Full-Time Freelancing Isn’t For Everyone
Why even the hardest working and most passionate people turn away from freelancing
At the beginning of the pandemic, plenty of people turned to freelancing as a quick way to keep the bills paid and make ends meet. Many of us — myself included — stuck with it to see if we could replace or even boost our pre-pandemic income by doing freelance work. Some of us are now thriving as full-time freelancers, happy to never work for someone else ever again. Some of us are still striving to get there. Others — myself included — have moved on to full-time jobs, having recognized full-time freelancing as the temporary fix it was and leaving it behind.
For me, this whole process — of starting to freelance, getting more serious about freelancing, then figuring it out it wasn’t for me and pivoting away— took the better part of two years. It has been a very bumpy road that taught me as much about what I didn’t want as what I did. Your own career journey may look different, but here are the lessons I learned from my story.
Note: I’m mainly going to focus on full-time freelance writing, so other types of freelancing may have nuances not covered here. Still, you may find tidbits you can apply to your unique situation. I’m also writing with the awareness that everybody has different long-term goals regarding what they want to do with their money, time, energy, and professional skills. These goals need to be quite particular in order for someone to be a good fit for freelancing at this point of their life. (More on this in a moment.) I decided freelancing wasn’t for me because, after reading and watching tons of content by working freelancers today, my goals are not similar to theirs.
Here are some of the biggest things that may turn you away from full-time freelancing.
The Upfront (and Continuous) Hustle
Becoming a full-time freelancer means starting your own business. Until you get in a position to delegate, you are the one-person-team for every department of this business, from marketing to legal to finance to HR to the services themselves. This is a tremendous amount of work to put in upfront, and much of it is unrelated to writing — the core business.
Even if you get all of this up and running, the nature of full-time freelancing is that you always have to be looking for more work, through a combination of both passive and active marketing. While the rewards for some of the best-paying freelance jobs can be exceptional, much of one’s time spent freelancing involves running the business side of things rather than the work itself.
If starting your own business is something that appeals to you, full-time freelancing may just be your ticket to an exciting career change. But if you’re like me — not particularly interested in the hustle and responsibilities of starting a business—full-time freelancing is probably not for you.
I began as a freelancer on Upwork and, like many freelancers on content mill platforms, grew frustrated with the race to the bottom on price and the scarcity of high-quality, good-paying jobs. As I began to learn more about what it took to be freelancer free from Upwork, I learned more about the business aspects it required. I even tried some of the techniques I learned to attract prospective clients on LinkedIn. It was all eye-opening to learn, but deep down I loathed it — if this was how much effort was required upfront (and continuously ad infinitum) to become a full-time freelance writer, I wanted no part of it.
A full-time freelance business and a full-time job at a company (the route I ultimately chose) are very different things. The former is focused on growth of the entire business, while the latter is focused on professional growth at the individual level. At this stage of your life and career, which type of growth do you value more?
Lack of Job Security
I’m sure the successful freelancers out there would read this and come after me, but the lack of job and income security associated with freelancing (at least in the beginning) was a non-starter for me.
There’s no shortage of success stories and lessons about how people can transform their dismal 9-to-5 salaries into six-figure income. While some of these stories are suspicious, many of them did come about through genuine hard work building their brand and honing their skills in writing, negotiation, and all other ancillary business skills. What they all have in common is a hustle mindset that I just don’t have.
The thought of all the things I’d have to do to be a full-time freelancer frankly overwhelmed me and made me miserable. On top of this, job security is still not guaranteed. (It never is with traditional jobs either, but knowing a company’s history and growth trajectory provides at least some assurance of job stability.)
So I weighed my need for immediate job security, my ultimate career goals, and the skills that full-time freelancing would require me to learn — and changed course.
It’s the Wrong Profession
Just because you have a certain marketable professional skill, doesn’t mean that’s what your job should be.
Ever since I graduated college, I’ve wanted to be a writer. Writing was what I was best at. I assumed this meant I had to look for (or, in the freelancer’s case, create) a job with “writer” in the job title. And for the longest time, that’s what I did. I’ve done internships and freelance work where the most significant portion of the job description was to write.
Just because you have a certain marketable professional skill, doesn’t mean that’s what your job should be.
But then I excavated long-buried aspirations to write fiction — and make money from it. (In this article, I talked about how doing NaNoWriMo planted the seed that caused me to reevaluate my life and career goals.) Eventually I became less and less fulfilled by the nonfiction content I was writing as a part-time freelancer. The prospect of doing more of it as a full-time freelancer filled me with dread. Besides, freelance writing never actually gave me the mental space to enjoy writing.
It took me so long to realize that having “writer” in my job title didn’t make me one — I made myself one.
Again, I reevaluated my ideal work situation against my professional skillset. In the end, I decided to pivot to a full-time editor position — I’d still be working with words, it would pay the bills, and it would give me just enough space on the side to exercise my creativity.
Capitalism says we should always be looking for ways to monetize every one of our skills to make more money — through freelancing, part-time jobs, or other side hustle. If making more money is your priority right now, go for it. But if not, you’re better off giving yourself the room to breathe.
It’s Not the Right Time
In addition to being the wrong job, it was also not the right time for me.
In my studies of how to become a full-time freelance writer, many experts say you must have 2–3 industry niches — areas of expertise you specialize in and can write quicker and more authoritatively about. Generalists don’t make the big bucks because the lack of specialized knowledge means they take more time to research and write.
But not every niche is lucrative for freelance writers — if your expertise or interest happens to be crocheting, you’re out of luck. In fact, there are relatively few lucrative verticals, like fin-tech and healthcare. Sure, you can teach yourself the basics and do your own research to get started, but if you don’t have a natural curiosity about these industries, eventually it’ll be very difficult to enjoy the work and you’ll burn out.
You have even more of a learning curve if you don’t have any significant industry experience or knowledge. This is boat I found myself in. When I started freelancing, I was 24 and had never worked at a single organization for more than 2 years. It isn’t impossible, of course, to learn about a specific industry from scratch, from the outside, but I knew I would never grow a genuine enough interest in real estate or other lucrative niche to make it worth my while.
It simply wasn’t the right time.
Maybe 20 to 30 years from now I will accumulate enough relevant industry expertise (and curiosity) to venture into full-time freelancing, but not now.
Freelance writing never actually gave me the mental space to enjoy writing.
Final Thoughts
Here on Medium, there are plenty of brilliant full-time freelancers who may disagree with the views expressed here, or who may call me lazy for complaining about all the necessary steps it takes to become a freelancer. It’s true — I stand in awe of your hard work in the face of overwhelming odds. But if I learned anything throughout this whole process, it’s that you never know until you try.
Throughout this journey, I joined forums, took classes, and watched webinars on freelancing topics — SEO, LinkedIn marketing, white paper writing, you name it — trying to learn all I could. Even though I ultimately decided against it, I would never have known it wasn’t right for me if I didn’t learn all this stuff. So I’ll always be grateful for this experience and the wonderful communities of aspiring and established freelancers I met along the way.
If you’re on the fence about taking the leap into full-time freelancing, try it for a couple months or a year. Learn what it takes to start a business. At least then you’ll know for sure why it is or isn’t for you.
Right now I still do some freelance work to make a bit of pocket change every month, but the fact that I no longer am relying on it to make a living has taken away a lot of stress and actually improved the quality of my work.
To put it simply, the freelance writer’s lifestyle — the constant research and outreach — is simply not for me. It doesn’t matter how hard-working or passionate I am about writing. Freelance writing is its own beast that comes with significant tradeoffs, which often take away from the actual act of writing.
All this isn’t to say I don’t have the utmost respect for current and aspiring full-time freelancers everywhere — you’re building something no one has ever built before, truly taking your work into your own hands. And it’ll always be the right time to be proud of that.
