Your Writing Career — Who’s In Charge?

Is your writing career serving you or are you serving it? This was the question that occurred to me about my own writing career after reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (yes, that is an affiliate link). Put another way — what is the goal of your freelance writing business? I’d be the first to admit that that’s changed for me over the years. When I started freelancing the goal was to have something that could legitimately be called a freelance writing business, that actually made money and paid the bills. The fact that I worked long hours to achieve this didn’t seem to matter that much.

Changing Priorities For My Writing Career

Over time, though, my priorities have evolved — or rather, I’ve begun to see my priorities as real priorities instead of making them take second place to earning an income. Don’t get me wrong, I still need the money, but that’s not what this career is about for me. I would write anyway, because I love it, but if I had my druthers I’d probably change the amount of time I spend on client work. Is that a bad thing?

I don’t think it is. I aim to give all my clients excellent service. When I started freelancing, I worked for a lot of different clients; now I work for fewer clients at better rates. Over the next few years, I’d like to refine that even further.

What I Really Want

What the Tim Ferriss book did for me was force me to look again at what I wanted from my life. The important things are:

• family life

• travel

• helping others to succeed

• job satisfaction and general happiness.

Earning an income is a way to achieve those things in the way that I want them, but there’s no reason that this has to be a traditional approach. I’ve been thinking more and more about the value of outsourcing and the need to earn passive income, something I already do, but only on a small scale. Not every penny I earn has to come from the sweat of my brow — there are cleverer ways to do this.

So the process I have gone through is to think about what want and how to achieve that now — not in ten or fifteen years’ time. The 4-Hour Workweek has helped me with this process, as has the Location Independent Business Course. It’s still ongoing.

What Happens Next?

So what does this mean? Well, I’m going to be blogging more, but I’ll also be working on ebooks and looking into other income streams. I’ll be looking to take a smarter approach to my writing work and to enjoy the benefits of a freelance lifestyle now.