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Stumbled on a stat that 67% of freelancers quit within their first year

I was browsing through a report from the Freelancers Union last weekend and saw that number. It blew my mind because I almost packed it in myself after six months of barely scraping by. Made me wonder if more of us just need a better way to handle the slow seasons instead of giving up entirely. Anybody else feel like that statistic lines up with what they've seen?
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3 Comments
craig.parker
Man its the same pattern everywhere not just freelancing. People bail on anything when the first real hardship hits. I see it with my neighbors who start home projects then give up halfway because it got harder than they thought. Or people who join gyms in January and stop by March. Slow seasons for freelancers are just life's way of testing if you actually want it. The ones who make it past year one usually figured out how to ride out the quiet months instead of panicking and running back to a 9-5.
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patricia_hill60
Some people quit because they smartly recognize a bad bet instead of wasting more time on it.
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ross.kim
ross.kim17d ago
Has anyone else seen that study about how people who quit early actually tend to be better at reading risk? I came across it a while back and it basically said successful people don't just stick with things blindly, they know when to cut losses. Reminded me of @craig.parker's point about the gym crowd - those people aren't necessarily quitters, they just figured out the gym wasn't for them. I think there's a difference between quitting because it got hard and quitting because you realized you were on a dead end road. My neighbor started a landscaping business last year and packed it in after three months. Some called him a quitter but he said he just saw the math didn't work and got out before he went broke. Kinda smart actually.
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