Become self-employed and travel the world!

I wanted a life with more freedom and a lot more travel, and yet, here I was, not having any freedom, not travelling, and spending way too many hours and having way too much stress trying to get there.

Due to popular demand I created a companion PDF for this video with summary notes and extra insights. You can download the companion guide here:
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I’m going to teach you how I afford to travel the world.

In this video you’ll learn the fastest and best way to start working for yourself so you can become a digital nomad, or location independent entrepreneur.

When you research how to work for yourself you will surely be bombarded with 1000s of ideas, as well as 1000s of people trying to sell you some B.S. “business in a box” or “magic solution”.

Run!

The fastest way to work for yourself is to become a freelancer, a coach, or a consultant. In this video I’ll share my own experiences working for myself as a freelancing and coaching others.

You’ll learn exactly how you can get started working for yourself and the right ways to think about what to actually do.

I’ll give you a hint, there is no magic here. It’s all about giving real value and actually helping people. When you do, you’ll get more freedom and be able to keep working for yourself and living life on your own terms. Oh, and you’ll also get to keep your soul. Cool?

I also share my own experience as a digital nomad and talk about how I started working for myself as a freelance copywriter and how this enabled me to live abroad and really design my dream life.

In this video, I also want to actually teach and break down how it could be possible for them, because most of the time when you explain to someone that you have this life where you can live wherever you want, you earn money regardless of the local economy of where you are, and you have pretty much total freedom in terms of where you live and when you work, they’re interested in how they could do that as well. I’ve wanted to make this video, this video right now for years where I break down the best way to do it and how it can be done.

Now, if you’re wondering who am I to talk about this stuff, well, I’ve been location independent for over four years now. I started off leaving my hometown of Vancouver, Canada in 2012.

I was working as a freelance copywriter and was broke. I’m not going to use some curse words to tell you how broke I was, but I was as broke as you can get.

I made this decision to kind of follow through regardless, on my dream of living around the world and managed to not only make it work, but really increase my business and turn things around to the point, where we’re at a really nice profitable freelancing business, where I was able to go from Costa Rica to New York, where I was able to surprise my brother with a flight to visit me, and I was able to do all this while working as a freelancer on my own hours with the freedom to live where I wanted.

Since then, I’ve grown my business to include writing my own books, teaching online courses as well as doing coaching. So I have a fair share of experience not only through my own life, but also working one-on-one with other people as they went through this journey of becoming a freelancer, and then designing their own life around that.

Now I hope you don’t mind me talking about myself a bit, I’ve been told I have to put that in these videos because people want to know, “Who is this guy? Why should I listen to him?”

So, now that we have that out of the way, I want to go back to our original premise, which is that conversation that comes up time and time again, where I run into someone who says, “I want your life. How can I have that kind of freedom, and work for myself?”
I want to go through what I would tell them, what I do tell them in that conversation.

The first thing I would say, and I want to say about working for yourself is, don’t over-complicate it. It doesn’t have to be this crazy complicated thing.

Now, I think the best way to get started, in terms of working for yourself and having the freedom to set your own schedule is freelancing, consulting or coaching. There’s a bunch of reasons why I think this is by far the best way to get started. I’ll go through that later on in the video, but for now, just roll with me here.

So within this area, you don’t need to over-complicate things. A lot of people, myself included, especially myself, we have an instinct of making things more complicated than they need to be. Ultimately, what a good freelancer does, is they provide value.

For the rest of the video, I’m going to use the term ‘freelancer’, but know that I include consulting and coaching within that category of freelancing here.

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How To Work For Yourself and Travel The World” open=”true”]If you have the chance to talk to any kind of successful location independent entrepreneur or digital nomad, you can bet that we’ve all had this conversation dozens of times. It’s the one that goes kind of like this:

“So why are you in Barcelona?”

“Well you know, beaches, and I like Spanish food, and I thought maybe I wanted to learn Spanish.”

“Yeah, but why are you here?”

“Beaches, and I like Spanish food and I wanted to learn Spanish.”

“No, no, but why are you here?”

“Oh, like job and stuff?”

“Yeah, yeah, are you an English teacher? What are you doing here?”

“Oh no, it’s not like that,” and then you go on to explain your life.

And we’ve all had those dozens of times.

I’ve always wanted to make a video where I explain this to people, so I kind of have something to point people to and say, “Hey, here’s how this life is possible.”

Now, if you’re wondering who am I to talk about this stuff, well, I’ve been location independent for over four years now. I started off leaving my hometown of Vancouver, Canada in 2012.

I was working as a freelance copywriter and was broke. I’m not going to use some curse words to tell you how broke I was, but I was as broke as you can get.

Now I hope you don’t mind me talking about myself a bit, I’ve been told I have to put that in these videos because people want to know, “Who is this guy? Why should I listen to him?”

I want to go through what I would tell them, what I do tell them in that conversation.

The first thing I would say, and I want to say about working for yourself is, don’t over-complicate it. It doesn’t have to be this crazy complicated thing.

For the rest of the video, I’m going to use the term ‘freelancer’, but know that I include consulting and coaching within that category of freelancing here.

What a good freelancer does is, they provide value. They find a way to give other people value with their service, and that’s it.

It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Now, once you figure out how to provide value, and we’ll talk more about what that is, what is value and how can you provide that. Once you figure out how you can provide it, then the next step is figuring out how you can provide it in the best way.

So, you start out providing value and maybe you’re earning 25-35, 50 dollars an hour, and then you can progress with that and find out, “Okay wait, how can I give more value and more value?” It’s basic business, it’s where you give someone value and they pay you for that.

Sometimes this is hard to wrap our heads around because it’s not really how it works in the employ sense. Every relationship, I believe, is an exchange of value, but in an employee-employer sense it’s not as obvious, it’s not as direct, and it’s often not as fair.

You could provide your employer with tons and tons of value, and it doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily give it back to you. But as a freelancer, you have a lot more equality there, in terms of the value you give and the reward you receive back.

So, the first question to ask yourself is, what is something that you do or can learn to do, better than most people? That’s your starting point, when you have something that you can do better than most people, and I don’t mean the best in the world to start out with or even the best in your city, but I mean better than most people.

Once you have that, you have the starting blocks for providing value to people.

Let me give you an example that I use on my clients sometimes to really help convey this and help build your starting confidence.

So you’re just getting started, it can be really hard to believe in your work or feel confident why someone would pay you for something. This can especially be true in the more artistic freelancing professions like writing or design. I started out as a writer myself and it’s weird to think, “Wait, someone’s going to pay me a hundred dollars an hour to just write for them?

Like, “Doesn’t everybody know how to write?”

Actually, I was a terrible speller in school, so from a traditional point of view, I’m probably actually a bad writer. So, how is it that someone is willing to pay me for that work?

Well, look at it this way. We all have a certain set of skills and strengths. Our strengths are more built-in, whether it’s from childhood or genetics or whatever else, kind of what we have to work with, and our skills are things that we develop through training and time.

Let’s say that writing is a combination of a strength for you, and maybe a skill. As a skill, you’re in the early stages of developing it, and there’s always more to learn and as a strength, it’s something you’ve always done well.

Now, consider a potential client, say you have a, I’m going make it really boring, say you have a dental office who needs to have their marketing done. They want to run a big promotion, put a lot of money into advertising, web stuff all that.

You might be thinking, “Wait, why would they pay me 50 dollars an hour for writing? I didn’t learn that at my last job, I don’t know if I’m worth that. Why would I be worth that?”

Let’s turn it and look on the other side. You have this dentist here who earns 150 dollars an hour and is a terrible writer, and there’s no one on staff who has any kind of writing ability who could pull it off, who could do this work for him.

So, you have this dentist there whose time is valued at 150 dollars an hour, and if he was to do his own writing, it would probably be bad, and taking longer than it would take you, and be costing him 150 dollars an hour of time that he could otherwise be working with patients.

So if you come in and you say, “Hey, I’m going to charge 50 dollars an hour, and I’m a good writer,” you’re delivering huge value there. You’re, number one, saving him 100 dollars an hour in terms of that trade-off of his hours versus your hours.

Number two is you’re probably delivering, in fact, I can guarantee you’re delivering a higher quality of writing that he would get doing it himself.

And number three, you’re taking this burden off of him, of having to do his writing.

People never think of this, but if you have a task in your business that you really don’t like to do, having someone help you do it where you can trust them and they will take it over, is a huge value. You’re delivering value in 3 different ways for this person, and you’re earning that 50 dollars an hour more than you can know.

So at a basic level, that’s what freelancing is. It’s providing value for someone with a skill you have, and I would recommend a skill that you build off of existing strengths. It’s really simple, and it doesn’t take years and years to start delivering that skill.

Now, it does take years and years of improving that skill to become one of the best, to become one of the people who can earn 150 or 200 dollars an hour, working from anywhere. But initially, to get started, you just have to be better than most people at that and be willing to work and sort out the client relations stuff, in terms of getting paid and setting up proposals and all that.

And that’s it. It’s not that complicated.

Now, the cool thing with freelancing is that you can start out this way, and then you can build it into something more.

So you can start out, say just taking a strength you have, develop a skill around that, and then offer it as a basic service. We say, “Hey everyone, look, I’m a hired gun, you need writing, I’ll be writing,” and you start out at a basic rate.

You start out at 40 dollars an hour. You start out that way and what’s really cool there is, you’re getting income right away. So, you already have some freedom if you want to travel or work from other places, you could do that, and you’re earning a good income. I mean I wouldn’t say it’s great, but it’s a great starting place to be at.

Now, you can take that and start to complicate it. You want to start out really simple but then you can look at ways to complicate it and take it to that next level.

So, you might start to notice when you work with your clients that, “Hey, they also have this problem,” or, “90% of what they want me to do revolves around this one area, and the rest of the work isn’t really helping them that much.”

So let’s focus in on this work and then double my rate, and deliver really good value by just focusing on the stuff that’s going to get the results.

There are lots of options where you can grow the freelancing career, and take it to a place where you’re delivering more and more value, and you’re being paid more and more for delivering that value. And of course, the more value you can deliver with your work, the more freedom you can have.

Now, someone with the freelancing business who is required to be by their clients, you know they have to go into the office, they have to keep a fixed schedule because the clients say, “We want to be able to get hold of you,” that’s a person, I can almost guarantee you, who is not delivering exceptional value.

The reason that they need to be there, they need to go into the office, they need to be on the phone all the time, and be responding to emails, is because they don’t give enough value to have power in that relationship. They’re replaceable, and so the client at any time can say, “Hey, if you won’t do it, we’ll hire someone else with your exact same skill set. You’re not delivering anything exceptional to us.”

As you move towards delivering exceptional value, that’s when you can develop more and more freedom because there may only be you or a handful of you’s, who can do what you do, with your style and with your personality and everything else, which gives you a unique advantage because your clients can’t replace you.

And because you’re delivering value, they don’t care where you live, they don’t care if you come to every teleconference meeting or show up at everything, because you’re delivering them huge amounts of value.

That’s what really separates the freelancers who are free in a way, like they work for themselves and they can technically travel, and the freelancers who were really free, and can set their own schedules and set their own locations and how they work with clients.

It really determines those relationships.

It’s because they’re delivering a high amount of value and they have a very specific understanding of the client’s needs and how to give them value. And with that, they gained a lot of power in that relationship, and so they can call the shots in how it works.

Let’s say you’re on board, you think, “Freelancing, this could work for me, this sounds like a pretty good deal. How you actually get started? What are the steps? What do you need to do to go from starting out to having a life of freedom to being location independent and all this good stuff?”

On the theme of simplicity, we’re going to keep it really simple.

The first thing and you might already be past this stage, but I want to include everything, first thing is deciding what you’re going to actually do. Now for some people, it’s pretty quick. When I decided I wanted to be a copywriter, I read some books on copywriting. I always like advertising ever since I was a kid and it seemed like the right thing. It was pretty instinctual.

For other people, there can be some more self-reflection and kind of go through some processes to figure out what is the right thing to do. But ultimately, you want to answer the question based on your strengths and skills, “How can I provide a lot of value to people, and enjoy myself?” Of course, right? But usually, if you’re doing something that’s in your strength, you’ll enjoy it because we all like being good at stuff.

If you’re doing something that you’re naturally good at you usually enjoy it more, you get a lot of fulfillment and satisfaction from it, so it works well together.

So that’s the first step, ‘What I’m actually going to do?”

Next is, you want to brush up a little bit on the skill side, if you need to, depending on where you’re at with that. So in my case with copywriting, it was having read a few books. I think I might have read one more book before I started being a copywriter, and that’s just to get you started on the skill development. I in no way advocate read a book on whatever your skill is and then that’s it for the rest of your life, but it’s to get you started.

And then the next thing is, get clients. Get started, getting paid for your work. I know it seems early, read a couple of books, decide what you want to do, start charging people.

But you will learn so much faster in the real world.

And as I talked about before, if you have a natural strength for what you’re doing and you read a couple books and got started, you’re going to be able to deliver value.

You’re going to still be able to help people with your work, you might just charge a lot less when you’re starting out.

You will learn so much faster starting out with paid work and as starting out as soon as you possibly can. So there’s a lot of benefits to starting out with paid work.

One, you get paid, right? Not a bad thing. The other is that it gets over that first hurdle. It’s a weird thing psychologically to think of ourselves of having a new profession, to say, “I’m a copywriter. I’m a designer. I’m an SEO consultant,” whatever it is.

It’s weird, this kind of confidence hurdle, and the quicker we can get over that by starting to do some work, the quicker sort of everything goes.

Another thing is, when there’s pressure, all of us, we’ll learn so much quicker and we perform better. It’s very hard to kind of read books on something and take courses and not also be doing it, in terms of how quick you’re going to learn. Sort of taking your time, “Oh, I’m going to read another book about this, I’m going to do something,” and that can drag on a long time.

So the quicker you can start getting paid for the work, even if it’s way under the rate you should be earning, the better.

So how do you get your first client? Well, I’m a big fan of designing your marketing strategy around you and your strength.

If you’re someone like me who don’t like confrontation, don’t do cold calling. That’s not going to go very well. I made that mistake for many years, and that’s why I’m such a proponent of this. You want to design your marketing around what you do best.

But for the initial clients, for most people, I would suggest starting with your network. Now this isn’t going to be your long-term strategy, but when you’re getting started, putting something out to your network that’s honest and direct is going to be really effective.

When I started as a copywriter, this is what I did. I put up a note on Facebook that basically said, “Hey, I think I’m a decent writer, I’m available for hire, and I’ll be really cheap because I’m just starting.” And I wrote it good obviously, I wrote it good. You can see my English is not that great, if I can be a writer, anyone can.

But what it was is, I put it together in a way that demonstrated my writing ability, and I put it up on Facebook. You might have heard me tell the story before, but I put it up on Facebook and I went out for a run.

I came back an hour later and I had 2 clients basically, messages from people who became clients within a day of that. And that’s how it got started for me.

Now, not everyone has the network to go into that, but generally almost everyone between your network and people they would know, there’s going to be a couple people who could potentially hire you. So I really recommend starting with your network, but there are other strategies and things you can do if you sort of moved to a new country and literally don’t know anyone or something like that. There are other things you can do.

So we started out with choosing what you want to do, polishing up that skill, getting your first client, and then the last thing you want to do is turn pro. We’ll talk about this more in a future video, but turning pro is when you go from dabbling, from the little leagues to the big leagues, and that’s when you start to really grow yourself and your business to the point where you can be earning really good income while having a lot of freedom in your life. That’s what we’ll talk about in a future video here.

So we started this conversation, trying to answer these questions as, “How can I have a life with more freedom? How can I be able to live where I want, to set my own schedule?”

I want to go back quickly to why I think that freelancing is the best way to do it, because it’s obviously not the only option. There are things like teaching English, getting a remote working job or trying to build one of these magical passive income machine businesses. I am very, very adamant that freelancing, whether that’s actually freelancing, or consulting or coaching is the best, best way to go.

I want to go through why I think that is, and then I’m going to go through a couple of tips for being successful, and things to look out for as well, some common challenges.

The first reason that I think freelancing is the best way to go, is that there’s a clear value proposition. What I mean by that is, it’s simple. You deliver good value to someone and you get paid back for it.

A lot of other ‘online businesses’ all sort of things, it’s a very gray area, weird business. It’s hard to figure out, “What I’m actually doing? What’s the value I’m delivering? What do I have to do to get paid?”

And because of this, freelancing usually has almost immediate income, you know you can start earning an income within your first month if you get clients and generally can have a somewhat consistent income.

Now, of course, there’s ups and downs depending on when you get clients and everything like that, but it’s not something where usually your income will just disappear out of the blue. So it’s a really great way to have that freedom right away, whereas a lot of other options might require you to spend a lot of time upfront, maybe years before you can have that freedom to travel or set your own schedule.

Freelancing allows you to do it pretty much from the beginning and compared with the other, like remote working for a company, or things like teaching English, those just don’t have that much freedom. If you have to keep a schedule with your company back home, that’s just not great in terms of your flexibility with you know, when you wake up, when you can go out, when you can travel, things like that.

The second thing I really like about freelancing is you’re developing a skill that you can then apply later on, if you decide to start a different kind of business or do something else.

So whatever you choose to do, whether it’s becoming a social media manager or an SEO consultant, or a writer or graphic designer, or video editor, that’s a skill that you can then apply to your own business. Let me tell you, I wish I had that video producing skills this week, while I try to put this together, okay?

So whatever that is for you, you develop that skill and if heaven forbids, then I would never ever want you to have to do this and go back and get a job.

But if you ever did need to go back to the job market, you now have a really good skill that you can add to your resume. Usually, the kind of freelancing roles that are great for being location independent are also really in demand right now. Now, more than likely what you’ll do is go on and do something with your own business. If that’s the case, you now have the skill that you can use for yourself.

Now, the third thing that you’re developing is business specific skills and a network.

So when you’re just starting out working for yourself, there’s a lot of things you’ll learn, in terms of how to maintain a schedule or manage yourself, how do you work through the bad days, how do you just organize yourself, you know, how do taxes work, how do you set up companies, all this sort of stuff.

You figure that out when you’re a freelancer, and you build those general business skills.

You also build your network. A lot of your clients might be successful entrepreneurs, so then down the road, 3, 4, 5 years if you ever decide to start a different kind of business, you have all these business skills plus a much wider network that you can use, which is much, much better than starting off with nothing, and just kind of hoping it works out.

On that same note, if you’re new to business, when you’re just starting out, it’s pretty hard to spot opportunities. You don’t necessarily know what people need or what they want, because you’re guessing, right?

Whereas if you spend a few years freelancing, you’ve been working with a lot of clients, seen how businesses operate, you often spot opportunities where you’re working with a client and you see, “Wait, they have this problem, okay, my other client had this problem too, maybe there’s a chance to make a software for them, or develop a specific solution or do something.”

A lot of businesses start that way where it’s a freelancer or consultant, they spot problems within the companies and then develop a solution, and that becomes a bigger sort of 7 or 8-figure business, that go on from there.

But you only get to see those opportunities when you actually get working and get involved with companies.

The last thing and this is kind of building off that, that I really like about freelancing is, you have so much room for growth. Whether you decide to just stay as a solopreneur and grow your business and become a, I mean there are consultants who earned 7-figures working for themselves with no staff. So these are the opportunities to grow and become really big financially wise, without all the stress of a company or staff.

But if you prefer and you want to grow into a bigger business down the road, you can do that, you can also go and look at maybe having an agency, so hiring other freelancers to work for you. We’re developing sort of a very productize service model where you have one specific service you offer as a freelancer and you build that up.

There are lots of ways you can grow, you know, going beyond that working in a cafe freelancer, you can make that choice, and you’ll be able to make that choice in a much better position because you’ve a lot more self-awareness, because you have been working for yourself for a couple of years at this point.

Now, you’re probably thinking this guy is obsessed with freelancing and maybe even a little bias in terms of why it’s the best route.

I told you my story a little bit so far, but I haven’t told you the whole story. That might shed some light on why I’m such an advocate of starting this way.

So pretty much from my early twenties, I’ve always wanted to travel. I had this one-week trip to Mexico after a terrible breakup, and just ended up being so much fun, like I was that total gringo getting wasted at Señor Frog’s, get kicked off stage, it was pretty funny.

I just had a great time, and ever since then, I’ve wanted to travel more and I just, had a thing for other cultures and I had this dream of living in 5 countries before I turn 30.

Now, being this overly ambitious 20 something-year-old who had a little too much Tony Robbins, I figured that I would build a company. I would sacrifice, work hard, hard, hard, every day, every hour I could. I would build this business, and then I would be successful.

And then I could go travel, I could go live out this dream of living in 5 new countries. I wouldn’t be working, I’ll just be laying back on the beach and I’ve retired by the time I was 30. That was the very, very delusional plan I had then.

But I went for it, and I started a business and I kind of went all out and I failed, and I failed miserably, as some of you know, I don’t mind talking about that but it sucked that I failed, and I started to look at kind of what I had spent the last few years doing and, well I was really passionate about the business that I started.

It was not tied to the life I wanted.

I wanted this life with a lot more freedom, a lot more travel, and yet here I was, not having any freedom, not having the travel I wanted and spending way too much hours and having way too much stress trying to get there.

Basically, circumstances forced on me the life I have now, where I started copywriting and working as a freelancer because I had to, because I was absolutely broke. When this business failed, it wiped me out, and so I needed to earn some money.

That’s why I started freelancing, because I was committed I wasn’t going to get a job, I wasn’t going to quit on my dreams, but I did not have it in me to start a new business at that point.

I started freelancing and pretty soon then I realize that, “Wait a minute, I could be doing this from anywhere in the world. I could still be working and earning this income,” but first, I wanted to live in Costa Rica and so I did.

And not only actually I was able to do it despite some pretty shoddy internet, but my business grew significantly like where my income really improved once I moved away and got focused.

It then kind of this led to that, led to this, I moved to New York, and then I ended up moving to Europe and here we are, I guess 4 years later.

And so for me, firsthand, I really experienced that going that other road, sacrificing the present for the future doesn’t always work out. It’s not to say you shouldn’t have big dreams and think about the future, try to change the world or anything like that, you should, but then I think there’s a way to do both, that you can work hard and enjoy the now, and have the freedom in the now, be able to travel and have those experiences, and then grow it into something bigger down the road, rather than sort of sacrificing happiness now, working too hard and then hoping one day, one day maybe, it will pay off and then I’ll be able to live this life.

I’m a big advocate of that, I’m a big advocate of enjoying your life now and working hard, and growing it for a future. So that’s why I am, I guess, so passionate about this route because, for me, this is the best route to do that.

By going into freelancing, you’re able to have freedom pretty much right away, and also grow into something significant. Also, depending on how you do it, if you have a soul, if you do it well, you can make the world a better place with it. If you help the right kind of client, if you work with the right businesses, you can play a key role and then make a difference in the world as well.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little over-enthusiastic about freelancing, but hopefully understanding my backstory might explain that a little bit.

Before we wrap up in this video, I do want to share 3 more tips for starting out and being successful as a freelancer.

Now, the first one is to be authentic and be honest. When we start out with something, we have had, and I use ‘we’ because I did this and I noticed most people do it. We have a thing, we’re trying to pretend that we’re more successful than we are, or more important than we are, and that’s stupid.

It doesn’t help us. You know how many of us have seen a business card that’s the ‘Daniel Johnston Freedom Group International Incorporated’ you know, something like that, it’s stupid.

Everyone knows it’s just us, why are we pretending?

What happens is when we try to pretend to be more successful than we are, or better than we are, we put all this unnecessary pressure on ourselves.

So if you’re starting out as a freelancer, and you pretend that you’re the successful, experienced, awesome freelancer, you’re going to create so much pressure on yourself to deliver amazing work, that it will, it could potentially be really crippling.

Whereas if you just be honest and authentic and say to people you know, “Hey, I’m just starting out, I have a natural strength for this, I think I can be really good, and I’m going to work my butt off because I want to succeed. Will you try me out? I’ll give you a great price.”

If you start out that way, there’s no pressure on you.

Okay, there’s a little pressure on you but there’s a lot less pressure on you and you have a really good basis for that client relationship where they’re going to want to help you, entrepreneurs want to help people starting out working for themselves, that’s just like wired into everyone.

So you’ll be able to do good work from the beginning where you don’t have that pressure on you, and you have a really good honest relationship.

And if you do good work because you’re not pretending to be really successful, your clients are more likely to refer people to you, because they’ll say, “Hey, this person’s awesome. They’re just starting out, you should give them a chance as well, they did great work for me.”

So starting out with a really honest attitude, I think, is one of the most important things you can do.

Now, the second thing is to work hard and do whatever you can to deliver the most value and your best work to your clients. Sometimes, it’s easy to get trapped in the finding client aspect and get behind on delivering great work.

Don’t do that. Do your very best to deliver the most outstanding work you can. Now that doesn’t mean it will be the best work in the world, but the best work you can do at the time.

It’s really important. Put in the time to deliver great work and it has a few effects, of course. Happy clients come back to you, you get referrals, all that stuff. I’m sure you’ve heard that. But another thing that happens is, when you do really good work, you feel pride, and when you get good feedback from your clients, you’ll feel more pride.

The more pride you feel in your work, the more your confidence grows, the easier it will become to market yourself. When you’re starting out and you don’t really know, like, “Am I doing good work? Is this good? I don’t know. I don’t know other people in my field.”

It’s real, it can be challenging to sell yourself because you’re not sure on your product. So the more confident you’re building your own product, the easier it is to promote yourself. And you do that by working really hard and delivering great work.

The third thing which ties in with doing the good work, is focused on the day-to-day.

I know you have a vision of traveling and freedom and this lifestyle. I don’t blame you. I had the same vision. I think that is an important part of kind of pushing ourselves forward, is thinking and knowing what do I want to create in my life and all that kind of stuff.

But it’s really important to focus day-to-day on delivering that good work.

So think, “Okay, in 3 months I’m going to move to some tropical beach.” Great, but day-to-day, dive deep into the work say, “Today, my only concern is doing the best work I can for my clients,” or, “My only concern is doing as much marketing as I can, and getting clients,” whatever that is, the days, like your days will build your weeks, your weeks will build your months, I’m sure you’ve heard this, your months build your years.

The more you can get into those moments and kind of get into the flow each day, the more that you’ll kind of leap forward in terms of productivity and growing your business.

So we’ve covered a lot here today, and I want to give you some props for sticking with me. It’s a long video and I’m sure most people had clicked off. We live in this YouTube generation of, it’s got to change camera angles every 4 seconds so you can hold people’s attention.

That’s unfortunate because most quality things take some time to learn. The best reading is not a quick blog article on a Top 10, it’s probably a book from 2,000 years ago. So I want to really commend you for sticking with this and following through this whole video.

Before we wrap up, I want to mention one of the challenges that can come up for a lot of people when they start down this freelancer path, and that’s dealing with fear and that’s dabbling.

The two are related, and in the next video I’m going to explain how they’re related, and how, without us even knowing it in the back of our minds, little things around fear, around what friends and family might say, affect your confidence.

And slowly, that forces us to change direction, It can lead to things like dabbling, giving up prematurely and just not having that focus we need to get results.

If this is something that you’ve dealt with before, or maybe you’re worried about it, “Okay, I want to do this but what happens when fear pops up, what happens when you know, people tell me I can’t do it, or self-doubt comes in?”

Have no fear, I cover this topic in depth here.

Now before you go, do you have any questions come up?

And whether or not you have a question, I would love it if you could answer this question from me, which is, if you could live anywhere you wanted, where would that be? Right now, you could go and spend a month anywhere in the world, you don’t have to worry about cost, you don’t have to worry about anything.

You’ll just spend a month there, where would it be?

Share that in the comments section, I’d love to hear about your dream destination. Again, thanks for watching, see you in the next one in a couple of days.