Embracing the Dip.
By: Zoran Spirkovski
Tags: Writing, Work, Remarkable, Freelance, Professional

Embracing the Dip.

Photo by Samantha Weerasinghe on Unsplash

I’ve grown so much in the past four months. I took major responsibility for my life, my time, and eradicated a lot of bad habits. It’s been a growing period, and I would have loved to keep up with the workflow, but along the way I realized something.

The way I work doesn’t work if I want to be remarkable.

I want to be remarkable.

Unless I change my way of work, I can only be a generic professional service provider that writes everything, works with anyone, and doesn’t have a lot of choices regarding what they work with.

The main issue, they say “Yes.” too much.

I really want to help clients get to where they need to go, I want to help other writers, and I want to make a lot of money.

I cannot do that if I am not willing to say “No” to some things. I cannot do that if I am not willing to sit down and do the work necessary to define who is it that I will work with, and become a specialist in a particular field.

Time management issues have been the name of the game ever since I started working, and it’s been getting too much. I’m a solo operator, and I can only handle so many clients before I start failing to deliver on my promises.

I hate failing to deliver.

It’s the antithesis of what I believe a professional is and I’m not happy to have been that person a handful of times over the years. It’s normal for projects to get delayed. Things happen, life gets in the way, or the job requirements were misidentified.

Whatever the cause, they happen, and that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about ignoring a project for so long that it becomes stale, where both the writer and the client feel weird to ask how it’s going.

I have a few of these outgoing at the moment, and it sucks.

It drains so much mental energy from me, that I’m stopping all of my work, going back to work on the things that I failed to deliver, before moving forward.

It must be done, otherwise, how can I believe that it is possible for me to be a remarkable writer? Wouldn’t a remarkable person be so connected to their word that they would never let their promises go awry?

Changes in my working process

Photo by NEW DATA SERVICES on Unsplash

I am taking my time to carefully develop a process that embodies the four years I spent writing to create a series of steps that are scalable, repetitive, and lead to doing my best work.

Naturally, I must leave space for creativity, and this happens in the ideation and execution processes in my profession.

Once I come back to work, the focus will shift to producing content for my business and figuring out what is it that I do and don’t do. I will work on my website as well, as I am going to need a “waiting list” feature.

The waiting list is mandatory, as one of the major changes that I’m making is the increased selectivity of clients and jobs. I will no longer work with more than one client at a time, and this should be conducive to doing my best work.

Additionally, I want to go into brand messaging strategy, before selling any writing services and execution. This doesn’t mean that I will not work with anyone that doesn’t want to buy my strategy, but they will need to have some prerequisites before I can commit to working with them.

If they do not have a content plan, brand messaging guide, and a clearly defined audience, I will not be able to accept these projects, even if it means starving a few months down the line.

I must take the risk and go for the biggest play because I’m not prepared to miss my opportunity at becoming a remarkable writer.