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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.