How you feel about your work and its place in your life is a huge deal. Before you can build a freelance career that’s both rewarding and exciting, you have to do the internal work of understanding yourself—your boundaries, your needs, and your motivations. When you first , this self-reflection is the most critical step.
To really get what freelancing is about, it helps to see how it stacks up against a traditional job. The single biggest difference? Accountability. As an employee, you answer to your boss. As a freelancer, you answer to yourself. It’s a simple distinction that changes everything about how you work, get paid, and plan your life.
For most of my life, if you’d asked me what peace of mind looked like, I probably would have pictured something cliché, like meditating on a Tibetan mountaintop with the Dalai Lama. I never imagined I’d find it so much closer to home, thanks to a cognitive neuroscientist named David Vago.
Decades ago, my mentor posed a simple question that took me years to fully unpack: “Are you a good person or a bad person?” My immediate answer was, “A good person,” but the real weight of that self-assessment didn’t hit me until much later.
We’ve already talked about getting to know our true selves and realigning our mental operating system around the core beliefs we were born with, like our limitless ability to learn. It’s impossible to reboot our minds if those fundamental programs aren’t in the right place. Most of us understand that panicky feeling when a phone or laptop gives us the "screen of death" and won't start. We worry that everything is lost. But what many people don't realize is that the most important technology they own—their mind—has been compromised for most of their lives.
It’s a simple question: can you learn? Most of us would say yes without a second thought. But how deep does that belief go? Sure, we can learn simple things. But what about the really hard stuff? Could you learn to play the piano, understand monetary policy, or wrap your head around quantum mechanics? Could you become an expert, speaking on conference stages about it?
Think back to when you were a toddler. At that point in your life, the way your mind was wired was pretty much perfect. It didn't come loaded with flawed programming that held you back or warped your sense of self. Nobody had taught you about limiting beliefs yet. For most of us, that was the last time we were truly set up to build the life we wanted, free from all the negative conditioning that came later.
There are two things that really set humans apart. One is our opposable thumbs, a neat trick we share with a few other species like koalas and some tree frogs. But the second one? That’s all ours. It’s our ability to take in information and consciously make choices based on it. This power of choice is our single greatest asset.
I heard a story recently that perfectly captures the journey most entrepreneurs face. A young man’s mother looked at him and said something he dreaded hearing: “You are going to have to go back to being a waiter at Red Lobster.”