The suffering in life will eventually come back in one form.

It has been 11 years since I graduated in 2009. In the first few years when I started to work, I never thought of rapidly improving my skills and I did not try my best to work. Such confusion and following the crowd lasted for several years. At that time, the greatest enjoyment for me was playing a handful of Dota and a dozen of LOL with my friends.

It was around 2014 that I woke up. At that time, I was facing a lot of pressure, such as getting married and having children, paying off the mortgage and car loan, and trying to provide my family with a better living condition. So I was always sleepless at night thinking about how to make money in the future. Then slowly formed the habit of reading and running, because to find the answer in the book, thinking about the future in running, so the habit is slowly formed.

I remember reading about 50 books a year in 2015 and 2016, when reading was the most important thing for me, and gaming stopped because I realized that “the era of gaming” was gone, and everyone had different things to do at each stage. And all I have to do is be who I want to be.

But now reading has become a habit, also become the main motivation for my rapid growth, if you still think that reading can not make money, it must be because you read too few books, believe me, only quantitative change can cause qualitative change.

These previous experiences have also become the necessary conditions for me to achieve freelance work.

How to start freelancing?

Some people might think of freelancing early as financial freedom, but that’s not the same thing.

Financial freedom is the ability to maintain a living on passive income without working, so working or not working is not important to people who have achieved financial freedom. Freelancing is a job where you can continue to earn no less than your regular salary while you’re out of the company, but you have to work. That’s the biggest difference between freelancing and financial freedom.

PS: It’s easy to understand that freelancing is a role change, and that any major role change in your life will lead to fluctuations in your earnings. So for the first few years of freelancing you may earn less than you did when you were working. But wages have a ceiling, because you’re essentially selling your time to your boss, and your boss is making a “difference.” Freelancing doesn’t have a boss layer, so in the long run freelancing has to be better than the salary you get at work.

The freelancers AROUND me fall into three categories:

  • The account holders who mainly operate wechat public accounts account for the majority of freelance workers. They have at least two or more public accounts and have fixed income every month, and earn much more than working. For them, knowledge planet may be a sideline;
  • The second category belongs to the publication of paper books and training camps, which is relatively hard to have a fixed income of the public number, the income is not stable to the public number, mainly depends on the registration of training camps;
  • The last category is my current state, mainly to write columns, write the public account as a supplement, because the income of the flow of the public account is less.

The first group belongs to the early adopters, who achieve hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fans very early. The earlier they do, the greater the bonus will be, and the realization cycle and cost will be smaller. Because the competition is not so fierce in the early stage, and there is official support, the more fierce the competition will be, and the more difficult it will be to achieve. So try early in everything, because the cost of failure is so small compared to the cost of missing out.

The second category of people actually be tired, because on paper, the authors can get into little book is less than 10 yuan, so the paper book is usually used for increasing personal endorsement and personal branding, like gray (comic algorithm), after all, this can sell for hundreds of thousands of copies of a book, the author is almost the one, It takes years for a [technology field] to come up with a good topic, a good technique, something funny, something that the reader can understand and learn from, and all the activities and publicity of a post-publishing house, so the bar is very high to create a mega-bestseller. So paper books are often used only to increase personal endorsements, which can then be cashed in through other channels, such as training camps.

The third group is not easy either, but the column pays several times more than the print book, so as long as the column sells well, the revenue is good. Its threshold is that you must have a certain amount of technical accumulation, and be able to express their knowledge clearly and interestingly, so that it is likely to sell, and your audience group to be large, to be enough “just need”.

Writing on column of the net as an example, reviewing and publishing model is almost the same, need to review, check operation, such as the process of writing is very suffering, not only that, you want to record your manuscript into audio and video, and reply to the problem of the reader, all these work consumes energy, so is quite time-consuming.

I was able to make the transition to freelancing because I wrote three technical columns in my spare time last year at work, and the profits from those columns have supported my freelance work.

And column another advantage is that it is a time to sell the business model of many times, the column I wrote last year in the back of a few years, can continue to provide income for me, plus I new a few columns again this year, so they will eventually form a cumulative effect, also is the process of quantitative change to qualitative change, as shown in the figure below:

(From Li Xiaolai’s The Road to Wealth and Freedom)

This means that your initial effort may not increase in direct proportion to your earnings, it may increase slowly in the early stages, but it will explode immediately after a certain tipping point is crossed. This point I think people with a certain number of years of work experience also have this experience, they work for the first few years of the salary is a small increase, but after a certain point, say 5-7 years later, a month’s salary is more than the previous year, so at the beginning of the start, don’t worry, take it slowly, adhere to the harvest.

What’s the biggest challenge of freelancing?

There are four major problems with freelancing: self-discipline, loneliness, anxiety, and focus.

1. Self-discipline

After leaving the company, without the constraint of work, negative and loose emotions will gradually spread, so if not restrained, you will find that work has no progress and income gradually shrinking, will make you feel very anxious and distressed. So my solution is to make a plan for the next day and stick to it.

My early plan is as follows:

Completed tasks are checked, unfinished tasks are added to the schedule for the next day, and each night you review your performance for the day and decide to continue or improve.

Such a day lasted for 2 months and I slowly found the feeling and developed good working habits.

As I gradually returned to running, I found that running increases your awareness of self-discipline and gives you a greater sense of control over your life. Therefore, keeping running is also an important means to maintain self-discipline.

2. Lonely

After freelancing, what may be the most unaccustomed to is “loneliness”. At work, I can at least brag with my colleagues and talk about what I feel about life. But after freelancing, I have become a person “fighting”, and MOST of the time I spend alone in the second bed.

So before freelancing, ask yourself if you have a strong heart that can conquer loneliness.

Of course, there are ways to deal with this, because freelancing will lead you to meet other freelancers who are just like you:

So you’re just going from offline to online, but you’re going to have less and less ineffective communication because people are busy and they’re talking about business.

3. The anxiety

I’ve talked to a lot of freelance friends, and every one of them, myself included, has a certain level of “anxiety.” Your anxiety comes from thinking and imagining whether you can make more money in the long run. Especially in the first few months of freelancing, the sudden loss of a fixed monthly salary, plus the benefits of freelancing are usually unstable, so there must be some anxiety.

But anxiety diminishes over time, and the right amount of anxiety can make you think more deeply and act more consistently, which isn’t a bad thing.

4. The focus

Most of your contact with freelancers will be online, and your productivity will plummet with constant interruptions and constant interruptions. My solution is to put my phone on silent and out of my reach during writing hours, and it works great.

My work schedule

  • At 8:30-16:00 writing
  • Our study – 18:00
  • 00 PM – 21:00 movement
  • 21:00-24:00 Write and reply part of the message

Repeat these “tasks” every day, no weekends and no holidays, this is the earliest freelance must do things, if not like, I believe few people can stick to it, I have almost no rest for half a year, but also enjoy it.

First-half Results

I wrote three columns in the first half of this year:

Redis Core Principles and Combat Address: gitbook.cn/gitchat/col…

The Java interview questions, and source 34 speak address: kaiwu.lagou.com/course/cour…

Redis interview guide for programmers gitbook.cn/gitchat/col…

Original article on wechat:

  1. Why are you advised to use enumerations?
  2. Comics: How does Java Implement Hot Updates?
  3. “I’ve been blogging for 10 years and people say it’s not cool.”
  4. Linked lists are 1000 times slower than arrays?
  5. The secret of Easy Learning Algorithm! Visual Algorithm website summary (with GIF)
  6. Refuting a bug in Ali’s Java Development Manual?
  7. A bug in Ali’s Java Development Manual!
  8. Write code by day, set up shop by night! 9 years ago set up shop learned these lessons…
  9. “Slap in the face!” the leader said: try-catch outside the circulation!
  10. Why does Alibaba make it necessary to specify the size when initializing collections?
  11. “Local variables Are five times Faster than global variables?”
  12. I tried to show off with “{{“, but I ran out of memory!
  13. 6 Current Limiting Solutions everyone can Understand (Pure Dry)
  14. Confessions of Redis: Why HAVE I Gone further and further down the single-threaded road?
  15. Switch’s performance is 3 times better, and THAT’s all I did!
  16. If fast or Switch Fast? Unlock the secrets behind switch
  17. 7 Ways to traverse HashMap and Performance Analysis!
  18. Redis 6.0 has finally been released! What’s new besides multi-threading?
  19. 7 Ways to traverse HashMap and Performance Analysis! (Highly recommended)
  20. String performance improved 10 times several methods! (source + principle analysis)
  21. Ali New Java Development Manual (Taishan Edition) Content Interpretation (attached download address)
  22. 9 Tips to Make Your If Else Look Elegant
  23. With custom banners, SpringBoot is instantly better…
  24. Don’t ask me how many objects the new string creates! Let me prove it to you!
  25. The most complete implementation of deferred tasks in history!
  26. IDEA finally support Chinese version and JDK directly download (too convenient) attached new version introduction video
  27. Want to read Spring source code? Start with this “minimalist tutorial”
  28. Shocking! How can terminating a thread cause a service outage?
  29. “99% of all programmers in Lombok, principle should be so easy? I also hand rolled a! | collection!!!”
  30. How can you build a Redis cluster in a second?
  31. Dachang internal information, Redis performance optimization of the 13 catch-22!
  32. Java14 is out! Switch is so easy? Lombok is no longer needed? Build Java14 with Idea!
  33. The Interview flipped over again! Random?
  34. “Because I said that volatile is lightweight synchronized, and the interviewer told me to go back and wait!”
  35. Someone said: Lightweight lock must be a weight weight lock faster! I couldn’t help laughing
  36. Does an application crash when the thread pool overflows?
  37. Why does HashMap cause 100% CPU?

She wrote about 300,000 words, 127 articles, 3 paid columns and 37 original articles on wechat.

The last

There is no wasted effort, and there is no accidental success. Find what you love to do, give it your all, and time will do the rest.

In fact, life never let us down, if there is, then it must not come to the end!

The nuggets essay | 2020 years and I summarize the campaign is under way…