Do you ever feel uncertainty from being self-employed?

A sacrifice a lot of us internet marketers make is giving up the reliability of a monthly paycheck for a chance to live on our own terms.

Do you ever feel uncertain about your future? How do you deal with it?

Yes all the time. For that I try to save as much as I can. Also I am trying to reach a fig. That will help me take this worry out and I can work more freely.

Best way to overcome is to set a goal and focus on that.

Small achievements helps too.

Best way to deal with what OP has mentioned, is to spend wisely and save. And from the savings, wisely invest most it. There is a difference between saving and investing. And there is a difference between simply investing and wisely investing.
And in my opinion, nowadays is is actually the ones who are employed in corporate companies, that feel their future in uncertain. We internet marketeers know we can simply move from one product / service that no longer sells, to the next product / service that is currently selling and we always keep finding newer methods or strategies to market or sell products or services, because there are and always will be newer and newer methods and strategies, and there are and will always also be newer and newer products and services to market and sell. And to implement or try anything new, we do not need any "boss's" "approval".
Real life example : In 2020 when the world was under the pandemic lockdowns, some (actually perhaps many) people lost their jobs. During the exact same time, there were internet marketeers who made a lot of money marketing (online), face masks, sanitizers, etc. These internet marketeers did not see the pandemic lockdowns, etc as some uncertain event that would impact their earnings. So, internet marketeers (may be not all) do make money no matter what is happening, as it is easy to move from selling one product, to selling some other product. There is always an opportunity in every scenario, for many internet marketeers. Every scenario, every challenge, every new problem, results is a new solution by some inventors and some businessmen and then the internet marketeer would just market, sell those new solutions. And nowadays for solutions to problems, the solutions are invented or created and released for usage, quite fast, so the marketing opportunities can also be grabbed quite fast.

Yes, every day, this is the bad side of my iM life

Yes, been self employed and in this game for the past decade. Living frugal and saving hard is what I do to counteract the uncertainty.

All the time..

I enjoy a full-time job tbf

A stable income stream to replace the paycheck
That's all you need

You need a stable income to fallback on and see what works for you. That’s what i’m doing right now. Or you might become prone to fall into the trap of endlessly chasing these ‘methods’ i’ve been reading about or falling for some charlatan preying on the desperate and the naiive, trying to real you in with flashy, gimmicky stuff about how they ‘made it big’ to try to one way or another, sell their stuff to you.

Think of the people who with full certainty do 8 hours a day 5 days a week with a pos boss. Look back on all your delicious, personally earned profits. And have a good cute pet to play with.

When I started out, I had a lot of uncertainty about being self-employed: friends and family have problems with you all of the sudden (especially when you make more money than them), your business' lack of history makes clients more dubious to do business with you, and you get extra scrutiny during the house-buying process.

I've made it through all of that, so I'm fine with being self-employed these days. Once you're established, you'll probably feel the same as well.

It's hard to shake off the employee mindset since people are creatures of habit

Eventually, you'll reach a point where you won't exchange the FREEDOM you have for anything in the world.

People cross that line at different times in their Entrepreneur journey.... many never get to cross that line.

I work part time in a company and part time on my side business.

It's the best I found personally.

Working on my business only would make me unsocialising and lonely and I hate this.

Being self employee requires strict work ethic. Many people on youtube advertise 9-5 job sucks and self- employed is only way to be free- In my experiences, self employed means you work extra more hours than 9-5 job and lots of sacrifice. It could get very lonely and loneliness sometimes lead ourself to uncertainty. In my case, having strong work ethic myself helped a lot

blackbeans said:

It's hard to shake off the employee mindset since people are creatures of habit

Eventually, you'll reach a point where you won't exchange the FREEDOM you have for anything in the world.

People cross that line at different times in their Entrepreneur journey.... many never get to cross that line.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I notice that most people don't realize that freedom is really. what your exchanging when you take a job.

Not really. Once you diversify a bit and build a nice savings investment portfolio, it's better.

At one point last year, I had 7 income sources each making 4-5 figures per month. If one or two drop, so what? I keep my living expenses low as well, which helps.

1 thing that you never ever want as self-employed is being stuck on a capitalist western country where you have to pay like 1k-3k taxes each month . Just take your savings and live on countries with low to 0 taxes . There you will have all the time in the world to figure out your business .

There is always some work to be done. Still working for other people. Just not going to their office. IMO it doesn't make sense to do IT and marketing jobs like copywriting at office, unless it's some serious business... I could run the office, but going there everyday as an employee for free sucks. I mean, it takes an hour to get to the office for me at best. In an hour I can get a lot done in some deep work.

The idea of being managed by someone you could manage is ridiculous. I have a problem with meeting people way smarter than me. Not in this country I guess.

Zwielicht said:

When I started out, I had a lot of uncertainty about being self-employed: friends and family have problems with you all of the sudden (especially when you make more money than them), your business' lack of history makes clients more dubious to do business with you, and you get extra scrutiny during the house-buying process.

I've made it through all of that, so I'm fine with being self-employed these days. Once you're established, you'll probably feel the same as well.

Click to expand...

But before you actually jumped into self-employed territory.. I assume you already had something going on right?

Did you wait for your side gig to earn more than your 9-5 before going full time on it?

Going self-employed is always the bravest thing one can do.