What I’ve Learned 4 Years Into My Gig-Economy Journey
If you’ve ever wanted to quit your full-time job and explore the life of a freelancer, listen up.
This isn’t an article about how I started making 6 figures after I quit and started working half the hours. This isn’t a magic listicle or piece of feel-good un-actionable advice. This isn’t a story of glory.
This is a hard-won, and battle-tested lesson that I want to share, even though I don’t have it all figured out (or pretend to).
Before I go deeper into the one takeaway and the main lesson I’ve learned, let me give a little background and context.
Firstly, I do not work in coding or technology. So, much of the freelancing I’m about to speak about is work with a degree of physicality. Only now, in my fourth year am I moving more and more towards knowledge work as one of my primary income silos. Secondly, I’m not some superficial, pseudo-successful, and ego focused ‘expert’. I am a hard worker who’s decided to be selective over who gets my help, and what I choose to do with my time, energy and effort. I’m someone who decided to try to call their own shots, and who has often failed to do that well.
So, this article isn’t about an easier life or the quickest way to the most shortcuts. This is about the truth and the last 4 years of my life. The last 4 years of my ongoing 10+ year self-directed apprenticeship.
Let us begin.
I’ve been without a full-time job since December of 2014 and it has not been an easy journey, but it has certainly been rewarding. The rewards are not purely monetary in nature. There are many more rewards in life than money. Truthfully, monetarily I would have a much more stable life if I had one full-time job. Don’t get me wrong it’s not that I don’t work full-time hours. I often put in 60+hour weeks, depending on the season and how thin I stretch myself. But, one job or endeavor seldom gets over 40h of my week, outside of a few seasonal contracts. I do a lot of different things and my peak number of concurrent jobs was 6 in the summer and fall of 2017.
At that time, I was doing the following to earn a living: Personal training, teaching cooking classes and catering, developing an online training course for the hospitality industry, working the front desk at a gym, being a brand ambassador for my favorite company in the world, and I was also in the process of becoming a group fitness instructor in boxing.
It was a lot going on. It was too much.
The craziest thing is that none of that was getting me ahead financially. It was just keeping me afloat. Working 7 days a week and running all over the place to get from one gig to the next I was barely scraping by. I was stretched thin with my time, and my pocketbook was threadbare. Yet, even amongst that, I was by no means depressed. I’d even say I was happy.
How could I be happy to be scraping by and working my face off? Because the first thing I learned as I ventured into the unknowns of the gig economy was this…I was in charge of my time and my schedule. Everything was on me. I was in a very real sense my own boss — even without truly being the full-blooded entrepreneur who quits their day job to start their dream company.
I only worked each of those jobs because I chose to load up my schedule that way. But, I had the freedom to walk away from any single opportunity or pursue new opportunities without the whole system grinding to a halt. That is something that transcends a paycheck in the value it adds to my life.
TIME IS THE ASSET -Gary Vaynerchuk
Time is all we really ever possess, and all that really matters. That is what I’ve learned and the best thing I could ever hope to convey to anyone, whether a freelancer or a full-timer. What you do with your days, weeks, months professionally is a huge deal.
Everyone trades time for money, but there is so much that goes into that trade that escapes the popular two item euphemism “time=money”. How do you feel while you do it? Who’s lives are benefited by your labor? Do you feel challenged by it? Are you alive while you’re working?
To paraphrase one of my greatest heroes in life, Tim Ferriss, money is a renewable resource, and time is a non-renewable resource.
The opportunity to earn dollars will be available, and accessible through many vehicles and ventures. However, we can never earn another extra minute on Earth. Our jobs, vocations, and careers are the major way that most of us after high-school and college are going to spend their precious time.
For me, that means taking as much of the responsibility for how I spend that time as possible. For me, that means taking chances to learn, and grow in the long term, even if that’s not the most profitable thing for me to do in the short term.
My journey in the gig economy has been full of uncertainty. Focusing on growth and acquiring new skills has been the only certainty I’ve been able to cultivate. Rather than having job security, I aim for skill-security by being a good learner. I aim to leverage my time to pursue directions and opportunities that challenge me and are places I actually want to spend time.
I could, of course, have made a lot of choices differently. We can all say that. But, what I can say after plunging into the gig economy 4 years ago is this, I do not regret it. I don’t look back and think I should have done anything differently. I don’t have what-ifs that keep me up at night, and I don’t dread what I wake up to each morning.
I’m not a millionaire, but I have a million reasons I choose to make sure my time at work matters to me.
Thank you for reading!
This is the 80th installment of Writing Wednesday. A commitment to myself to actually pursue my dreams of becoming a writer. I have resumed this practice after almost an entire years absence.
I am a writer.
Let me know what you think, and follow my journey on Instagram/Twitter (@multitude27)
