I quit my freelancing career for 30 days. Here’s what happened:

Flying Solo: Myths, Debunked by LinkedIn’s resident weeaboo

2018 was a year of immaculate milestones for me. I conquered the God of Freelancing. I made more money than Jeff Bezos. I dominated social media and reached 10 billion subscribers on InstaChatBook and SnapTube.

I also learned 666 different programming languages, and I created the world’s first actual self-aware AI Unicorn Zombie….

…blah blah blah blah.

I could pull a LinkedIn Influencer and tell fake stories about how 2018 was my time to shine.

I could puff up my feathers like a posturing bird and squawk about how I’m a self-made woman and how working 14 hour days, bootstrapping it, and working yourself to death wins the day.

The reality of 2018 was hardly as glamorous.

I worked hard, very, very, very, very hard. Too hard, some people say.

“Some people” being my partner and friends, who had to deal with me being a frothing stress-monster for 14 solid months.

What I want to do in this post is tell the real truth about what success looks like in your first year, the myths involved, and what 30 days off honestly taught me.

Flying Solo: Myths, Debunked by LinkedIn’s resident weeaboo:

Myth: Taking a vacation as a Freelancer is fucking impossible.

Truth: It’s only impossible because you make it impossible.

As a freelancer, the divide between your life and your work can be very, very small. The internet has also made it even easier to get a hold of everyone at any time.

Couple this with a type-A personality, and even the most cantankerous person who doggedly protects their free time will fold.

I folded. I made taking vacations impossible because I prioritized improperly.

I said no as much as I could, but not in the right way.

Here’s the realness:

There is absolutely no reason why project X has to be done rite meow.
Poor planning on the part of a client does not constitute an emergency on your’s.

Unless you work in a field that is life or death, it’s not life or death — full stop.

I know this doesn’t sit right with many people, but what should bother them more is the why everything is an emergency.

There is absolutely no reason why you can’t take a vacation every now and then.
Say it with me now: you are a freelancer. You are not anyone’s employee.

You can and should take vacations. If your free time is not respected, you either didn’t set boundaries well enough (like me), or vet your client well enough to know not to take on a gig.

Be smart about this, smarter than I was, or you’ll burn out and turn into a lump of a blanket burrito for 30-ish days like I did.

Myth: If I tell my clients I have to take a break, they’ll hate me, won’t understand, and I’ll become homeless or something.

Truth: People are far more understanding than you give them credit for.

Every single one of my clients understood. They understood the drill, they’d gone through it themselves, and one of them even commended me on taking my break.

“Good for me”, they said, like it was a triumph. That was…really heart-warming. (Thank you, I appreciate you)

One told me “no problem” and said they’d been there. One asked to connect again in February, which was one of the clients I thought would be most upset.

They were not.

This is what I thought: I was a failure. I disappointed them. I was weak. I wasn’t perfect.

Newsflash: nobody is, and this myth is “fake news”.

Myth: If I do nothing on social or via email I won’t get gigs or leads.

Truth: Writing content that sticks will help you get leads for years. Businesses: pay attention.

My content is apparently evergreen. This means it’s relevant enough to stand the test of time, or is at least amusing enough that it still engages.

If you’re a business wondering how to do this, hit me up.

Leads still slowed down, of course they did, but I still got a few. They might not pan out, but they came.

I didn’t have to do anything, during my break, to bring them to me.

If you create a system that keeps your brand in the minds of others, you win. Long-term is the way to think, short-term doesn’t help you.

Inbound works, it just takes a lot of effort, and nurturing.

Myth: Creating a plan of action for business is too difficult and you have to hire a biz dev coach.

Truth: Lots of career coaches honestly don’t have their shit together either.

Take the time to plan with a well-rested mind.

I made a roadmap with ideal financial projections, huddled my D&D freelancer coalition, and made a plan.

The plan was easy. The plan is always easy.

As an Executor of All The Creative Tech Things, I had been so saddled with working and doing and planning for other people, that planning my business was the last thing on my mind.

When you’re used to scraping your face over the pavement repeatedly without looking up, being able to walk on two legs towards a fixed point seems like you’re flying.

I found that I loved it. I loved work, again. I loved the planning. I loved and love the team.

The lemon-sour-face I’d been wearing started to fall.

Myth: If you just work harder than everyone else, you’ll be successful because reasons.

Truth: When you have the privilege of taking more time to find solutions instead of running around like a chicken with your head cut off, you’ll make smarter plays.

Many freelancers don’t have the luxury of time, delegation, or vast quantities of disposable income.

Many freelancers can’t just ditch working for 30 days to go on some weird anime-fueled self-actualization quest (me irl).

Once I stepped off the ship and forced my 30 day vacation, something kind of amazing happened: my brain started to function better.

I was nicer. I slept better. I had less physical aches and pains. Why is this? Because stress kills brain cells.

In a study conducted by researchers from the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, researchers discovered that a single socially-stress event could kill new neurons in the brain’s hippocampus.

With less stress comes the ability to work smarter, not harder. And smart plays means more money-things, legit.

Contrary to popular evidence, CEOs are not the most hard-working stressed-out people ever in the world, ever.

The conventional wisdom is it is very stressful to be the top dog, the CEO or the military general. There are an increasing number of popular press books stemming from the idea that the top dog needs help managing stress. Our results indicate that the top dog has less stress as measured by baseline cortisol. That is quite surprising to some people.

“Some people” obviously being people who prop up the wealthy like Gods who think they earned everything on their own. Not so.

I’m not talking about technical founders who get their hands dirty, here.

I’m talking about people who can afford to hire, can afford to delegate, can afford to take a bird’s eye view, can afford to prioritize, can afford to fuck off from work and go golfing whenever they want, and can afford to slow down.

These people are not workaholics who work harder than everyone else. Maybe they did once, but not now.

Because workaholics tend to be ‘hungry’ freelancers and Startup Hopefuls and entrepreneurs early-on in their careers just looking for their win.

In one study of Dutch self-employed workers, the sheer number of hours worked didn’t cause negative effects. But another dimension of what the researchers termed “workaholism” was the inability to separate work and home. People who couldn’t stop thinking about work or checking their email at the dinner table reported more aches and pains, more exhaustion, and felt that they were doing a worse job. When you work from home, obviously, it’s especially difficult to leave your work at work.

Working harder does not help you. Working smarter does. Leaving behind work for an absurd number of days did not tank my career.

In fact, it gave me time to train freelancers. It gave me time to make a plan of action. It gave me time to update my client personas.

It gave me time to do everything a small business should be doing.

Hard work hardly works when it’s not paired with smart work.

And the final myth: Taking a break is for weak people who don’t want to succeed.

Truth: America’s obsession — and tech’s obsession, honestly — with working yourself into the dirt is dangerous.

I thought I was weak for needing to kabosh the whole ordeal.

I had everything.

So many freelancers messaged me, day in and day out, asking for tips, leads, and gigs.

They still do, and while it’s flattering, y’all need to pay it forward.

I was the go-to girl.

I was on top of the world. It’d be weak of me to slow down, to step away, to focus inwards.

It’d be weak of me to ask for help with my work, to delegate, to try to make a partnership.

I could do it on my own, because every success story seems to be a self-made one, and everyone can do it except for me, somehow.

Weak.

No, this is not true.

You are not weak for needing to take care of yourself as a human.

You are not weak for asking for help.

Do you know how brave I had to be to reach out to my clients to tell them I had to fly away like a bat out of hell?

Do you know how brave I had to be to literally forgo income for 30 blistering days, by choice?

What’s weak is just taking it.

What’s strong is saying you’ve had enough, and taking time for yourself, so that you can grow.

As a person, as a solopreneur, as an entrepreneur, whatever.

Success comes from knowing when to get off the ride and walk a different path.

You cannot, cannot, cannot make smart choices about your career when you’re wiped. Stressed. Sad. Anxious. Spread so thin you can’t think. Just going through the motions.

You can’t. You just can’t.

If these 30 days taught me anything, anything at all, it was that in order to be successful you need to take care of the person who’s trying to make a go at success: yourself.

My first order of business: Say Hello To The Team:

Backstreet’s Back, Alright. They’re all mad ladz and I love them.

And my second order of business is exactly this: to take a ducking break.

Kira Leigh is a snarky marketing nerd, writer, and artist. See her work here and send her a message if you want to work together with her amazeballs team.

Special thanks to Renato P. dos Santos for his continued support.