3 Habits Of Highly Successful Freelancers

I have the pleasure of interacting with many successful freelancers, top-notch business people, and entrepreneurs, along with some not so successful ones but aspire to be one. I found a common and noticeable difference in the habits and daily routines of successful freelancers and those who aren’t.

Believe me, and these habits have nothing to do with hard work. It is often the opposite. The not so successful people are often as hard-working as the one who aren’t so successful.

So what makes the difference.

The most common differences in habits and daily routines of freelancers that are uber-successful have in common that others don’t are:

1. They Allocate Time to Read

Reading is one of the most common habits that I found among super successful freelancers and entrepreneurs that are missing, among others.

“Go to bed a little wiser than when you woke up.” – Charlie Munger

And if you can follow it for the rest of your life, the amount of knowledge and wisdom one can accumulate is beyond calculation.

It sums up pretty much everything.

The knowledge you have gained while graduating isn’t enough to keep you knowledgeable for the rest of your life. You have to accumulate more.

Pick up any random person among the most successful people for you, and you will seldom find he doesn’t like reading or doesn’t have the habit of reading.

The habit of reading can never hurt. So make reading a habit. Books are your best friend. They cannot harm you, but the amount of knowledge and wisdom it can give you is beyond measure.

I do like reading books, but I don’t have it as a daily routine. In my free time, I read, but often I have been dragging myself away from reading because of lack of time. I have been working hard to allocate time daily to read.

I also had a bad habit of ordering books in a bunch. However, when they are delivered, some of them go on the shelf directly and often aren’t read. Now I order only one or two books at a time and keep them either on my computer table or at my bedside. So they are always in front of me and put them on the shelf only after I complete them, or in case I don’t want to be reading them.

2. Surrounded By Positive-Minded People

Deliberately or unknowingly but I found that highly successful freelancers and entrepreneurs have a habit of surrounding themselves with positive-minded people. They interact with everyone, but they don’t hang out with everyone. They choose the right people they want to hang out with.

Having too many negative people around you won’t get the best out of you.

“You are the average of the five people you most associate with” – Tim Ferriss.

The people around you can have an impact on your habits and behavior, but more importantly, it can change how one views business and opportunities.

When I was in Kolkata, my friends were more focused on doing a job and not trying entrepreneurship. After moving to Surat, the people around me are more focused on starting a business. I see an apparent change in how I view the business opportunity now than I used to back then.

I have seen this happen to some of my school and college friends as well, where I met them after a few years. They were different personalities, but as the people around them changed, they have an impact on it.

The people around you have a massive impact on the way you approach various scenarios. So make sure you choose the right kind of positive people around you.

3. The Plan is to be in the Game for a Long Term

When I got in Surat, I heard from a friend that struck me.

You need to survive 1,000 days in a business to make it work.

Surviving 1,000 days and one can gain a lot of experience to pull it off.

“Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: Ten Thousand Hours” – Malcolm Gladwell

One thousand days or 10,000 Hours is pretty much the same. It means you need to work towards your business and freelancing a lot more than starting the rat race to make more money.

The more you do something, the better you get.

As a freelancer, try to be in the game for the long-term and try to be a vivid learner. You have to figure out your choice of niche and build long-term clients.

I see so many freelancers want to start earning from day one. There is nothing wrong with it, but if you push hard at the start to make more money, you may end up in a highly competitive niche that doesn’t have long-term prospects.

Similarly, if you can blog for three years without worrying about traffic building or monetizing, you will know the niche you enjoy the most writing about, but some blogs will fail as well.

Experimentation and failure are a part of entrepreneurship, but I see it is missing from freelancers and new bloggers.

Final Thoughts

Freelancing isn’t all about getting clients from the freelancing site only, and there is much more than that. As a data entry operator or Yet another WordPress theme designer, one can’t expect top hourly rates.