A FEW HOME TRUTHS ABOUT INDEPENDENT WORKING
Getting up when you want.
Getting dressed when you want.
Choosing your own projects and unearthing opportunities you never dreamed of.
Fitting work around your life (rather than the other way round).
Flicking-the-bird to workplace politics.
Fully up to date personal admin, including multi-tabbed personal budget spreadsheets.
All undoubtedly compelling arguments for quitting corporate life and going it alone. But, as so often in storybooks, there’s a dark side. And unfortunately the force is strong there too. Three months after leaving life in a marketing consultancy, here are my top 6 realisations about ‘building a career on your own terms’
1) You REALLY have to believe in yourself
I read endless blogs, well-intentioned personal stories and motivational pieces which serve only to highlight to me how hopelessly unskilled, lazy, unimaginative and floundering I am. In order to stand your ground and not return quivering to the safety of full-time employment (unless of course that is what you actually want), you really need to back yourself. And when you don’t, just pretend you do. No one else is going to tell you the right decision — you have to trust your instinct on an hourly basis.
2) Staying at home is maddening; the big wide world is expensive
Even with Skype calls, introductory coffees, coworking sessions and all the other social interactions of independent working, the reality is that you spend a lot of time noodling away on your own.
Now, it’s become clear that I will slowly descend into lunacy and potentially divorce (see item 4) if I sit at home all day, in my 34sqm flat, looking out onto someone else’s outdoor space. But London is HELLA expensive. And I’m not even talking £500 a month Soho Works membership with free turnip juice and 3D sandwich printing. A couple of coffees a day, lunch, stationery that you can no longer steal from the cupboard on the first floor, the most overpriced public transport system in Europe…BOOM, £15-£20 a day.
3) The devil makes work for idle hands
I’m a pretty motivated person. I like to make shit happen. Out of bed I spring at 7.30am, meditate, eat my homemade granola, do some (a little) exercise, then sit down to start the day’s work. But give me no deadlines, constant access to What’s App, the compulsion to cook elaborate and complicated Ottolenghi dishes, a nearby library AND a Kindle, and I guarantee I can fill weeks with activities that bring me no further whatsoever to my goals.
4) Too much thinking kills relationships
I have a lot of time to think. A LOT. It’s not that there isn’t a heap of stuff I could be doing — I know the direction I want to travel in and I’m moving there, one tiny pigeon step at a time. But it’s just not the same as an 8–6 workday filled with meeting, calls, client deadlines, critical debates with colleagues on the plotholes of Homeland…etc etc. And, when alone and not run off my feet, I think.
I daydream about the future, start searching on RightMove for houses we could buy (how??!!), build a 5-year household financial plan, map out the year’s holidays and social events and when the right time is to have a baby and what type of wacky home education we should give it…And so on and so forth. And then enthusiastically blindside my husband upon his return from a day in the office, with the next 20 years of his life neatly laid out. It goes down oh-so-well….
5) I don’t know how to do any of this
The corporate world spoon-feeds you. Sure, you have to work hard and play the game to get ahead, but it’s always pretty clear how to do that. Most of the time, there’s a neat grid of behaviours and competencies to guide you — tick tick tick, PROMOTION! You don’t really have to think too creatively (indeed, sometimes it’s positively discouraged).
On the other side is a whole world of things that I just don’t know how to do. How do I build a website? How do I write an invoice? How do I pay myself company dividends? How do I pitch myself when I’m increasingly convinced the only way I’ve succeeded thus far is a sense of humour and a good haircut? What are my ACTUAL skills? How do I stand out? How do I continue to pay national insurance so I get my paltry £40 a month state pension when I retire? WHAT DO I EVEN WANT TO DO??
6) Bring me my people.
The gods only know how anyone does this alone. Surround yourself with people who will tell you you’re brilliant even when they have no clue what you do. With people who will tell you honestly how confusing and vague your website is. People who will hold you accountable to all the commitments you make to yourself that are so easy to break (it’s only ME, who care if I let ME down? Not me.). People who celebrate when a journalist tweets you about a blog post, and empathise when you wake up on the first day of 2016 having no idea how to make money for the next 365 days. Build your own tribe.
And finally…some of the best advice I’ve read comes from Steven Pressfield — ‘whatever you’re most scared of doing, do that’. And so to work.
