There’s perhaps nothing as rewarding as doing something yourself that you thought you couldn’t do. It’s where our innate sense of achievement comes from us humans.
Now, imagine if you could be doing that each and every day of your working life? By becoming your own boss, you’re taking back control of your working life, which will give you a far greater sense of satisfaction than working for someone else. Here’s how to go about it.
Deciding what you’ll do
One of the most important steps to making it on your own is to decide where you want to go in your life. A great time to do this is if you’ve quit your old job, or you’ve been let go with a nice severance package. Or it could just be that you have some free time on your hands on the weekends and want to use it wisely, to change your direction. Now is the time to pick something you’ve always wanted to do for a career, but life has always gotten in the way.
Are you a creative person?
If you think of yourself as a creative person, or perhaps do art of any kind in your spare time, now might be the time to take that up full-time and devote yourself completely to it! Your creative hobbies may require some investment – large curved monitors and camera equipment, for example, can be quite expensive – but consider it a business expense!
In fact, if you’re starting a business, you may be able to write it all off as a business expense when you do your taxes! Whether your creative passion is photography, painting, video work – or whatever hobbies that make money – if you’re a creative of any sort, there has never been a better time to grab your creativity by the proverbial horns and make the opportunity count.
Open your own coffee shop
It’s probably crossed everyone’s mind at some point that they’d like to own their own coffee shop. Most of us have probably looked around our local coffee jaunt and thought about what we’d do with it if it was our space and our ‘baby’.
The things we’d change about it. How we would reimagine it. Why not get started? Your coffee shop doesn’t need to be a particularly large space; it can be in the back of an old food truck, for example. You can start out in something small while you build your profile and work towards a larger space if your heart so desires.
Have a passion for design?
If you’ve always thought of yourself as having the ability to look at a space and immediately recognize what’s wrong with a particular space then you could consider a career as an interior designer. Considering the current boom in the housing markets, interior designers are in hot demand at the moment. Jump on that train while there’s still gravy in it.
Making money from home
Given that much of the world is transitioning to a ‘from-home’ state, it makes sense to try to capitalize on that sudden shift and be a part of an evolving new market: the freelance market. Companies are starting to realize just how expensive it is to maintain bricks-and-mortar buildings, and how unnecessary it is to do so as well.
This means that either, their staff has transitioned totally to working from home, or their whole business model has had a redux. Either way, if you consider yourself to be adept with computers, you might try to make money during the Coronavirus pandemic through a freelance career.
Freelancing is great as it allows you to tailor your career to your skills. Writing? Editing? Transcription? Design? These, and so many more, can be done freelance. And they allow you to make just as much, if not more money, from the comfort and safety of your own home. Of course, when working from home and communicating via email, make sure you secure your email to protect your valuable files from malware.
Summing up
Whatever you decide to do with your life after a change in circumstances, reimagining what your life could be like should be one of those things. And if you’re lucky enough, you might find something you love from something you didn’t. And if you’re doing something you love, as the old adage goes, then it isn’t really ‘work’.
Guest post courtesy of Denise Langenegger
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