing tests to no avail, but I was still hopeful.
I took proofreading tests, translation tests, transcription tests, and even registered for survey services but none of my efforts yielded any results.
It wasn’t until the January of 2021 that a friend hired me as an academic writer after a month of training.
This experience exposed me to a new side of me, unknown even to me.
I found myself enjoying the researching, reading, and writing process of academic writing, but since money was the goal I didn’t stretch out my curiosity outside of my assignments.
The academic writing journey came to an end after a few months of great success.
I landed a transcription review gig two months later which was more lucrative and simpler compared to academic writing.
My joy was making money the easiest way possible and with transcription review, I was living my best life.
This was short lived too and I found myself right at the beginning once again.
I ended up taking a corporate job that was paying me real bad as a safety net, while I hustled away for a part-time online venture that I would turn into a full-time job later on.
After an entire year of seeking after online jobs while working a corporate job, I realized that I was stuck in an unprogressive cycle and utterly exhausted.
This article is a chronicle of the things that kept me stuck throughout a 3-year period of seeking for a long-term online venture in futility.
- Get-rich-quick schemes
On my quest to find lucrative but simple jobs, I got overwhelmingly loads of ways to make money online and fell for lots of pyramid schemes.
My hunger to make good money fast, distracted me from the inevitable traps of get-rich-quick schemes; most of them being click baits.
Falling for these schemes depleted my motivation, will power, and hope for a solid win.
This only fully manifested after I had wasted so much of my time; something so finite and irretrievable.
2. Lack of Clear Goals
After a great deal of research and avid reading, one of the most vital aspects of any kind of success or win is having clarity of goal.
Setting clear goals is the first crucial step in any success story. My ambiguity in the outcome I desired was my greatest enemy.
My objective to make money fast didn’t come with any clear blueprint on how to fulfill my goal: it derailed my productivity rate.
I was like a kid stumbling in the mud expecting to learn how to run. This proved to be the greatest thing that kept me unproductive and unprogressive.
3. Procrastination
As a former ardent procrastinator, I was always postponing promising ventures in pursuit of a higher deal.
Writing this piece is one of my great wins against Procrastination.
I would find something concrete and authentic but put it aside because it didn’t match my pay expectations or my mental laziness scale.
I knew I wanted to make some good bucks but wasn’t ready to be mentally diligent. Procrastination is a dream killer and it nearly killed mine.
4. Busyness
For the longest time I mistook busyness for productivity and boy! Ain’t this the biggest scam of all!
I would be busy for 10 hours a day but have nothing fruitful to show for.
I’ve now learnt; busyness is the art of prioritizing the urgent things over the important ones, which in most cases amounts to no significant progress.
While I was seeking out ways to make money, I was so busy that sometimes I got little to no sleep but I still made no progression toward achieving my goal.
Writing down the urgent things versus the important ones helped me see how the urgent matters were distractions and could still be achieved while working on the important goals.
5. Fear
Fear of failure paralyzed me from going after promising and diligent ventures and encouraged a physical diligence routine over a mental activeness.
By this, I mean I was comfortable working for 10 hours a day in futility over taking thetime to think of why my methods weren’t working and evaluate what would.
Fear kept me from exploring my new found passion for academic writing while under supervision; enabling my lack of confidence.
Self-reflection helped me understand that fear in actuality is anxiety misinterpreted as fear out of self-mistrust.
6. Multi-Tasking
Instead of focusing on a reliable singular and solid goal to make online freelancing work, I focused on all the ways I could leverage to make money all at once, and in doing so, I failed at all of them.
As the famous quote says: in all things you offend all, I ended up at the very beginning of my journey with hopelessness and dread.
Multi-tasking wears out your energy, time, willpower, and productivity rate: it’s stupid and uncalled for.
7. Inconsistency
In doing all things, I established no consistent productive routine except multi-tasking.
I was all over the place with no steady way of making progress toward my goal.
Inconsistency kept me busy and away from productivity. I had no fruitful flow of things and thus my attempts yielded no successful results.
8. Fixed Mindset
I went into this quest with a fixed mindset where I wasn’t open to employ the level of commitment required to focus on something worth the pay I was seeking.
I focused on ventures that didn’t require me to change or gain the knowledge I didn’t have, while earning a decent amount real quick.
Anything that required practice and work was undesirable to me and not useful.
9. Poor Planning
From the very start I didn’t have a well laid out plan on how to go about my objective to earn money from freelancing.
This wasted lots of my time and created loads of unnecessary work. It made me work in circles with little to no progress accompanied by maximum exhaustion and despair.
10. Lack of Commitment
Commitment is also among the most crucial aspects of success and I highly lacked any sense of it.
Having a greed to make money real fast prevented me from committing to anything long enough for it to work.
I was always looking for the next big thing when one thing failed and thus didn’t commit to anything I encountered.
The highlighted 10 factors above, held me in a painful, slow, and non-progressive journey, but through every single one of them, I gained great insights on how to attain success in any desired goal.
Personally, I prefer to have learned this before all the toil and futile effort, but I’m glad I get to help someone out there avoid wasting their three years in an unprogressive and painful cycle.
All the best in your success story!!!!
