"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

Sir Winston Churchill

Image granted by my colleague and friend

Magda Phili

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I didn't realise that I could run into scammers. And even if I knew that a client didn't pay some other freelancers, I still thought that maybe it was a misunderstanding, and I will be paid for my work nevertheless. I was wrong.I thought that if I charged little and worked a lot I would earn a lot. In reality, it led to exhaustion and frustration. I didn't have time for anything else except work.I thought that completing my ProZ profile and registering in a few other translation portals was enough for a continuous stream of regular clients. That lead me to the crisis point in 2008-2009 when the agencies I used to cooperate with stopped working with the Russian language and thus stopped sending me new projects.I thought it was enough to just do one type of services, namely translation, and work for only a couple regular clients. But several pretty long slow periods taught me the value of diversifying my income streams.You can guess what the result was, right?As a result, I got overworked and exhausted, and this exhaustion compromised the quality of my work.As a result, I got offended when I should have been listening and learning.I have shared more than once already that money matters is one of the hardest things for me in freelancing. It's not a big problem for some people, but for me it still is.During the first couple years of freelancing I still had an employee's mindset and I didn't realise that I was building my business. Instead, I treated freelance translation as a hobby. And that wrong attitude lead to wrong business decisions.I just wanted to translate. Partly, it was because I didn't treat freelancing as business. Now, as I see how it has evolved and how I have changed, it amazes me. And I can see that my business started growing much faster the moment I started making goals and tracking my progress.