How do you know it’s time to specialize?
Sometimes you have to generalize first
I started freelancing on Upwork as an English-Indonesian translator.
My first job was to translate travel-related content from English into Indonesian. It’s pretty easy, but I found myself get bored easily doing that.
I looked around, wondering what everybody else is doing. Some people with technical skills can become designers and programmers. What about the non-technical ones?
They work in marketing or business development. They are consultants and managers.
And I don’t think I can become that instantly. I just graduated from university. My first and only real job was a 1-year internship. I need more experience.
I need to try my hand at different jobs.
So I generalize myself.
Becoming a virtual assistant
A virtual assistant is someone who helps you with anything you need to be done. It can be writing, managing, translating, sending emails, taking calls, or inputting data into a system.
It’s a busy world out there. Entrepreneurs, big and small, need some helping hands all the time. They have no time to manage their social media, or pushing their weekly newsletter. As long as they’re thriving, virtual assistants (or real assistants) are going to be hired.
My first job as a VA (virtual assistant) is managing writers on Trello (Trello is a project management tool). I assign them different topics to write, and when they’re done, I will have to publish it.
It is much more fun to do than translation.
The next several jobs I got were odd jobs like transcribing and finding influencers. Then, I got 3 online marketing/blog/social media related jobs.
This was around the same time that I became more active here on Medium. I wrote some posts. I read and learned a lot about social media marketing, digital marketing, and content creation.
…I fell in love with content marketing
Now, after 4 completed jobs and 6 ongoing clients, I know what I want to pursue. I mean, I’ve been blogging since I was 9 years old on a blogspot made by my dad.
I think I’ve found my ikigai.
I’ve been learning, digging more and more about content marketing. I joined Coursera+Copyblogger’s course (presented by Sonia Simone). I set up my personal website. I created a new Twitter handle, @ascenciafk. I followed Sonia Simone on Twitter, then Andy Crestodina.
A few days later I was followed back by Andy Crestodina (I wonder why).
On July 5, I will be attending a Content Marketing Masterclass meetup in Jakarta.
How do I know it’s the right path?
I don’t know yet.
Maybe, just maybe, these are the clues if you’re on the right path:
- It feels right.
- You get excited doing it and talking about it. (I’m really excited writing this!)
- It’s something that you’ve been doing since you were little. It’s something that you enjoy doing if you don’t have to care about anything else.
What’s going to happen next?
I’m not saying that I will only do this for the rest of my life.
As long as I’m progressing and enjoying this, I think I will be okay.
Whoever we decide we want to be, we’re still free to explore ourselves.
It’s still a journey.
