The Taboo Of Wanting An Easy Life

I want an easy life. There; I said it.

And I don’t care who knows it.

I want to do what I’m paid for extremely well and extremely efficiently.

If doing that creates an easy life for me, who’s to tell me I can’t have one?

We’re going to let off steam in this blog post.

Autonomous freelancers have easy lives

When you become a freelancer, it’s for a variety of reasons. You might crave independence, you may thrive working with multiple clients, or you may even like the process of attracting new business.

You get to be a business owner, a craftsperson, and a marketer all in one. It’s not easy becoming an autonomous freelancer (a freelancer who has things on autopilot and does what they like).

But it is the ultimate goal.

While very few freelancers —and heck, very few people in business— will admit it, we all want an easy life. It’s taboo. It’s frowned upon. It’s even thought of as a sign of weakness, laziness, and any other negative connotation that we would never associate with in other aspects of life.

Note: There are definitely people who enjoy, and even need, a challenge. But there’s a difference between solving problems and making them harder for no reason.

“ In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first."

Is it even possible for a freelancer to have an easy life?

I’ve been full-time freelance for six and a half years, and, for the most part, I’d argue I have an easy life.

I qualify this with a few criteria, as documented in my post, What Is The Secret To Being A Highly Successful Freelancer? : 

These all must work in conjunction for an easy life. Let me give you an example.

Because I have a thorough process for building a freelance pipeline, I don’t spend time on tasks I don’t enjoy or find unproductive. E.g. There’s no cold pitching or outbound sales in my process.

Because I market myself well, I spend the majority of my time delivering work. This is what makes me happier than anything when it comes to my job. And it happens to be the element that earns me all the money.

What’s more, because I have a regimented process, I am productive and spend a considerable amount of my “work day” doing non-work related things. It’s not unheard of for me to finish before lunch and spend the afternoon playing golf.

"The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail."

• Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching).

Why is wanting an easy life frowned upon?

Society tells us that wanting an easy life is bad. This is mainly due to the confusion between lack of ambition and process optimization.

For a long time, the association with efficiency has come with negative connotations like:

But let me ask you this: 

No.

So why wouldn’t I do everything in my power to become more efficient (and spend the rest of the day on personal projects, with friends, with family, etc.)?

Leadership of yesterday has constantly rewarded “hard work” over smart work. Plenty of people have written articles about necessary changes of approach to flexible working and deliverable-based rewards, but it’s so god-damn ingrained in business culture.

"Work smarter, not harder."

Today, businesses spend billions of dollars a year on consultants and tools to help “optimize processes”. Isn’t the goal here to create time and resources to do other things?

Ring any bells?

These types of freelancers who “want easy lives” are, in fact, putting in the work upfront to ensure everything that follows is best optimized. It’s not lazy at all. It’s not contrary to personal development and self growth; it’s for personal development and self growth.

There is no reason whatsoever to not invest a little time in optimizing your processes and learning habits to create freelance autonomy.

My first process optimization to gain an easy life

Walking to school as a teenager. I was motivated to get to school in the fastest possible time so I could play football (soccer) with my friends before lessons started.

The faster we got to school, the more time we had to play football. It made for a positive start to the day. So, why wouldn’t I choose the (literal) path of least resistance?

I tested all five possible routes, with differing alleyways, cut-throughs, and crossings. I then chose the fastest one to gain an extra five minutes of football time every day.

If you add up the number of school days I did this, I gained back 900 days worth of five minutes. That’s 79 hours worth of football I added to my school life. A whole three and a half days!

How does this relate to freelancing?

As a freelancer, you might be billing per hour, per word, per article, day, project, whatever.

This is your time. It’s not company time. Some freelancers who come from full-time backgrounds struggle to adapt to this mentality. No longer can they spend hours per week chatting to colleagues, fetching coffees, or taking smoke breaks—and expect to be paid for it.

But you can’t expect a freelancer to work eight hours straight without breaks, talking to people, or getting on with the rest of their life. If you want to put the free into freelancing, you must think about refining your processes, communications, and delivery of work.

It’s all about making your life easier, at the end of the day.