Seth Godin on his blog has marvelously explained the inherent characteristic of “effort” while comparing luck and effort:

While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.

Here is the link to his post.

He has talked about people who have lots of luck; success falls on to their laps without much effort. On the other hand there are people who have to sweat and bleed for little fragments of success and recognition.

At the cost of sounding like “the grapes are sour” I would like to say that the perception of success and failure differs from person to person and so is the perception of luck. Some people consider failure is a great opportunity to learn and start all over again. Similarly I consider myself extremely lucky that I don’t have to leave home every morning in order to make a living. I just have to move into another room to manage my online copywriting and content writing business. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have to work hard; but I am lucky that the technology of today has helped me earn a comfortable living while being with my wife and my baby all the time. Seth Godin has rightly pointed out that we are lucky that we were not born in the times of black plague or when slavery was rampant and freedom was hard to find.

Does this mean I don’t need anything else in my life? Sure I do. I want to earn more money, I want to make my family’s future financially secure, and I want to pursue my genuine passions: singing and writing literature. All these things may happen luckily (a hotshot music director stumbling upon my YouTube video or a big publisher falling in love with my writing style), or I may have to work really hard to achieve them. I have problem with neither.

All freelancers are entrepreneurs. Most of the time they are managing almost all the aspects of their one-man (or one-woman) enterprise and they have to go through various dark and bright phases. This illuminating post lists four stages in an entrepreneur’s life:

1. Uninformed optimism: this is the first stage when you are brimming with confidence and optimism and you don’t have much knowledge of your newly discovered idea. Everything is bright and promising and success is the only word you know. At this stage you can launch thousand business ideas and they can all succeed. You are simply a genius, indefatigable, unconquerable.
2. Informed pessimism: the reality hits hard in the second stage. This is the time when you realize where you actually stand and what a Herculean effort is required to achieve the goals that seemed so easily achievable during the stage of uninformed optimism. In the second stage some of the results have already manifested and you have lots of data to compare with your results against it. The fingers of frustration begin to touch you and you feel nervous about the plunge that you have taken.
3. Crisis of meaning: the pall of fear has encompassed the firmament of your existence and the sun seems to have set, never to rise again. This is a perilous stage because you can either crash into a state of permanent failure or you can gather your strength and rejuvenate your efforts.
4. Informed optimism: if you are past the third stage you enter the informed optimism stage. By this time you have tackled your fears, you have analyzed and studied some of the results, you know where you are succeeding and where you may be lacking in effort and strategy. You are in control of your bearings and you know what direction to take. You are cautiously optimistic, the writer phrases.

This is well known that these stages come in every entrepreneur’s life; the crucial point is how you can leverage these stages and turnaround all adverse circumstances. For instance you shouldn’t make money related decisions during stage one because than you’re always prone to spending more. During the uninformed optimism stage you should handle media and public relations because you are at your best in terms of confidence and drive.

Since by the second stage you have all the information at hand you can plan for the next step. You can strategize your operations and make a promotion and marketing plan. You can also chart a realistic map of your growth and the amount of effort that would be required.

The original writer has explained all the stages much better. As a freelance copywriter and content writer I keep on going through these stages again and again because every new day is a new entrepreneurial step. Every day I have to redraw my marketing strategy and implement new methods to promote my business. This takes away a big chunk of my time and this sometimes worries me a lot: am I losing lots of time, and consequently lots of money, doing things that are fuzzy and may not work? Sadly, almost every marketing effort on the Internet takes its own good time to show results.

Just read a nice blog post on how to manage and balance your personal and professional lives. When you are working from home it is very difficult to draw a line between working and not working and sometimes I feel I am always working even during the weekends. I remember a few months ago I had planned a 15-day holiday and accordingly I had prepared a schedule to complete a client’s assignment.  He not only delayed the assignment he also kept calling me and sending me e-mails and I ended up working all my holidays and this really created a crisis in my family.

I think having clients from all over the world does take its toll because they all have their own working schedules and sometimes I have to adjust my work timings accordingly. Still, from inside I know you can draw a line if you really want to.  What can be the cost?  Maybe you will lose a few assignments but it’s not worth it if you are losing out on quality family time and even your health.

I am gradually deciding on what days I want to work and on what days I don’t want to work.  That’s why now I have specifically mentioned on my website (look at the top-right side) what days I am working. I don’t even take the weekends off in the conventional sense because it doesn’t suit me personally.  For example, on Mondays I have my music class and I cannot simply miss it.  Since my teacher (he is around 70-year-old) uses public transport to come to my place (yes, even at that age he is quite healthy and doesn’t find public transport daunting) I am never sure when he is going to reach and this creates lots of disturbance. Besides, almost all my music classes are extremely exhausting by the time we are through, at least for me.  This practically used to waste my Mondays completely, work-wise. Then my wife suggested that I should have my weekend on Sundays and Mondays instead of Saturdays and Sundays.  I am still getting used to not working on a Monday or at least not worrying about work.

No longer I spend around 12 to 15 hours working on my laptop; the moment I have worked for 8 hours I call it a day and these 8 hours, beside my writing assignments, also include blogging and supervising other writers.

Striking a balance is really essential if you really want to make your freelance business meaningful.  You leave your regular job and start working on your own because you want to enjoy life and don’t want to spend it in the daily grind of commuting to your office and then remaining in that unfriendly building all day.  You want to be with your family, you want to see your kids running around you when you are working and you want to be with your spouse when he or she needs someone to be with.  There is no purpose in getting on the verge of achieving all this but not getting it just because you cannot organize the way you handle your work.