Unexpected motivation to keep going :)

 As someone who has been mostly self-employed (meaning I've done a mix of freelance and contract work) for just about 3 and a half years and mostly winging it the majority of the time and haven't seen huge levels of success, there have been many times when I've wanted to give up and get a 9-5 just to not have to constantly adapt and find new work and execute new ideas. It's easy to get lost in the day to day mundane of what you're doing and not see much long term growth. A few months back I even thought that I'd been wasting years of my life treading water, spending my time on mindless tasks that I wasn't learning anything from and that wasn't bringing me any closer to my long term goals. So much so that I did start looking for full time work. (At this point I'm not sure if that's truly the direction I'm wanting to pivot into, but I'm open to the idea of it if it brings the right type of growth. I may or may not be slightly attached to the freedom of freelancing). 

Anyway, last week I had a meeting with a company to see what they do and whether I'd be interested in joining their team. At first I was quite literally blown away by this company. Their reputation. Their dedication to quality and premium products. Their innovation and drive to keep moving their industry forward. The effort they're making to stay up to date with how the world and society is evolving and keeping up with tech even though the company is over 100 years old (I find this is often a rare thing with companies that have survived that long, they often resist tech advancements in how businesses operate etc). I was overwhelmed by the time I left there after a couple of hours. It would be a great opportunity. And I was qualified for it too. I had a good chance of getting it...if I wanted it. 

But after a day of processing and sleeping on and thinking through everything I had seen and heard and experienced, I had a sobering realization. As great as this job appeared, a large portion of it would be sales, in some way or another. And they'd been specific about wanting someone in this role that would stay for a considerable amount of time. And although in this day and age's economy and state of employment, this should've been the greenest flag I'd seen in a long time, it just made me realize that it wouldn't be fair to either me or the company if I took this job. 

So while I felt like the biggest failure turning down this opportunity, there's a few things I learnt from this:

1. Not every amazing opportunity that is presented to you is for you. You can love what a company does and align with their values and it still not be the right fit for you.

2 .It reminded me what matters to me more; freedom & flexibility, building my own creative empire, diversifying and the long term goals of the creative life I want to live, combined with balance to give the other important things in my life the time and my presence that it deserves. 

3. I have a lot more skills and experience than I thought I had. During my meeting with this company, they seemed to be impressed with a lot of the skills I had and experience I'd gained. This reminded me that a lot of the things I've been doing the past few years and have spend my time on are valuable skills that is enough to catapult me even further. Have I spent time on things that didn't have as good of a ROI? Sure. But what matters is the things I found along the way that did work and helped me grow. 

So where to from now? 

SO while I still have a whole long list of things I want to pursue and explore further and further build my career in, there's still the problem of that I am human and only have 24 hours a day and limited capacity and energy. I still don't know what to focus on primarily so that I can have some visible exponential growth and progress. HOWEVER...I have the motivation and drive to keep trying and exploring and keep doing. 

There's something telling me to keep going and not give up on my freelance journey. 

So that's what I'm doing, I'm going to keep pushing through and keeping doing the work. 

In my next post I'll talk a bit more about all my current passions and what I'm wanting to work on still and my progress on each topic. As someone with many undiagnosed ADHD-symptoms I find this helpful to re-list and write down all the things I'm passionate about so I can compare the list to my previous list from a few months ago to see what stuck, what's new and what I abandoned as well as how much progress I've made in each skill or project. This way I can track what's a long-term passion, which topics keep coming up, which ones I struggle to make progress in and which ones were merely a short term fad interest. 

That's all for now, 

:)