Freelancer or Employee

01

One year for how much money?

Time cannot be bought. Counted honestly, my hour would have to cost a couple of thousand euros at least. It doesn't, and nobody's does, not mine and not the hour of the cleaner who looks after our flat.

Now look at your own day. Say you put 10 or 11 hours a day into work, and that includes everything: the drive to the office, or the few steps to the desk at home. That means you are giving each of those hours a price tag. It is hard to see while you are in the middle of it.

So the question was never what an hour costs. It is how many of them you sell. I can't make my hour as expensive as it is worth to me, so I can only sell fewer of them, and that is why the share counts, not the price.

02

"Must" is not the problem

Wanting to decide about my own hours has nothing to do with being lazy. A lot of people hear "I only want to do what I want" and picture someone hanging around doing stupid things. That is not what I mean.

I learned the difference from Hyrox. Say I want to finish below 1 hour 20 minutes. Then I must train, even on the days I don't feel like it, and that is totally fine, because the goal is mine and so is the decision.

What I don't want is a different kind of "must": someone tells me I have to do something so that they reach their goals. Whether that someone is a very big company or a startup doesn't really matter.

Think of the last "you have to" you heard at work. Whose goal was behind it?

03

What an employee can do

At some point I understood what that "must" from above means. When they tell me what they want done and that I have to do it, they want me to do it for their goals. That is totally fine. It is how employment works, and it is how most people in the world live.

As an employee, there is really one thing you can do about your hours: work less and less and still earn more. In the end that means you sell your time better than the others do. That is perfectly acceptable, and you are still selling time.

I decided I don't want to do it that way. For me, freelancing was the logical step out of employment and a step toward being completely independent, which also means I can live wherever I want. The goal behind it is to offer something to the market one day that has value and does not depend on my time.

Freelancing alone doesn't get you there. A freelancer still sells hours, as the math in episode 1 shows, so it is a step and not the end.

04

The consequences come with it

The only way I know to flip this is to decide fully about your time and to accept the consequences of your decisions. The second half matters as much as the first.

Take the family. If my son is sick and I have to pick him up from school, I didn't decide that morning that I want to pick him up. It is the consequence of a decision I made before, which is why it is still mine.

So when you write down what you "must" do, keep the two kinds apart: the musts that come from your own earlier decisions, and the ones that come from someone else's goals.

05

This week

Take one normal working day this week and write down every hour of it, your commute included. Next to each hour, note whose goal it served. Count both columns in the evening, yours and someone else's. In the beginning the second column is somehow necessary, but my ambition was and still is that every hour I spend is a decision I make.

06

The open question

If I can't set the price of my hour, only how many I sell, then more revenue from hours means more sold hours and not more freedom. So what would "more" actually buy me? That is part of this season's decision, and you will meet it again in the next episodes.

Next in this season: “Finding Your Niche”. What I actually sold in my first year as a freelancer, and why it was me.