Do What You Love

I always felt a kinship to my father-in-law. I think he understood me better than most, at least in one way: he worked for himself, too, as a real estate appraiser. He was probably the person who was most excited, besides me, when I quit my day job and started working for myself, now almost three years ago.

He knew what it means to work for yourself, to be completely in control of your time and how much money you make. He knew the frustrations, the trouble of keeping yourself focused, the worry of money not rolling in at the right times or at all.

He also knew how much fun it can be to call all the shots in your life.

I’m sad to say I don’t have that close connection to another work-at-home person anymore, because my father-in-law died last Saturday. It wasn’t completely unexpected but it was still a shock, and we’re all still reeling a bit.

Live Your Dream

Real estate appraisal might not have been my father-in-law’s dream (in fact, my husband says he wanted to be an archeologist in younger days) but he enjoyed it well enough, particularly when he was working for himself. It got him out of the office a lot, and he had fun going out to long lunches with the other guys in the business for shop talk.

His death is a reminder that we should all work hard to find that thing we love and try to make it our life. He didn’t get there, and it makes me sad to think what might have been if he’d taken a different path.

There are times when I think about what I really want to be doing with my time and my life that I wonder if I’m making the best use of my time. I always come back to the fact that I want to help people become freelancers because I know there are so many people who would love this life, who could make a success at it, if only they had a little help, support and encouragement along the way.

I felt lucky to have someone in the family who’d made independent work a success so that I didn’t get as many of those questions about how I was going to survive without a day job. I know a lot of people don’t get that.

I want to be the support for those people, and for those whose families are supportive. I want to help you live your dream of doing what you love and getting paid a good living for it. I did it, and you can do it too.

So, how can I help you?

Is Passion a Problem?

A recent article from Inc. magazine really got me thinking about the idea of bringing passion to your business. Most people who want to start a business — freelance writing or otherwise — are advised that the best thing to do is find something you’re passionate about and find a way to make money doing it.

Makes sense, right? If you hate the daily grind, doing something you love for money every day is sure to be better.

But John Warrillow, an expert on building businesses to sell, says starting a passion-based business is a bad idea from his perspective. His article, “Is Your Passion Turning Your Business Into a Job?” says that people who make a business from their passions risk ruining their favorite hobby by making it something they have to do. What’s more, they build a business that has limited growth potential and saleability because what makes the business unique is the business owner’s passion, which can’t be transferred.

The Danger of Making a Hobby Your Business

I can certainly understand the potential problem of making your business something you love to do for free. Most of the writing I do these days is for a knitting site. Knitting was clearly a hobby and a passion of mine before I started working for this site, and as I’ve worked on it (for about three and a half years) I have to admit that knitting feels more like work and less like fun now.

I’m not the only crafty person to have felt this way once she or he got the “dream job” of working in the craft all day long.

It’s hard to remain focused and enthusiastic when you’re spending all day on something, even when it’s something you love.

Passion is Still a Good Thing

But I still think it’s ridiculous to say that you should go into business for yourself doing something you’re only marginally jazzed about. The story uses the example of a hobbyist who becomes a professional photographer whose passion is her selling point versus someone who only shoots school photos. They’re working in the craft they’re passionate about, but not in such a way they’re likely to get burned out.

Maybe, but shooting school photos all the time can’t be that much fun, can it?

One thing that’s great about being a freelance writer is that you don’t have to write about the same subject for the rest of your life. You can write about something you’re really passionate about one day, and something else you’re merely interested in the next.

If the writing itself is your passion, you’ll have fun almost no matter the subject (if you’re wise in your choices, anyway; there are some really bad assignments out there). If there’s no passion, then why bother?

Ways to Get Work Done

One of my major aims with this site is to help people who have day jobs transition to becoming full-time freelancers, or to learn how to better juggle both having a day job and doing freelance work.

One of the hardest parts of doing both is finding the time for freelance writing (or any other kind of moonlighting) when you’re already working all day. I remember this being a constant struggle. I wanted to work but I also wanted to spend time with my husband and our friends.

Getting More Done

I don’t think any of my suggestions are going to strike you as revolutionary, but the main thing you need to remember about freelancing while you have a day job is that you have to do what you have to do.

If you’ve promised someone a freelance project, you have to deliver, no matter how much strain it puts on you. If you want to continue in this business, you don’t want to get a reputation for being unreliable.

But once you get in the habit of working your freelancing into your schedule, it does get a little easier, even if it’s still a lot of work.

Making Time

The most important thing you can do as a freelancer looking for more time to ply your trade is to develop the mindset that this is something you want to do (and, when you have assignments, that you have to do). Most of the time most of us can make time for things we really want to do.

If you enjoy your morning run, for instance, you’re a lot more likely to do it than if you think of it as a long, hard slog.

It’s the same with freelancing. That’s why it’s so important to go after projects you actually want to do and are excited about — it makes getting to your desk when you’d much rather be in bed that much easier.

Of course that’s a major recommendation of all time management gurus: wake up earlier or go to bed later. I’ve argued before about the importance of sleep, but it really is a good tip if you can manage it.

I advocate using pockets of time whenever and wherever you happen to find them, even at your day job, though this can be very problematic if you ever get caught. Take a notebook wherever you go and at least you can brainstorm or draft out an article on paper to be typed up later that day.

Leave your office and get a little work done — on paper or online — on your lunch break. Try to get in an hour of work when you get home before you eat dinner. If you don’t have kids and your spouse will tolerate it, add in another hour after your evening meal (and after the kids go to bed if you do have kids).

I will admit that when I had a day job I would occasionally call in sick or take a vacation day to do freelance work, and I always used built-in holidays as work days for my freelance work. These days are a great test of whether you’ll really enjoy freelancing full time and whether you can manage to get any work done (because as a full-time freelancer, you’re likely to work at least some holidays).

You certainly don’t want to make a habit of such things, and don’t tell anyone that’s what you’re doing.

If You Want it to Work, it Will Work

If you really want your freelancing career to be successful, the odds are good you’ll be able to find the time and motivation to get the work done that you need to get done. If you’re having trouble meeting your commitments or even getting started looking for freelance work, it’s likely that you aren’t sufficiently motivated to make freelancing your career (or you may have overcommitted yourself, in which case you need to take a step back and evaluate which projects you really want to do and have time for).

It’s all a balancing act, but if you want to be a success as a freelancer, I promise you that you’ll figure out a way to make it happen. I’m living proof that it can be done.

Quick Tip: Don’t Get Discouraged

There’s a lot about the freelance writing life that isn’t always great. You have to deal with a lot more rejection and flat-out unresponsiveness than people in regular jobs do, not to mention sometimes you have to put a lot more effort into actually getting paid for the work you do than people on a payroll have to.

It’s easy to let the little slights and big disappointments aggravate you, but though it’s difficult we all need to try to keep from letting these things get to us, at least for a long period of time. It’s fine to feel the disappointment of not getting a job or having an assignment turned down by what you thought was the perfect market — and with no more than a form letter at that! — but don’t let these setbacks keep you form the goal of making freelancing a successful career for you.

Freelancing is a numbers game; you have to get through some nos to get to the yeses. Just keep going. You’ll be glad you did.

Quick Tip: Stretch Yourself

We all have certain types of writing that we do regularly to pay the bills, and that’s great, but it can also be a fun challenge to occasionally write something that’s out of your comfort zone.

If you’re a straight nonfiction kind of person, try writing a poem or short story. If you write for businesses, try a personal essay. If magazines are your venue of choice, try a different topic or style of story.

These exercises won’t necessarily turn into paying opportunities, but stretching your creative muscles in this way is a lot of fun and will change your approach to your regular work in a positive way.

Stop Putting it Off

Have you ever written a query with great enthusiasm only to leave it languish on your hard drive unsent for weeks or months?

I’m sad to admit I do this all the time. Last year I wrote this great query for Sierra magazine about how my city, which had just endured a devastating ice storm, was planning to recover from the loss of thousands of trees in a town known for its greenery.

I was so excited about the potential for this story. I envisioned the interviews I would do, the tours of parks full of fallen trees.

But I never sent the query. It’s now been more than a year since the storm, and though there’s probably still a story in there somewhere, I probably should have been reporting it all year if I really wanted to tell it properly.

On Not Letting Go

That’s one of the more egregious examples, but it’s certainly not isolated. I’ve read editorial calendars, come up with great ideas and never queried them. Or I’ll write a query, find a market and still never send it.

I do this for all the reasons every writer procrastinates: perfectionism (as if there is such a thing as a perfect pitch sent to the perfect market at the perfect time), fear of failure (what if I really do suck at this writing thing?), fear of success (you mean now I have to write that great article?), fear of no response at all.

A Different Approach

This time I’m going to try something different. This morning I wrote a query for a market I know is looking for stories like mine. I know I have to hurry because the lead time on the publication’s editorial calendar basically coincides with now. And I’d really like to see this article — a personal essay actually — get published.

While I’d never advocate myself or anyone else sending a query right after writing it, it is important to get queries out the door as soon as you can after writing them. So my goal is to let this query rest overnight and send it tomorrow.

Of course I have no guarantee of success, just like any other writer. But I also know that there’s no way this article or any other will ever get published if I never query. The same is true of your great ideas.

A Challenge

This week, is there a query you’ve been sitting on that you could send out? Stop putting it off. There’s no harm at all in seeing what will happen. You just might end up with a sale and a clip to be really proud of.

If you take this challenge, I’d love to hear what you sent or simply that you sent. Let’s get these stories out into the light!

A Good Day Writing

All of what follows is not to say that I’m not normally proud of my work. I work hard, I do the best job that I can, and I stand behind every word.

But that doesn’t mean that every word I write is poetry, or even all that pretty. I write some pretty darn utilitarian stuff, and that’s OK. It doesn’t all have to be poetry.

Good Work

Still, the other day I had a really great writing day. I wrote a couple of book reviews for a publication that I work for from time to time, and they came out, I thought, really well. Better than I expected, particularly considering the circumstances of my writing time right now (mostly during that girl’s naps, which last at most half an hour).

This may be the first day I really just felt “wow, that was some good writing” in a long, long time. Maybe since before the baby was born.

It’s days like this that make you want to keep going, that remind you that despite all the garbage we have to put up with as writers, as freelancers, as human beings, that every now and then we get to do something good, something that makes us smile, makes us proud, reminds us why we wanted to do all this in the first place.

And that’s what it’s all about.

Have you had days like this? I’d love to hear about it.

Oh, and if you wanted to see what I think of as good writing from me, check out my review of The House of Tomorrow (the other one hasn’t published yet).

If I Knew it Then: On Diving into Freelancing

When you’ve been doing something for a while, it’s natural to look back and think about things you might have done differently if you were starting over these days. While we don’t really get the chance to start over, we do have the opportunity to share our experience — and, hopefully, our wisdom — with other people in the hope that they can learn and maybe have success more quickly than we did.

That’s the whole point of this website, in fact. I want to make it easier for people to become freelance writers and make a success of it much more quickly than I was able to.

How I Got Started

When I first started freelancing, I put a huge emphasis on the free part, as in, writing for free. These days I wouldn’t even call that freelancing. It was good practice, of course, and it gave me some confidence to go after paying markets, but I did the free stuff for way too long than was right for me.

(That isn’t to say that doing some writing for free isn’t a good idea, or wouldn’t work for you. Every person and every career is different.)

Once I started seeking out paying markets, I didn’t have a very organized approach (some might say I still don’t, but that’s another story). I’d send a single query to a single market. If they said no, I probably wouldn’t try to send it to another market. I might not even follow up with another idea to the editor who just rejected me.

When I got an assignment I’d work hard and make the editor happy, of course, but, again, I often wasn’t following up with another idea to try to get another assignment. Not the best way in the world to build relationships.

Diving in Smartly

What I should have done was immerse myself more fully in the freelance world. I should have been more engaged with the newsletters I was reading, I should have queried more and sent repeat queries to markets I wanted to break into more often. I should have focused on building relationships both with editors and with other freelancers.

Of course there’s still time for a lot of that, but the number of resources out there for freelancers is so huge these days it’s much, much harder to keep up with than it used to be.

The point is, if I were doing it over again, I’d spend a lot more time networking, and a lot more time actually working than I did in the beginning.

I’d also try to work smarter, paying more attention to building my career, being more aware of where I wanted to go, and just putting more effort into it.

Notice all of the above requires work on your part, work you might not have thought about as being part of building a freelancing career. But it’s not smart to just jump into freelancing blindly. You’ve got to do your research, figure out what you want to write about, where you could write about it, how you’re going to move from your first clips to a more established career.

I didn’t do any of that. I just thought “it would be kind of fun to freelance,” and wandered around until I found opportunities I was interested in.

It was a really inefficient way to go about things, and I’m sure it cost me a lot of opportunities, lost money and lost time.

Don’t work the way I did. Make a real plan for your freelancing. Set up systems to help you stay on top of your business (we’ll talk more about that soon). Do something every day to further your business, even though you’re already so busy you’re not sure how you can fit another thing in.

You can and you must if you want to be successful. Go forth and kick butt.

Super Bowl Sunday Every Day

Most years I’m not too interested in the Super Bowl. This year was different (Go Saints!), but usually I just watch for the advertisements. That’s strange in itself, because most of the television I watch is recorded on my DVR, so I skip the commercials. If I watch anything live, the commercials are muted.

So why do I buy into watching the commercials on this one day? Because they’re hyped as the most creative, sometimes the most controversial, ads that will be shown all year.

Companies spend millions of dollars to get a few seconds’ eye time, so they know they’d better come up with something interesting to keep viewers from running to the fridge or the bathroom during a time out.

Why Blow it all on One Day?

This year I wasn’t too impressed with most of the commercials, but they did get me thinking about why it is that companies spend so much more time, energy and money to make their ads really creative for this one event, while they largely spend less time and effort on getting people to pay attention to and talk about their ads for the rest of the year.

Every now and then there’s a commercial that breaks through and gets people talking that wasn’t associated with the big game or some other must-watch event, but it doesn’t happen very often. Wouldn’t it be better for a company to introduce a ground-breaking ad, say, in August, when there aren’t a bunch of other fun new ads to talk about?

Write Like it’s Your Super Bowl

This also got me thinking about writing, naturally. Do you write every day like you’re writing for the biggest publications? If not, what’s the difference in your style, your attitude, your level of effort, when you’re writing a blog post compared to an article for a $1 a word glossy magazine?

What difference would it make in your career if you wrote everything with the same level of passion you’d bring to the biggest assignment of your life?

What would it mean to write every day like it’s your Super Bowl?

It might mean you’d take more time and care with some of your writing that you consider as almost a throwaway now. It might mean you’d go the extra mile, call one more source or track down one more statistic. It might mean you’d give that piece one last edit before hitting “send” or “publish,” just to make sure it’s the best you can make it.

I hate business jargon, but the idea of overdelivering is a good one to keep in mind when you’re thinking about writing like it’s your Super Bowl. You want to amaze people with the level of effort and enthusiasm you put into your work.

Your readers will notice when you’re truly engaged with a subject and writing with passion. They won’t know you only got paid 5 cents a word, or that you didn’t get paid at all, when you approach every piece of writing as if you were writing it for an audience of millions.

In time you won’t know the difference either in terms of the level of effort you put out. All of your writing will have more personality and connect better with readers than it ever has before.

And you can bet your editors will notice it, too.

A Dose of Passion

Gary Vaynerchuk is an inspiration to anyone who wants to follow their bliss and make money doing that thing they’re most excited by.

Late last year he published Crush It: Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion to help other peopel start from scratch and use social media to make their passion pay.

He says that now is a great time to start a business because the barriers for entry online are now so low. You can start as simply as by writing on the subject of your choice on a free blog.

Bringing the Hustle

The key that sets successful businesspeople apart from those who blog but have no following is, first, their passion for their subject, and second, their ability to hustle, as Vaynerchuk calls it.

Hustle means learning all you can about the subject of your passion, following people in the field on Twitter, reading blogs on the subject and becoming as much a vital part of the conversation on you topic as possible.

That mean not just reading blogs but responding to them, leaving comments and following up on comments to your comments. It means not just following people on Twitter or Facebook but also retweeting and responding to messages of value.

All of this conversation is not about blatant self-promotion, but getting your name and links back to your website out there will certainly drive traffic to your site and ultimately increase sales if you have a product on offer.

All You Need is Time

Of course this sort of work is extremely time-consuming, but if you’re working in a field you’re really passionate about it won’t feel like work.

And this sort of in the trenches stuff is the best way to learn what’s happening in your field and who the major players are — information that’s vital to taking your business to the next level.

Crush It is an incredibly useful, inspirational and informational guide to cashing in on your passion, no matter what it is. If you think the thing you love is too obscure, if you think you need more resources or more education before you get started, think again.

Read Crush It and start taking action on your passion right away. After reading Vaynerchuk’s pep talk, you almost won’t be able to resist it.

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