Students That Freelance

Depending on if you want to make a career out of your freelancing or if this is just a temporary employment situation, every freelancer should have a plan. Lucky enough for us student freelancers, we are starting early enough to develop a more long-term plan. It is proven that those who plan are more successful than those who don’t plan. But what do you plan for? What should be the motivation behind any plan involving your freelancing business? I would have to say that the motivation should be to think big.

Why should you think big? So far in my experience, the bigger I thought about my freelancing, the more I thought about where I wanted my freelancing to take me, the more great things started to happen. I started getting more business and more clients, I started having more opportunities open up for me, and most importantly I started being able to picture my life as a freelancer more vividly than ever before. All because I started out with a plan and a motive: to think big.

Think big. Small phrase, but can pack a powerful punch. So what exactly do I mean by “think big?” First off, it involves thinking about where you want to be in your freelancing in a year, five years, ten years, twenty years. Do you want to be freelancing? Do you want to own your own business? Do you want to hire others like you to work under you? Do you see yourself having a 10-20 person firm? Do you think about going to work only a few days a week and still making a good living?

In order to make all of these things happen, you have to think big. For instance, if your dream/goal/plan is to have 10 people working under you in your own business in 10 years, then start thinking about how to get there and act like you only have 1 year to do it. What a paradigm shift right? If you want to achieve your goals by the time you set out, then you need to work like you only have half of the time, or a quarter of the time to achieve it.

But working hard to achieve your goals in less time than planned isn’t the only thing you should do to think big. To think big, you have to think big. No, that isn’t a typo. When you start thinking big about everything involving your freelancing, all of the time, and apply it to everything you do in your freelancing business, your business will start thinking big.

When you start thinking big about your freelancing, then opportunities start opening up that you never thought could happen before. You start getting ideas about your business and how to make it grow, and you will put them into action. You will start to see things in a new light, and see how you can transform your freelancing into something more than you could ever have before.

When you stop thinking about how your business is currently and start thinking big, you move from thinking about the present to thinking about the future. Entrepreneurs live in the future. They want the next big thing. They want to innovate and explore uncharted waters. Think of all the great things that student entrepreneurs have done: Facebook, Napster, FedEx, College Hunks Hauling Junk, and the foundation for Microsoft. All of these things happened because the entrepreneurs behind them thought big. And you see how big they are now.

So when you start thinking about your plan for your freelancing for the next year, five years, ten years, your motivation should be to think big. When you start thinking big, your freelancing will never be the same.