Since I registered my (then part-time) self-employment in early 2023, a lot has happened. I've learned a lot, made plenty of mistakes and had many aha-moments over time. Here come my biggest learnings and takeaways.
#1 Shiny Object Syndrome is real
This was one of my earliest realisations. Back in 2022, when I first thought about self-employment, the motivation was to make quick money online. Or now, most recently, as all the AI tools have kept getting better and bigger over the last few months: it felt like every day brought a new version, a better model, new plugins and skills, all of which sounded great, and I wanted to run after every single one and try everything. But that's where I noticed, thanks to the lesson from back then: it doesn't always make sense to chase the shiny objects or the fancy-sounding solutions.
The fix: #Laserfocus
That was my realisation early last year, when I noticed I had lots of open projects and wanted to tackle them all at once. But if every project gets 10 %, at the end of the day I make almost no progress. That's why super-focus, laser focus, really is the answer. Set priorities, look at urgency and impact in a priority matrix, figure out what matters most right now. Use the 80/20 rule to tackle it, and take it step by step instead of trying everything at once.
#2 There is no shortcut
Derived from the motivation I described in point 1, I quickly reached the sobering realisation that there are no shortcuts, or rather, that I no longer want to take them anyway. I'm a big fan of working productively and efficiently, 80/20 rule, Parkinson's law, and so on. But the cheat code or shortcut that's supposed to make everything much faster and easier: it doesn't exist.
My alternative: do it properly!
100 % of me, so I can be proud of the result. And if the whole world were to see it tomorrow, I could confidently say »That was me!« without going red, because deep down I'd know it was only half-hearted rubbish. That's the approach I now bring, as my quality promise, into every client project.
#3 Focus on yourself and pull your thing through
Also a really big realisation, one I still have to work on myself but have run into several times already. Whether it was before starting self-employment or before the world trip, when I told friends and family: sometimes I got smiled at pityingly, or hurt, or brushed off with a »yeah yeah, sure, you do that«.
Or later, after I was already travelling and had started my podcast and social media: after a few months on the road I still had only 300 Instagram followers, was quite sad that these weren't the numbers I'd hoped for, and quickly started comparing myself to others, even when they were doing something completely different and had been at it much longer.
And then at some point it clicked. Everyone does their thing, everyone has their own pace. You're not too early, you're not too late, you're exactly »on time«. Whether on social media, in self-employment or in life in general. You're exactly where you're supposed to be. And yes, this sounds a bit spiritual, but it really helped me reduce the comparison to others. I wouldn't say I've dropped it completely, but it reminds me over and over that I'm on my own line and reach the goal at my own pace.
Hopefully you took a few thoughts away from this article. I'm curious what my next big »aha-moment« will be.
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