In a recent digital exchange with one of my relatives, I was asked the question, “Four years in, does going freelance look like you thought it would?” My impulse answer boiled down to ?.
At the time when I quit my full-time job at Tulane in 2022, my goals were broad and open-ended:
While I probably had some concrete benchmarks at a conscious and subconscious level, I didn’t put a lot of energy into milestones or deliverables. Never did I seriously answer questions like, “where do I want to be in five years?” or try to set hardline goals like, “I want to make $x annually as a freelancer by 2026.”
Upon reflection, I think this is a product of the circuitous and wildly unpredictable path my life has taken. In high school, my dream job was to be a band director which led to me majoring in music education. My junior year of undergrad, I discovered new music and switched my major to composition. After completing both an undergrad and masters degree in composition, I ended up going corporate, and what started out as a temp job in data entry quickly turned into a promotion to Business Analyst and then Systems Analyst – all positions that I shockingly really enjoyed. After three years, I almost moved to California to dive deeper into a career in data analytics before abruptly and unexpectedly being pulled back into music education by landing the job at Tulane. Starting out as a drumline instructor, I eventually got promoted to Assistant Director of Bands and had almost full autonomy in running the athletic band program.
From the outside, one could view this 20+ year journey as a lesson about persistence – although I went through twists and turns, I eventually reached my long-desired destination of becoming a band director. But while this doesn’t feel 100% wrong, it’s not quite right either because at the time when I was deep in corporate life, I was 100% convinced that my music career was over and that my dream of becoming a band director was dead. In fact, if you had asked me at any point during this journey, “where do you want to be or think you’ll be in five years?”, every single answer at any given point in that timeline would have been wrong.
Never mind that that decades long dream that I imagined would be my last career stop turned out, well, not to be.
All of this has led me to an understanding that those sorts of questions, while helpful for those who need those hardline long-term goals to find focus in their careers or lives, are not compatible with my mindset. The circuitousness of my career (and life) and the unpredictable and uncertain nature is something that I’ve come to embrace, allowing me to actively adapt to any given situation without settling on one and being open to and seizing on unexpected opportunities when they cross into my line of sight. I’m not navigating my life journey so much towards a destination but a direction, keeping my eyes on the road, but letting metaphorical interesting exits or sudden road closures take me not off course, but a redefining of what is on-course.
That said, I think the spirit of that original question “does freelancing look like you thought it would four years later?” can be answered with a slight reframing – “how do you feel about being a freelancer four years later?” And that answer is simple: I feel great. I’ve accomplished so much in ways that I never could have predicted, and in ways that I would not have been able to while still working full-time. And while I am confident that this leg of my journey is far from over and I’ll easily admit that I do have some new broad and open-ended goals, my answer for what I think will happen five years from now remains relatively unchanged:
?
