By Alexa Nizam

Just over a year ago, I joined the growing ranks of professionals leaving salaried positions behind to take their side hustles full-time. At the time, I knew I was in for a year of ups and downs and accelerated professional growth—but I still wasn’t quite prepared for how the year would unfold.

In the months since, my freelance copywriting business hit six figures, so it’s safe to say my leap of faith paid off. I found my footing as the year evolved, but I did learn some unexpected lessons along the way. If your side hustle is on its way to becoming your main hustle, here are the things I wish I knew a year ago!

“Working vacations” aren’t vacations—just take the time off!

When I used to dream of my freelance life, “working vacations” were one of the main perks I looked forward to. I thought it was amazing that freelancers could pack up their laptops, jet around the world, and work from anywhere, anytime. I couldn’t wait to start crossing new destinations off my travel bucket list—no PTO required.

It turns out that it’s easy—maybe too easy—to mix work and leisure time when you make the rules. This year, I’ve learned that working vacations are actually the worst parts of work and the worst parts of vacations. Instead of the idyllic version I had in my head, I found that working from a new place mostly meant my “vacation” never really became a vacation.

Instead of mixing work and pleasure, I now prefer to get the work done all at once and take shorter vacations that are truly time off. If you’re great at working from different environments and think you can enjoy your new locale during off hours, give it a shot and see what happens. But if you thrive on routine and like vacations to feel like vacations, keeping them separate is easiest.

Lesson learned: just because you can work from anywhere doesn’t mean you should!

Growth won’t always be linear

Before quitting my full-time job, my side hustle had several record-breaking months in a row. It was easy to believe that trajectory would continue, but it didn’t. Instead of continuing to increase my earnings each month, I hit a plateau for the first few months of my solopreneur journey. Later in the year, I even had a few of my slowest months to date.

Looking back, it makes sense that my growth was more volatile as time went on. When you start something new, every little improvement or knowledge boost can have a major impact on your growth and revenue. But as you get more of those small lessons out of the way, it gets harder to push the envelope every single month. And that’s okay! Now, I prefer to look at quarterly revenue instead of monthly revenue to …read more

Source:: Buffer Blog

Author: Aaron