The Power of Sleep

It’s seems like I’ve been seeing a lot of bloggers lately writing about the importance of getting a good night’s sleep. Maybe I’m just noticing it because I’m not getting a whole lot of sleep thanks to my four and a half month old.

A lot of things you’ll read about starting a freelance business while you’re working a day job will suggest that one way to do it successfully is to get less sleep — either staying up late, getting up earlier or both.

While to some extent that’s a good idea — particularly if your daytime schedule is already jam-packed — it’s very possible to take the lack of sleep to an extreme.

You Still Have to Sleep

There’s a point at which cutting out sleep goes from a good idea to something that’s counterproductive. While you might be excited at first by the amount of work you can get done if you’re only sleeping five hours a night instead of your regular eight, over time you’ll start to drag and find that your performance — both at your day job and in your freelancing career — starts to suffer.

You’ll be cranky, unfocused and not producing your best work, none of which will endear you to your clients, your boss or your family members.

As in most things, the answer is balance. You’ll find out pretty quickly what the minimum amount of sleep is that you can function well on. For me, it’s probably about six hours. I can live with five hours, but usually if I get up after five hours of sleep one day I’ll sleep more the next day.

I’ve always been big on sleep, so you might find that you can do with less, or that you need more to be really productive, happy and doing your best work.

Other Ways to Find Time

If you’re not willing to give up sleep or just aren’t able to do it, there are usually some other ways to find time to get work done if you really need to. I’ll admit I didn’t have kids when I was freelancing along with a full-time job, but I never really went to bed later or got up earlier in order to work.

Instead, I worked in the evenings a couple of nights a week instead of hanging out with my husband. I worked during my lunch hour. Often I worked at other times at work when my regular work was slow (my direct boss knew about it, was sympathetic because he took freelance work, too, and I was discreet about it around others).

I’m not saying there are always ways to find the time without giving up some sleep, and in your case sleeping a half hour or an hour less (especially on the weekends) might be just the thing to give your career a boost.

The message is not to listen to the gurus so much that you make yourself sick or unhappy or that your work suffers for it.

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.

On Following Your Bliss

I was looking for something on Netflix the other day to watch while working out, and I settled on “The Power of Myth” (yes, I’m a bit of a nerd). If you don’t know it, this PBS miniseries from the ’80s involved discussions between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell about mythology, how myth works in everyday life and the mythological journey that we are all on.

Campbell talks about each person as having a dragon to slay, and that dragon will reveal to you what it is you really want to be doing with your life.

His famous shorthand for the way life ought to be lived is “follow your bliss.”

Simple, but hard

Which sounds nice — who wouldn’t want to be following their bliss? — but it also sounds completely unrealistic when you’re just trying to pay the bills and a dead end job is better than no job at all.

I get that. I also get that a lot of us don’t act on our bliss — that thing that really excites us, that will make us want to get out of bed in the morning instead of wishing it were the weekend again on Monday morning — because we’re afraid.

Afraid of failure.

Afraid of success.

Afraid of what other people will think.

Afraid of what we’ll think of ourselves.

We aren’t willing to take the plunge because it seems too hard. We don’t follow our passion because that seems like something that only people with wealthy spouses or trust funds can do.

But the truth, as Joseph Campbell would tell you, is that we all ought to be following our bliss, and to fail to leaves your life less than fulfilled.

What You Can Do About It

Of course, the advice to simply start following your bliss now, today, before it’s too late, isn’t really all that helpful.

But it’s exactly what you need to do.

Can you take a small step toward that ideal life today? Do you even know what it is? If not, that’s probably the place to start.

If freelancing is where you think your bliss is and you haven’t yet taken the plunge, maybe today’s the day to actually pick a market and write a query (or send one if you have one already written that you’ve been looking for the right home for).

It might be the day to start a blog or to brainstorm topics that you’d like to write about.

If you’re already on the road to freelancing, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your goals, look at your client list and see if you’re really being served by those clients or if they’re all heading you in the right direction.

Taking Action Myself

I’m not just writing this blog post for you. I think it’s important for all of us to take a look at how we’re spending our time and if it’s really getting us closer to our goals.

For me, this sort of soul-searching is telling me it might be time to detach from a long-time client whose work seems to be taking more time than it’s worth these days. The extra time I’ll have by not working with this company means I’ll be able to do more of the work I really want to do — and maybe even have time to write another book.

Now that would be bliss.

Don’t Forget to Enjoy it

While we’re all still thinking about ways to make this year better than the one before, I thought I’d point you to this timely article from the New York Times about resisting the temptation to delay pleasure.

Many of us, it turns out, are procrastinators when it comes to pleasure. You know, the people who don’t use the pretty soaps because they’re just “too nice” or who are saving that great bottle of champagne for a special occasion that never seems to come?

Maybe you’re one of those people, too.

Start having fun!

If you are, it’s time to break that nasty habit. If now’s not the time to have fun and enjoy the things and people we have around us, then when is the right time?

The story talks about the fact that people who live in Chicago have seen more of the landmarks in other cities than they have in their own, and most of the time they only visit the zoo or the museums when entertaining people from out of town. In fact, a study found people are more likely to visit the tourist attractions when they’re about to move away from a big city, feeling that they might never get back to experience them.

We think we’ll always have more time

The problem, behavioral experts say, is that we understand that we may have limited money in the future, but we like to believe that we’ll magically have more time in the future to do those things we aren’t doing today.

But if you look back over the past decade, you’ll probably realize that you’re busier than you used to be, not more at leisure. That’s not likely to change.

But waiting for the perfect time to open a bottle of wine or cash in the frequent flier miles can lead to such high expectations of that perfect event that you never end up using the cherished thing, and that’s really sad.

It can be difficult to let yourself give in to the pleasure of the everyday and to enjoy even the “special” things when there’s not a special occasion to do so.

The truth is, every day is special, or ought to be. Any day is worthy of a little bit of happiness, a little splurge when you can afford it.

The joy of building a business

This has to do with building your freelance career in that you need to remember to enjoy the ride. Yes, building a business is a lot of hard work, but if you’re doing what you want, what you enjoy, you should be getting a lot of joy and satisfaction out of even the busy times.

Take a few minutes this week to revel in the happiness surrounding whatever you’re doing. Even when times are tough, there’s sure to be something that you can celebrate. For me, right now, it’s that I work from home and don’t have to go outside in the snow. And, of course, I have this amazing little girl to share my days with, even though it means not getting as much work done as I’d like.

I’d love to hear what you have to celebrate, and if there’s a pleasure you’ve been delaying that you can put on your schedule now.

Don’t Make Resolutions for the New Year

This is the time of year when I’m supposed to be writing a post about New Year’s resolutions, and how every business person needs to take a good, hard look at their business or what they want to accomplish in the next year and resolve to do better than they did last year.

Resolutions don’t work

The only problem is, setting resolutions most of the time just sets you up for failure. Think about how many years you’ve resolved to lose weight, get more exercise or, in my case, finally get my office in order once and for all and keep it that way for more than a week or so.

We have the same resolutions over and over because once we mess up once, taking that extra cookie or staying away from the gym for a day, there’s a part of us that thinks the whole year is blown and thus we don’t have to try that hard anymore.

That’s ridiculous, of course, but resolutions tend to set us up for an all or nothing mentality that usually means we get exactly that: nothing. No closer to our goals, our dream life or what we really want from year to year.

there’s a better way

So what’s the right way to make forward progress without resolutions? Setting solid goals and making a plan to meet those goals.

Instead of resolving to work on your marketing efforts every day, set a goal to double your sales for the year, then think about what you have to do each day or each week to get to that point.

If you want to be more productive, instead set a goal of writing one more query (or two, or five) every week, and do what it takes to get that done.

What’s the difference between resolutions and goals? Resolutions tend to be much more vague and open-ended, where as goals can really be the basis for road maps to get you where you want to go.

The other good thing about goals is that you don’t have to feel so defeatist if you mess up. One day skipping the gym is not going to necessarily ruin a goal of losing 10 pounds in the next two months, but it will certainly wreck a resolution to go to the gym every day.

Goals allow you to make forward progress little by little every day or every week. They give you much more momentum than resolutions do, which almost feel like you’re bullying yourself.

So ditch your resolutions and give goal setting a try. See if you motivation and willingness to stick with your plans doesn’t soar.