My big lesson from 2025

When you’re a full-time employee, you largely feel that someone’s in control of things.

There are projects to work on. Familiar faces here and there in the business. A salary always kicks in at the end of the month, alongside a contribution to your pension, health insurance and some snazzy cycle to work schemes, if you’re lucky.

Someone’s in control. So you feel in control. And so you can get on with it.

When you go independent, control gets pulled from under you.

All those projects? Yeah someone had to develop the pipeline and convert them into contracts. That salary? Yeah someone had to ensure invoices got paid and everything god reconciled properly. And things like pensions or insurance or fancy perks are now your job too. In short, sure you go independent so you can focus more on ‘the work’.

But in some sense, you also get pulled into 10x directions that are about nothing but ‘the work’.

And yet. As with all tough years (and there have been a few of those), there are lessons to be learned.

A big lesson for me? That control is not the right brief anymore.

It’s a misled expectation. We control very little. But what we can do is learn how to influence events and our reactions to those events. You can’t control where your next gig will come from, but you can influence it.

How? By learning how to get noticed, have the right volume and quality of chats, being comfortable with asking and closing. Nothing about this is about control, because you can’t force anyone to do anything. But you can learn how to influence people and events so the odds are a little bit more in your favour.

A possible pushback: where’s the safety net in all this?

Well, my provocation to you (and myself) is this: is there a real safety net elsewhere anyway? Because, unlike pre 2019, it feels like every full time job is basically a FTC, and so any ideas of safety nets are at best opportunities with an expiry date, and no one ever really tells you what the date is until the date actually comes.

So for me the lesson in 2025 was clear: assume the expiry date will come, get ready for it, learn to enjoy the process. Learning to influence things is a hell of a first step to become more resilient as an indie.

We all need a bit of that.

Originally posted on the Outside Perspective newsletter.