You don’t have to be the best in the world

“I often suggest new consultants to embrace a concept and mindset of imperfect action. I see a lot of consultants, especially at the early stage. They’ll spend a lot of time thinking about their website or thinking about their business plan or thinking about creating materials. And so what they’re doing is spending a lot of time building things, but they’re not really getting out of the building.”

- Michael Zipursky

The internet shortened the distance between skilled workers and people willing to pay top dollar to work with experts. As a freelancer, you no longer have to live in the same city (or even the same country) as your clients. The biggest challenge is making it easy for the people who need your expertise to find you.

Don’t let your head get in the way of finding clients. Beginning freelancers often deal with a lot of imposter syndrome. Or they focus on minutiae instead of doing their most important work.

It helps to keep this in mind: To start earning money as a freelancer, you don’t have to be the best copywriter, digital marketer, or engineer. You just have to be better (or have more time) than the person hiring you.

So get your first client, get your first paycheck, and just get started.

Everything else will grow and snowball with time.

As you leverage your skill set more and more, you’ll improve and grow your confidence. And as you improve, your rates will go up. Higher rates mean getting more time to do better work for each client. Then your rates will go up again, and so on. Before you know it, your humble side hustle has become an empire.

It all starts with your first project.