I started freelancing

I'm officially an entrepreneur. This year I decided to become a freelance business/technology consultant, and boy am I definitely learning!

My desire to become a freelancer was due to a number of things: income, taxes, inflation, new opportunities/lack of opportunities, desire to contribute in specific and direct ways etc. But ultimately, I believe the top reason to become a freelancer is to learn.

Now I know what you're thinking I don't have to become a freelancer to learn! I can just take a class or pull up YouTub for crying out loud. And yes this is true, but there is something about learning while on the job that allows you learn more than if you weren't.

To be honest, I can't remember many details about my assignments from school. And I can only attribute a few of my college classes to have really prepared me for my current career. But even that preparation pales in comparision to the skills I learned while starting in my career.

What did work teach me that school didn't

Hmm...well the most important skill I learn wasn't a program, but it was the soft skill of clear communication. This is a broad term, but I'll be specific and say I learned how to design and describe technology through written and verbal communication.

I definitely grew to enjoy this form of communication too. And I believe that since this type of communication had such a great impact on me, I use this approach in just about all my communications.

For hard skills, I think the best skill I learned was how to read XML documents on the XML marker program. After getting familiar with it, it turned out to be pretty fun to read and and find the data that I was looking for in a long XML file.

What do I want to learn as a freelancer?

Simply put I want to learn new skills. I want to learn the skills that will make me more rounded and able to solve problems more efficiently. Specifically, I want to learn the fundamentals of business in a practical way to generate income. That includes marketing and selling for sure. I also want to learn how to mobilize people and leverage people and resources to solve problems and generate income.

I can't say that learning how to use a new program or tool is something that I really desire, because the tools are ever changing. But the fundamentals of business stay the same.

I learned early on in my career pursuits that the school system doesn't teach everything let alone the most important topics needed in life so I want to be proactive about my learning and also duplicate that in my children. This will hopefully ensure that they aren't in their late 20s+ wishing they were taught more about real life and business.

As I continue on this journey, I'll refine what I want to learn and I'll be sure to keep that at the forefront of my mind so that I know what opportunities to prioritize or pass on.