You want to be a freelancer, huh? The promises of making your own schedule, not having to show up at any particular time and of course, not having a manager to answer to are certainly all great aspects of freelancing, but with all that freedom comes great responsibility.

I always say that anyone can be a freelancer, but not everyone can be a successful one. Besides opportunity (because, admittedly, not everyone has that), it takes the right combination of personality traits to make it in such a competitive world.

Let’s just say hypothetically you have everything you need to be a freelance photographer – the equipment, the software, the social media following – you are set up pretty well, but at the end of the day, the only thing that’s going to get the bills paid is you doing the work. The photos won’t take and edit themselves, they won’t upload and send to the clients or post on social media for you — you have to do pretty much everything as a sole proprietor, holding yourself accountable to get ‘er done because again, there is no manager who will be looking over your shoulders.

And that’s the main reason why not everyone makes a living by freelancing. You have to be self-motived and organized enough to get your work done instead of spending the entire day lazing around the house, which is incredibly hard to do as a human who is biologically engineered to “save as much energy as possible”.

On top of self-motivation, you almost certainly have to be a go-getter –especially so when starting out.

Without a long list of references or referrals to essentially do your marketing for you, you should expect to assume these tasks for yourself, and truth be told, you are going to have a hard time selling your services to new clients without directly asking for the sale. Not good with sales? Forget it. You have to be a good marketer and salesman when you are starting your own freelance business or you are going to drown in a sea of other freelancers offering the same exact services. You really have to put yourself out there if you want the business to boom.

To tie it all together, you really have to be persistent. You are undoubtedly going to run into situations that will make you feel like you’ve had enough of the freelance lifestyle — whether it’s people judging your work, giving you bad reviews, or clients simply not paying, your persistence to make it through the everyday struggles of the industry must be unwavering. Rest assured that these are things that most freelancers run into at some point or another, so it’s best to just learn from these situations and try to avoid them in the future. And of course, persistence always helps with securing timely payments, contract signatures and client responses.

Oh, and one more thing. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t think you have all of these traits — many of these skills can be learned and perfected with time and a little patience!