Freelance Apple

Why are you a freelancer? My answer some time ago was “It offers the freedom to work whenever you want at your own pace”. As time passed I realised that the passion of freelancing was actually deeper than this and once one achieves this passion, it all becomes worthwhile. This article is for freelancers, as you expected, but it offers an insight to non-freelancers into what drives a person to be a freelancer and why we gave up our 9 to 5.

The Passion

Almost everyone has goals in life, even if they do not call them goals or even realise that it is a goal. When I was younger I had certain goals which I wanted to achieve and they included:

1. Fly an aeroplane
2. Become the Prime Minister
3. To be a millionaire
4. To go to the moon
5. To make people smile

I’m sure many of you grinning at this list feel a sense of affinity to this list because everyone had weird and wonderful imaginations as a child. Looking at the list now, I didn’t achieve many of my childhood dreams and some of them can never become true. I wanted to fly an aeroplane and I never have done, but I have been on a considerable number of aeroplane journeys, so my love of flying has never gone away.

Becoming the Prime Minister can’t be hard since we have a one-eyed bear in charge of the UK and a stuck-up nerd trying to become Prime Minister. I may not have achieved this, but I did meet Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing St, which is better than nothing and it helped me realise that no honourable man can ever make it through the dirt of politics to become Prime Minister. I will never go to the moon and that only leaves two dreams left.

Here lies the passion of freelancing. Is it the money – the more you work, the more money you get? Is money the passion or driving force of any sensible person? No.

The passion of freelancing is the happiness which you get when you change the world by such a small amount by doing what you love. If someone asked me now, “Why did you become a freelancer?” I would not say the overused answer of ‘ditching the 9 to 5′ or just ‘becoming my own boss. Important as these thing are, my answer now is “The happiness I can bring into peoples lives by doing what I love”.

Whether you are a designer, coder, photographer or whatever else, your work does genuinely bring happiness to people. It may not be all the time but it does. I found that money can never give you what helping others can. Now, we do take a fee for our work, but so does an artist when their work sells. The differences between an artist and a freelancer are very few. We both do what we love, to bring happiness to others and in the process earn a living.

Jean-François Champollion

Jean Francois Champollion was the genius who deciphered the Rosetta Stone and became the first person to read hieroglyphics in over 1500 years. The work which Champollion did affected mankind forever, as he had read a language which was totally dead. His name will perhaps live on forever and millions of people will continue to be indebted to his work and dedication to this field.

Yet there are some facts people do not know about Champollion. He was extremely poor and when he cracked the code of hieroglyphics he hardly had anything to eat in his house. He was a poor man who had never even been to Egypt, yet he achieved more than all the rich and great scholars of his time who were breaking their backs in Egypt trying to crack the code. Champollion’s passion as a linguist lead him to go beyond his native french and to learn Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Amharic, Sanskrit, Avestan, Pahlavi, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian and Ge’ez. In the end his passion drove him to recreate the ancient language of hieroglyphics.

So what does this have to do with freelance web developers?

Your work can change the world. If, for instance, you are a freelance designer who works because of his passion to create amazing material which will be appreciated by people, then you have the ability to change the world. There is a person who is the best designer in the world and a person like this decides the future of your field by creating innovative designs. You can become that person and change your field forever pushing it to new heights and be remembered in history.

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