There are lots of things that define a person and who he is.

For some, it’s their personality, accomplishments, and goals, while for others it’s their job, career, and success, but no matter what your aspirations are, the truth is that the bills have to be paid and the fridge can’t be empty.

Now, a person’s life is filled with uncertainties, and there will always be a lot of ups and downs meaning that we don’t have much control of all aspects of life, but what we can control is our own development and knowledge.

Being stuck in that dead-end job from 9-5 five days a week maybe wasn’t your main goal in life, but you’re not complaining.

And it’s not that big of a deal for you as long as you’re getting paid enough for your basic needs.

Well, those days are over for you if you really want to break the chains that have been holding you back from what you really want to do and pursue a different career path.

WHAT IS HOLDING YOU BACK?

Before we begin to a detailed overview of how to take matters in your own hands and really achieve your true greatness, first you need to ask yourself a bunch of different questions:

  1. What is holding you back?
  2. Why can’t you move from the place you’re in right now?
  3. Why can’t you grow to the next level of success and happiness?
  4. Why can’t you live life on your own terms?
  5. Why can’t you manifest your greatness?

To answer all of these questions, we will dig up some quotes of historical figures that lived a long time ago, but which already at that time understood the problems of personal development that people have been faced with since the beginning of time.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. – Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)The beginning is the most important part of the work. – Plato (428/424 BC – 348/347 BC)

It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness. – Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD)

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times. – Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 -1527)

These quotes aren’t the answers to previous questions but rather the fuel of motivation you will need in order to tailor your life how you want to live it and what you want to achieve.

The funny thing is that these great philosophers all changed our view of the world, but they weren’t always right, but that doesn’t mean that they were doing something wrong, just that they haven’t got a grip of the time they were living in.

Stop being afraid of failure, instead embrace it and be prepared for it.

BREAK THE CHAINS

Throughout all of our lives, we are being told that when we finish high-school, we need to go to college so that we can get a job and start earning, get a house to live in and potentially start a family.

But is this true?

You see, the problem is that all the time, someone else is telling us what we need to do and who we need to be and there is no room for us to think about those things and see if that really is the path we want to pursue.

And now that you’ve got the job you went to college for, you might not feel happy working all those long hours in a workplace you don’t think is the place you need to be in.

It’s normal for humans to strive for greatness and not being satisfied with their current position.

Instead, what you should be focusing on is developing certain capabilities and niche skills which will help you become a specialist in different branches of employment and also be self-employed.

Of course, I’m talking about freelancing and its rapid expansion in the jobs market.

And even though freelancing is just the first step in your transition from a dead-end job to a successful life, the benefits of having more time on your hands are inexplicable.

I mean, the data speaks for itself.

Status of Active Freelancers

You can start freelancing and then move up to creating your own business.

Think about freelancing like an ice-breaker, a crucial point in your journey to get hold of ownership of your work.

THE MAIN IDEA – LEARNING

What’s really the point we are trying to make here is that you need to learn how to free yourself from your current job and get out of your comfort zone.

Ask yourself a simple question – where do you see yourself in 5 years?

If the answer is nowhere, or you don’t really know and think that you need to wait five years to have an answer, then you should quit your job as soon as possible.

You probably have doubts now in your mind, but stay with me. You need to encourage yourself to start learning new things and explore the world around you to see what are your options in life.

Maybe you always wanted to become a painter or a writer, but your parents wanted you to go to law school, and now you deal with paperwork for 40 hours a week and feel sick of it. Well, it’s never too late to pursue your dream.

In order to do this you need to:

  • Set goals – Long-term and short-term ones. How? Grab a piece of paper and a pen and write them down.
  • Know your weaknesses – If you feel like you’re not competent to succeed in a certain career, ask yourself which skills you need to have so that you can achieve your goal.
  • Learn, learn and learn – Knowledge is crucial for self-development because when you become an expert in one field, you’ll be irreplaceable.
  • Don’t get demotivated – Nothing is easy in life, and this will certainly be one of the hardest things to do but always keep your head high because once you reach that level when you’re not afraid to fail, you’ll grow rapidly.
  • Get out of your comfort zone – Knowing and talking about how to get a grip of your life is easy, but actually doing it is hard, so stop waiting around and actually start doing something.

Once you gather everything you need to start fresh in your life, you can slowly figure out how to actually start that new life you’re dreaming about.

Patience is crucial here as you’ll need to work on the skills you need and learn a lot of new things apart from still being in your dead-end job. And once you feel comfortable to pursue a different career path, quit that awful job and embrace the feeling of freedom.

WHAT DOES RESEARCH SAY?

Don’t trust me? Well, I don’t take it personally, it’s not quite easy to break away from a life you’ve been living for some time now, but data is on my side for this one.

Based on Report Linker, a survey was done among 1008 online respondents representative of the general US population on the topic of “how likely are you to become a freelancer during your professional career?”, and the results are shocking:

  • 59% answered “Very unlikely”;
  • 15% answered “Somewhat unlikely”;
  • 20% answered “Somewhat likely”;
  • 6% answered “Very likely”.

These percentages show how people aren’t so keen on getting out of their comfort zone and think that their position in the workplace is something that can’t be taken away from them.

They would much rather deal with the stress and the pain of not being happy then to stop and think for a second or two if they deserve something better in life. Wake up! That’s not who you want to be.

Need more evidence? No problem, because according to a not so recent “2017 Freelancing in America study” by Upwork, that at the time 54% of workers in America weren’t sure that they would be working the same job twenty years from now and we can certainly assume that the percentage is higher now.

Still not convinced? Redirect your attention to this graph done by Statista in 2016 then:

Who's Freelancing in America

Source: Statista

As you can see, freelancing has rapidly increased its popularity in recent years, and more and more people are willing to take the risk of trying it out and seeing if it’s for them.

And what’s great about it is that you don’t have to quit your job as soon as you try freelancing, you can look at it as sort of a second job in which you want to become better over time, so you slowly build up the skills you need to pursue freelancing as a full-time job.

LET US BEGIN

We’ve given you some of the information you needed before we could go on talking about how to actually start your transition from a person stuck in a lousy job to a person earning the same amount and even more working at home with half the effort and time spent working.

Our main goal is to walk you through some of the basic skills which are always highly required by freelancing jobs, such as content writing, translating and online teaching, and also keeping in mind that these jobs maybe aren’t in your interest right now, but stay with me on this.

  1. Content writing – Content writing and all of these freelancing jobs we’ve listed require a good knowledge of English or any other language quite well to be able to write all kinds of articles on all kinds of topics. It’s not as easy as it might appear to be, but once you get the hang of it, you can earn a fair amount of money from writing.
  2. Translating – All sorts of translations are also highly required, and if you know another language to that extent that you feel confident enough to do this kind of work, at one point, you’ll surely earn money than that 9-5 job you left a long time ago.
  3. Online teaching – This is a breeze compared to the other two jobs as it doesn’t require as much knowledge of English as it does require some teaching skills. You would be working with a teachers guide and help foreign students learn English through video lectures, it can be a bit tiring, but in the end, you can make a living out of it.

These are just some classic examples of freelancing, and these jobs make up the majority of freelance work.

But the point here isn’t to quit your job so that you can start working at home but rather to use that extra time you’ll be having from freelancing so that you can work on improving your skills for the career you want to pursue.

So consider freelancing as a sort of stepping stone between your old and new career.

NEXT STEP – USE YOUR TIME CORRECTLY

Once you transition from your job to freelancing and make it your main source of income, which in the beginning won’t be as much as you hope for but it will certainly be enough to pay the bills and have food in your fridge, you will have a lot more time on your hands.

Use this time to learn step-by-step what skills you need to obtain so that you can work your dream job,  and whether you want to be an entrepreneur, a marketing agent or even a business consultant, it’s up to you to find the career which will make you successful and help you achieve your full greatness.

Side tip – You should try to save up as much money as possible in the period when you’re doing freelancing as a side job, so you don’t have to worry about finances when you opt for full-time freelancing.

With all this being said, it’s never too late to pursue your dreams, and the way you do this is by going to events and seminars where they talk about the things that interest you.

For example, if you want to be an entrepreneur, go to seminars where they talk about how the stock and the market functions.

It’s like going back to school again, but now you’re an adult, and it’s much easier for you to learn new things and skills because you already have some knowledge of how the world functions and what you need to do in order to reach success.

It may take some time to actually get the skills required for your future career path, but the main idea here is still the same – learn everything you need to achieve your goal.

YOU’RE JUST ABOUT DONE

Now that you’ve reached that point where you know what it takes to pursue your dream and take matters into your hands, you’re ready to go out there and actually start working on it.

  • Want to be an entrepreneur? – Invest in some stocks and use the knowledge you’ve obtained to get the best results.
  • Want to be a marketing agent? – Rent out an office and advertise your skills to companies and clients.
  • Want to be a business consultant? – Share your experience and everything you’ve learned with people who are just starting out with businesses or who need an expert opinion on their company.

These are just examples of the careers we talked about earlier just to give you an idea of how to start your journey, and we gave these examples specifically because they are all well-paying and highly-requested jobs.

The point is to jump straight into doing the things which you want to do and even if something fails, you still have an option of going back to freelancing which wouldn’t be possible if you were still stuck at your regular job.

Keep in mind that this is the most critical move you’ll have to make and it’s not risk-free, but the purpose of this article is for you to break the boundaries which are holding you back from your success.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL

Never ever allow yourself to get demotivated when you fail at something because we’re not perfect, we’re just humans, and as humans, we tend to stick to the things we are most comfortable doing and that’s the biggest trap you can get yourself into.

There is nothing which guarantees success, but also there is nothing that can stop you when you are motivated to get out of your comfort zone and just do the things you have to do. With just thinking about it you won’t achieve anything.

The key to success is the beginning and the willingness to learn how to achieve success.

Just remember that people who flunked college or didn’t even finish high school got to be big business owners and company directors.

Just look at Steve Jobs, for example, he dropped out of college and went to India to study Buddhism, and surely everyone thought he was crazy, but later he developed his own computer software and started Apple, and today the iPhone is the number one selling product in the world.

There’s no difference between him and you, we’re all human, and if he can do it, you can succeed as well.

The only real difference is that he wasn’t afraid to pursue his career and you’re still not sure if you’re ready, well let me tell you-you’re ready.

THE BENEFITS OF GETTING YOUR LIFE INTO YOUR OWN HANDS

If you’re still being skeptical about taking a step further and creating a life worth living, we’ll give you a breakdown of the most important benefits you’re going to have once you let go of your fears and understand that there’s no such thing as job security.

  • You’ll have a lot more time – We’ve already talked about this but there’s nothing bad in highlighting it again, but remember to use that time efficiently.
  • You’ll be much happier – Not only that, but your partner, friends, family members, heck even your dog will be happier around you because you’re happy and fulfilled inside knowing that you are now in control of your life.
  • You’ll earn more with half the effort – It’s not all about the money, but we all have to eat and knowing that you’ll earn the same amount of money and maybe even more compared to your old job is great motivation.
  • No more dealing with stress – Let’s do some more research! According to The American Institute of Stress, the main causes of stress are caused by workload (46%), people issues (28%), juggling work and personal life (20%) and lack of job security (6%).
  • You’ll learn new things – And I can’t emphasize this enough. This is the main benefit of all the things we’ve talked about because at the end of the day you’ll learn so many things which will not only help you achieve your goals but also the knowledge you have will make you feel proud of yourself and no dead-end job can give you that satisfaction.

As you can see the benefits outweigh the risks of pursuing your goal because once you have the required knowledge and skill set, there’s nothing that can stop you from doing anything in life.

FINAL WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT

To summarize everything that we talked about today and to give you some final tips and motivation to start your pursuing your goals, we’ll quickly go through everything we’ve learned today.

First, let go of your fear and explore the world around you, use this age of modern technology to look up online how to start freelancing and try to find a freelance job.

Trust me it’s not that hard considering how much freelancing is popular today.

Second, once you find a freelance job, balance the time between your main job and freelancing so that you obtain the skill set needed to finally quit your job and start full-time freelancing.

Keep in mind that you’re using freelancing as sort of a lever to help you break off with your main job.

Third, the moment you get some spare time because of freelancing, start learning about your dream job through events, seminars, meeting and talking to people who actually work those jobs and then start building your way up to actually jumping into that kind of work.

And final, if you fail at something, get right back up, learning is not about always succeeding but also about learning from your mistakes.

At the end of the day, if you see that things aren’t going the way you’ve planned you can always commit to freelancing, it’s way better than where you’re at now.

This is a learning experience which will not only help you succeed in your carrier but also help you grow more as a person and teach you self-discipline and how to beat the odds when the going gets though.

Now go out there and do what you need to do – be your own boss!

Forget Job Security: How to Take Ownership of Your Work and Design a Better Life

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