Tired of Your Job? How Learning English Can Help You BE YOUR OWN BOSS

Welcome to the Effortless English Show with the world's number one English teacher, AJ Hogue, where AJ's more than 40 million students worldwide finally learn English once and for all, without the boring textbooks, classrooms, and grammar drills. Here's AJ with a quick piece to help you learn to speak fluent English effortlessly.

Tired of your job? How English can help you be your own boss. So we're going to be talking about freelancing today and the advantages of working for yourself and how to do it and why English is so important for that, how to use English to build your own freelancing business or career or jobs.

It's up to you. I guess the first question is why, right? A lot of people are tired of working normal jobs. In America, we say nine to five, the nine to five job.

What's a nine to five job? Well, it starts at nine and goes until five, right? Typically, it's an eight hour day work day, right? Might be an office job, it might be retail, meaning maybe you're working in a store,

It could be in a factory. It doesn't matter, but it's a nine-to-five job, right? It's a fixed schedule. So, traditionally, a full-time job is 40 hours per week.

Four-zero. Eight a day, Monday to Friday. But the truth is, we all know that it's actually much more than that. First of all, most people get a lunch break.

and most people want a lunch break, that might be 30 minutes. It might be, you know, up to an hour, usually 30 minutes to an hour for a lunch break. So that's an extra possible hour that you are not at home or not outside doing what you want, right? I remember, you know, when I had full-time jobs, when I was working,

Yes, the lunch break was nice. It was nice to have a little break. But I wasn't really free. I didn't feel free. I knew I had to run back to work. I had to stay close to the job or the office or stay in the office and just eat quickly.

It wasn't that relaxing. There wasn't a lot of time. So that's now nine hours a week, right? Times five days. So now you're up to 45 hours per week. But of course, there's also the time of going to work.

unless you live next to your job, right? You have to go there. It's called commuting, right? So that means you're on a bus, you're in a car, you're on a train, maybe a bicycle, whatever, but it takes time to get there.

You know, I think most people, I know most of my jobs, at least 30 minutes, at least 30 minutes to get to the job, usually. Sometimes, some jobs, there was much more than that.

So, that's going and coming. That's another hour per day, right? Now, you're up to 10 hours per day times 5. Now, you're at 50 hours per week, you know, to get to your job, to be at your job, right?

That's a lot of time, and there's no flexibility, right? Because your boss, your company tells you the schedule, right? Right. What if you don't want to wake up that early?

Doesn't matter. You have to. Right. What if you're a night person? You prefer to work at night? Well, if you have a normal job, nine to five. You can't do it, right?

There's no flexibility. You have a fixed schedule. And maybe some days you want to change things. There's no flexibility. You have to do it. It's exactly the same every day, which becomes extremely boring.

At least for me, it was so boring. I hated working nine-to-five jobs. I mean, really, I hated working any job like that. The other problem is income...

Limits, I guess I would say. Your income is limited, right? Because the company chooses a salary for you, right? Maybe it's an hour. You're getting paid $15 an hour.

Okay, whatever it is. Well, you're making $15 an hour. What if you want to make $17 an hour? Well, then you have to go to your boss and you have to ask for more and they might say no.

It's very possible they will say no. Sorry, we can't do it. What if you want to make $25 an hour? That's a big jump. Almost certainly they will say no.

No, sorry, too much. So your income is very limited at a job, right? It's fixed. We say fixed, meaning it's stuck. You can't change it easily. You can try to go find another job, which is very difficult.

You might be able to, you might not. Now, a lot of people, you know, at their jobs, they feel very kind of anxious. The environment is not so good. I felt this a lot.

in past jobs, boredom and kind of, you know, anxiety, not fear, but... I don't know, just the environment of being stuck inside all day in a building, usually with these certain bright fluorescent lights.

Usually, if it was an office job, it was just stuck in with a lot of other people. I felt like I had no privacy. No privacy in that environment. I felt like I always had to pretend to be busy.

This is a terrible feeling. It's almost worse than actually being busy. There are kind of two terrible situations in a job. One is to be too busy, to be super busy where you're like kind of a workaholic.

You're overworked. You're stressed because you're so busy. There's all this pressure. But the opposite is also very stressful, I think. For me, it was very stressful.

I had a lot of jobs where I had nothing to do. So I worked at some jobs, and really, I was not busy. There was not much to do. But, you know, the bosses are always walking around, other people walking around.

So I always felt this pressure to pretend to be busy. Because if I, you know, instead of just sitting at my desk, you know, taking a nap... with my head down or reading a book or something, right?

Which, you know, sometimes I would do it, but I have to do it like kind of secretly, right? Maybe I'd have a book, but I'd have to keep it low. And then if I heard someone coming, I'd put the book down and pretend to be working on the computer. Have you had jobs like this?

Maybe you have a job like this now. It's also very stressful I find it very stressful to constantly have to worry about pretending to be busy all the time.

So everything feels like a struggle. And then sometimes just the schedule, just the schedule, the time. One of my worst jobs, I was working at a hospital in an emergency room in South Carolina.

That's in America. And so this is the opposite. This is the opposite stress. I didn't need to pretend to be busy. I was busy, right? It's an emergency room.

And the hours, the schedule was like 12 hours a day. So it was this weird schedule that would change, like I'd work three days a week, one day, one week, and then the next week I'd work four days a week. But it was 12 hour shifts, so 12 hours at the hospital. And of course, it took me 30 minutes to get there, 30 minutes to get home, and is always in that environment.

And you can imagine emergency rooms are a kind of stressful environment, you know, you've got A lot of people are in pain, and there's all this chaos.

I was dealing usually with psychiatric patients and drug-addicted patients, so that people would come in, and they'd be high on some drug and acting crazy, sometimes violent. And... You know, I was dealing with this all the time. Like, so these long hours, 12 hours, then I would go home.

I would be so tired. I would just, you know, eat some food and pass out, sleep. And then I would wake up the next morning and it was already time to go to work. I had to wake up and, you know, take a shower and eat breakfast.

And then I felt like immediately I had to go to work again. So then I go to work again. And fuck, my whole life was work. Or resting from work. Like I had no personal life because the job was so kind of stressful and tiring that on my days off, a lot of times on my days off, I just wanted to sit around and do nothing.

I just would sleep late. And so I felt like I had no life at all, just working at that hospital all the time. And then in my brain, too, I was always just thinking about, you know, like what happened the day before or the week before.

So it just kind of like, you know, eat up my whole life. Now then on the opposite side, another one of my terrible jobs was at IBM, which is kind of a big famous company.

And I worked at IBM, let me think, one, two, three, I think three, three different summers. I was basically an intern, you know, like I was a student worker. So this was when I was in university.

And I would... During the summertime, the summer break, I would go work at IBM. Why? Why did I do it? Because I hated it. Why did I do it? Money, right?

I needed money. I was a poor, poor, poor student. And I didn't want to work too much during the year, right? Because when I was at school, I wanted to study and do other things.

So I had some part-time jobs at school, but not much. So I needed to make a lot of money in the summer and save it for the school year. So, they paid well, so I got jobs there, but it was the opposite problem.

I don't know why they hired me. I have no idea, because at all the jobs, I had nothing to do. I mean, really, nothing to do. I had to be there eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, right?

40 hours a week. But I had nothing to do. They didn't give me any jobs. They didn't give me anything to do. So it would be eight hours a day pretending to be doing something.

They might give me like a tiny little job sometimes that maybe I would need, you know, 30 minutes to finish the job. But then the rest of the day, nothing to do. Like I have so little to do.

I don't know. Do they give these jobs for charity just to help? I guess. Because really, they didn't need me. It was a worthless job. And in many ways, more stressful than the ER.

At least the ER, I was busy, so the time went quickly. I was 12 hours, but there was always something. I was running around all the time. Always crazy stuff happening at the hospital, in the emergency room.

So it was long, but the time went quickly. I was so busy and lots happening. But then at IBM, it was the opposite problem. It was just in this office, right?

So I would be in my own little cubicle, my own little small tiny office, just sitting there watching the clock, you know, like, uh, it's 10 o'clock, uh, seven more hours to go. I have nothing to do.

And then I have to listen, you know, if I heard the boss or somebody coming, get on the computer, pretend like I'm doing something, or pretend like I'm not just snapping or reading a book, right? So I'd have a book, usually, and just put it to the side and pretend, and then they would walk down the hall, they'd pass my office, and they'd keep going, and then I'd go back, read my book some more, look back up, oh, it's 10.05, only five minutes gone. Ugh.

And so then I play games, you know, like trying to just count the time, counting the time until... Going home was terrible, right? So many hours. So first in the morning, count the time until lunch, right?

Okay, it's 9 o'clock. Three hours until lunch. Two and a half hours until lunch. Two hours until lunch. And the time is like super, you know, right? When you have nothing to do and you're watching the clock, the time goes so, so slowly.

Oh, it was horrible. So then I'd play games like I would sometimes, you know, just go to the bathroom. Have you ever done this in an office job? Go to the bathroom and sit down, you know, go inside the part where you lock it, right?

And you sit down. And I would just sit in there and do it. I didn't really need to use the bathroom, right? But I would just sit in there, basically hiding.

because it was a little more private, right? The office was not private. It was, you know, those cubicles, kind of an open office so people can look over and see you. There's no privacy.

So I would hide in the bathroom and stay in there like, you know, 20, 30 minutes just hiding in the bathroom. And then sometimes I would just go like walk around the offices. I would just go to the stairs and walk up and down the stairs just for a little exercise and again, kind of

a little privacy hiding in the stair. It's called a stairwell. You know, in offices, sometimes the stairs are behind doors, right? So it's a little bit private.

So I'll just walk up and down the stairs for exercise. And because I was so bored, bored out of my mind. As I said, that summer was so long. It was just so, every day seemed like

forever, the time going so slowly. And every week, so slow, and every month. So, the whole summer felt so, so long. I was so excited to leave and go back to school.

Oh, yes, back to school. Terrible. So, Maybe you understand this. I think it's common. A lot of people hate their jobs for these reasons. Either they're too busy and they're stressed.

They have no time. They're not flexible. It's hard to make more money. You want more money, but you're kind of stuck. They won't give you more money. Or you're bored out of your mind, right?

Just so bored, bored, bored. And in some, I know some offices, some jobs, there's a lot of gossip too. So I never had this problem. I think maybe it's a problem that, you know...

stereotype is that you know that the women especially can do this but the men do it too um where there's a lot of gossiping about different co-workers and all this but they call it office politics probably because i was never a high level person like i was always like a low low low level worker um this did well i did actually this i was gonna say i'm wrong i can think of a job i can think of a job that where there was a lot of this politics it was a

one of my social work jobs. It was a small agency, and I really liked the job, but then suddenly, like all the workers... It was mostly women, actually.

But there was a... No, one of them was a man, though. So, see, there's... The stereotype's not true. Men do this, too. And so, anyway, they just start gossiping, and, you know, one of the workers didn't like the other workers, and then they try to create these, like, sides, like, are you on my side?

Are you on their side? And all this kind of fighting and arguing. It was terrible, so that creates a whole lot of stress, too, in some jobs. Not... I can only think of one job where I had that problem, but...

Some people have this, too, where they get stressed out because they have all these arguments and problems and politics in their job. So what's the solution? So because of this, a lot of you...

Want to be free. Be your own boss. It is very nice to be your own boss. I speak from experience. Very nice. And there are different ways to do this. You can start a whole business if you want to.

Right. This is called being an entrepreneur, right? Like now, I'm an entrepreneur. Effortless English is my business, right? But that can be scary for some people.

It seems like a big... a big job, a big task. And it can be. It can be. But there is an easier thing to do, and that's called being a freelancer. Being a freelancer is kind of like still doing your job, but independent.

So it's kind of like in the middle. It's between, right? So you have an entrepreneur that's a business owner, and then you have a job where you're working for someone else. You have a boss.

But in the middle is something called freelancing. And freelancing is basically your own boss, but you take jobs from different people, right? Let me give you an example.

One time I was in Thailand, just traveling, right? Traveling in Thailand in the town of Chiang Mai, which is a nice town up in northern Thailand. And I met this guy. I can't remember his name, honestly.

I forgot his name. But anyway, I met this guy. He was an American, and I just met him at a coffee shop. And he... was working in Chiang Mai. And it was really interesting.

I talked to him. I'm like, what are you doing? And he's like, yeah, I live here. I'm living in Chiang Mai right now. And he's like, I'm just a freelancer.

And what was he? He was a freelance writer. A freelance writer. So he would write like advertising and websites and articles, things like that for different people, right?

But he wasn't working for just one company. He would just get different jobs from lots and lots of different people. And what's great about freelancing is obviously it's very flexible, right? Because he could work whenever he wanted to.

He was working in a coffee shop. That's how I met him. I was working in the coffee shop, writing lessons and things. He was sitting next to me, and he was writing for his job.

It's very flexible. You don't need to be stuck in an office that you hate. You can work in your house. You can go out, work in a coffee shop. You could go to a park, bring your laptop and work.

So it's very flexible to your location. And not only just like office, but even there are people, it's called digital nomads, digital nomadism or being a digital nomad. A nomad is someone who travels around.

And so there are a lot of people who are freelancers. They're independent workers. Right? Right? If you're not working, it's harder to travel because then you have to save a lot of money first.

Then you travel. Then you use all your money. Then you have to go home. But what if you can work and travel at the same time? And that's what he was doing.

So he would continue taking jobs online. People would send him jobs. So he still had to do some work, but it was very flexible. It was also flexible the hours.

He could work whenever he wanted. He didn't have to start work at 9 o'clock or 8 o'clock. If he wanted to, he could write at midnight. He could just enjoy his day in Chiang Mai and go outside and go to restaurants and do whatever he wanted to do, play golf.

And... And then at night, he could just go to a coffee shop and work and do his work then. He could work and he could change it every day. If one day he wanted to get up early, he could get up early and work in the morning.

Next day, he could decide he could do his work at night, right? Very flexible. So, very flexible for location. the environment, and also even just you can live in different countries.

Later, I talked to him, and he was planning to go to Taiwan next. So he was living in Chiang Mai for a while, and then the next place he wanted to go was Taiwan. So he was going to go to Taiwan and live somewhere in Taiwan for, I think, another three to six months.

So very cool, you know. The other nice thing is that he said he was making more money He made more money as a freelancer than working for some company.

And this is an advantage, a potential advantage, benefit, of being a freelancer because you can make more money. You decide. Now, of course, you can also make less money, so there's more risk. There is more risk.

The number one reason people like jobs is that they are predictable. Right? So the job says, we will pay you $30,000 a year. So you feel like, okay, I know exactly how much I'll get each month, right?

You have a paycheck and you know, okay, after taxes, I'll get this exact amount. And so it's very predictable. I won't say safe. People think it's safe, but I don't think it's safe because you can lose your job anytime.

They can fire you anytime, right? Maybe the company is losing money. Maybe the company wants to cut cost. There's a lot of reasons. A lot of people lose their jobs.

And it's a big surprise. So, in my opinion, jobs are not safer. In fact, I think they're less safe. But they are more predictable. You know every week or every month exactly how much money you're going to get.

So it's easier to plan. It's much more predictable. And people like that. Most people like that, right? Whereas with a freelancer, as a freelancer, you can make more money, but sometimes you might have a bad month and you might make less money.

So it's not predictable. Each month might be different. One month you might have a big, big month, a lot of work. You make a huge amount of money. And then the next month it might be low for some reason.

And your income drops. So this scares a lot of people, makes them nervous, because it does require being a little more careful with your money. You've got to save some money so that if you have a low month, you're still okay. You can't just spend everything you make immediately.

You've got to be a little more disciplined with your money because it is less predictable. However... The good side of this is less predictable, but also there's more potential.

When you get some experience and you learn how to sell yourself, you can make actually much more money than at a job. So how can you do it? Let's just start at practical. How do you do it?

How can you do it? What skills do you need? Number one, you need English. I believe English is very, very, very important. You need good English skills, speaking and reading and decent writing skills.

Why? Can you do it just in your own language? Yes, you can, but you're limited. Let me give you an example. I've been looking. I'm looking for a designer.

I need a designer for a few different jobs. I have a few different jobs that I want to design. A web designer for a couple of things from one of my websites and also just a graphic designer.

So I don't want to hire some big company to do this, and I can't do it myself. I'm not an artist. I'm not a designer. So I go to this website called Upwork.

It's a freelancer website. And what do you do? Well, if you're like me, if you want to hire somebody, you want to pay somebody for a job. I have a job.

I have some jobs. Well, I go to Upwork, upwork.com, I think. And then I describe my job, and I put it on there. And then the freelancers, the freelancers on the website, they'll send me, it's called a bid, B-I-D, their bid.

It means they'll tell me, oh, I can do your job, and this is my price, and this is why you should hire me for your job, because I'm good at this, this, and this, right?

So they bid. And then what I do, maybe I get five or ten people saying, I want to do your job. And then I read what they wrote. I might call them on Skype and chat with them for a little bit.

And then I choose one. I'll say, okay, I like this person, and I hire them, and I pay them. And I think usually you pay like half before and half when the work is done.

Something like that. So, how does this work, right? Like, so, why do I hire them? Well, number one, they need to speak English, right? Because if they don't, then on Upwork, what you see is it's very, very, very international.

Upwork is one of the biggest freelancer sites. There are others, too. There are many others. Some of them are only, you know, maybe in one language, but it's very limited.

But if you... If your English is good, your English speaking and even reading and writing, then you can get an international audience, right? International jobs is so much bigger.

And so instead of working at a company and only having a job just in your town, now you can get the whole world, right? So like I look on there and I look at the jobs, there are people from Pakistan, people from India, from Japan, from China, Thailand, all different European countries, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, everywhere.

You know, like if I want a web designer, I can find web designers from all different countries, but they're all using English. They're all using English to sell themselves because it's marketing. And this is the other skill you must have. You need to have English skills, number one.

Number two, you need technical skills, your own job, whatever that is. If you're a computer programmer, you need programming, right? You have to know how to do it. But you should already know how to do it.

You're already doing a job. If you're a writer, then you need writing skills. If you're a designer, you need designing and art skills, right? So, this is obvious.

So, you need your own job skills, but you also need English, and you need marketing. These are the three kinds of skills you must have to be a freelancer, to be successful.

These three. You need your own job skills, so you can do the jobs, obviously. You need English so you can communicate with the whole world and get jobs from the world. It's a huge, huge market.

And you need marketing so you can sell yourself. Because this is the other challenge, this is the other problem of freelancing. Lots of people are doing it, right? So I have a job, say web design.

I put it on Upwork. Maybe ten people reply. How do I choose which one I want? Well, I'll choose the one that has good communication. If their English is terrible, I probably will not choose them.

Why not? Because I worry that maybe they're not going to understand me. Maybe I can't communicate with them well. It might cause a lot of problems. I don't want a lot of problems for the job.

So when I read what they send me, it needs to sound good in English. It doesn't need to be perfect. I know that. I know they're not from America. I know they're not native speakers, but it needs to be clear and good.

Not perfect, but good. So English for sure. And then also I know later I'm going to talk to them on the phone. I'm going to be Skype or something. I need to understand them and they need to understand me.

So English is super important. But then the second skill, marketing, because you have to sell yourself. You cannot just put information boring. I'm a web designer and I'm good at, you know, HTML, PHP, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these technical information.

That's okay. But everybody does that. Everybody does that. You have to sell yourself. You need marketing skills, sales skills, to sell yourself. So, if I read your description, I say, oh, I want to hire this guy.

This guy's great, or this woman. Wow, she's fantastic. So interesting. She has all the skills, good communication, and she shows me all the benefits I'm looking for.

You have to know how to market yourself. So, To finish, how do you do it? If you want to be your own boss, you want to be free, you need to do three things.

Number one, improve your English skills. Of course, you know, I'll promote my courses. Go to EffortlessEnglishClub.com EffortlessEnglishClub.com And get one of my courses, Improve Your English. If you're looking for specifically business English, I have a business English course at my website.

EffortlessEnglishClub.com Number two, learn marketing. This will help you in life, in your career, even if you stay in your job, but especially if you want to be a freelancer. Buy some marketing books.

I'll give you one recommendation. There's a guy named Dan Kennedy. Any book by Dan Kennedy is good. He's old school, meaning he's been around a long time.

He's been doing this a long time. Dan Kennedy marketing books. He's written a lot of books, so I'm not going to give you one. Just search Dan Kennedy books.

Search on Amazon or whatever website you use and read books by Dan Kennedy and start learning how to do marketing. And then finally, when you're ready, just try it. Here's the final piece of advice.

Don't quit your job. Don't quit your job. Don't just quit your job and become a freelancer. That's stressful. That's very, oh my God, now you've got to make all your income and you've never done it before.

That can be very scary. Keep your job for a while. Keep your job and just do freelancing part-time. Just take one job. Again, freelancing is so flexible.

You can do a lot of jobs every week if you want or every month. Or you could just choose. You choose. This is what's so great about it. You choose the work you want to do.

So just choose one job per month if you want. Just get started, right? Improve your English skills. Improve your marketing skills. Join Upwork.com or other freelance sites.

And then just accept one job. Get one job and do it. But keep your normal job still so you still have your paycheck. There's no financial stress. There's no money stress.

And then you do your one freelance job. Get some experience. Later, you could do more. Now it's two jobs a month, maybe five jobs a month. And then it starts to grow and grow and grow.

Your English gets better. Your marketing gets better. You start getting more freelance jobs. And then you can quit your job. Then you quit your job and you're free.

Then you are your own boss completely, 100%. Then you're free. Work when you want to. Travel the world and work at the same time. work from your house, from your bedroom, in your pajamas, whatever, okay?

You're free. You can do what you want. All right, so that's it. That's how to use English to be your own boss. Good luck. Let's get into our live questions and comments now.

So ask me your questions and comments. Let me check what people have already been writing. Lots of people saying hi. Schaber says, I quit my job also.

After that, I started to listen to your podcast and realized I had done it the right way. Now I have a lot of time. I set aside money before quitting. I am free now.

Awesome. Shaber. Awesome. Give him a clap. Give her a clap. That's fantastic. See, this is perfect. That's exactly right. And this is a good strategy.

Right? So Shaber saved money first, then quit and started freelancing. So again, less stress, right? Don't just quit your job and you have no money and now you're stressed.

Oh my God, I got to get freelance jobs suddenly. That's stressful. That's terrible. You know, save money or do it part time so you can start in a relaxed way and learn because it takes time to, you know, improve your marketing skills, to get used to the, you know, Upwork or the different freelance websites, to find, you know,

It takes a little time. Give yourself some time. But here's the benefit. Shaber says, now I have a lot of time. I am free now. For me, the freedom is the most important thing.

That's the best benefit. Yeah, money is nice. We all need some money. But for me, it's not about being super rich. For me, it's the freedom, the flexibility.

Work when you want. Do the kind of work you want. Live where you want. Travel when you want. That freedom is so fantastic. And I do it with my family.

Some people think, oh, I've got a family. I've got kids. I can't do it. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. I have kids. have two young kids and we're going to travel in fact we're planning our next trip I think we're going to go to Thailand soon so we're taking the kids this will be their first big trip we're going to our first big trip with the kids flying on a on a commercial airplane and it'll be a nice test so you can do it with kids too you can do it as a family alright more questions and comments

Manuel Rocha says, talking about when I was bored, being paid for doing nothing. That's wonderful. But Manuel, it was not wonderful. It was terrible. It would be wonderful if I could stay at home and do nothing and have freedom, do anything I wanted and get paid for doing nothing.

That's wonderful, sure. But I was not free. I had to be in that office all day. Most of the time, I was stuck in that office. I could not leave. So that was more like being a prisoner.

It actually was not wonderful. It was terrible. Horrible. Maybe some people like that. For me, it was hell. Okay. Horrible. It sounds nice as an idea, but in fact, it was just terrible.

Manuel follows up with a different comment and says, some bosses will tell you, I can fire you anytime, right away, because outside the office there are thousands of people who want your job.

Exactly. So this is the other side. Number one, they can fire you anytime. That's true. But number two, if they don't fire you, they can treat you badly.

They don't respect you. Why? Because they say, oh, well, I can hire someone else anytime. There's a lot of people who want your job. They use this as a reason to treat you badly.

to make you kind of like a slave to them. Part-time slave. Right? So, yeah, I know. I had a lot of bad bosses, too. You know, I had a few good ones and some really bad ones.

All of you who work know this. You all have bad stories, I'm sure. We all do. Prajwal says, I also do the same thing hiding in the bathroom, but I go with my phone.

Right. So when I was doing this, when I worked at IBM, this was before cell phones. Can you believe it? There was a time before cell... There were no cell phones then.

But now, exactly. If I was working there now, you want to hide in the bathroom, you go in the bathroom, pretend you're going to the bathroom, but bring your phone, and then you can just read your phone and message your friends.

Yeah. So many bad job stories. Hafita says, How can I get your Power English course? And how will you send it to me? Well, if you're watching on video, you'll see it says EffortlessEnglishClub.com.

That's my website. In fact, that homepage is where I sell my Power English course. Just go to that homepage and buy the course. And then you get a login.

So you get a password. You go in and download all the stuff. It's great. My most popular course is that one. Ben is saying, basically, be sure to file your taxes.

Well, here's the good thing about that. I don't know about different countries, but I know Upwork will actually track your income. So any income you make, I guess this is good and bad, but it's probably good because we want to be legal. We want to follow the rules and not get in trouble.

So they can help track how much you make. and they'll give you a little report at the end of the year. And then, yes, so you have to save money for taxes. This is a good point.

This is another thing you have to do if you are a freelancer, is you have to save a little extra money to pay your taxes so you don't get a big surprise at the end of the year having to suddenly pay a lot of money.

But, you know, these are small things. It just requires a little bit of extra discipline with your money. But the benefits are fantastic. All right. Yeah, Priscilla Candido says, whether you like it or not, English is an essential skill nowadays, a lingua franca, which means French language, right?

But basically it means, yeah, world language. It is. It's the world language of work and business and science. And, you know, this is just the truth of it.

And if you want the biggest market for international jobs, or if you want to be a freelancer, you want to get jobs from everywhere in the world, it's so much bigger than you need English.

You can still do it in your own language, but it's a much smaller market, more difficult. Anna Grigoreva, good to see you. She says she's busy. She'll watch this later.

Sounds good. Amina says anyone who knows English can make a YouTube channel speaking in English. They can get lots of subscribers to make lots of money from the channel because English is an international language.

Yeah, I would say don't plan to make a lot of money directly from YouTube, okay? We all know there are some stories of that, but in general, it's very, very hard to do. But what is good is to use YouTube or other social media.

For marketing, right? To build an audience, to connect with people. This is part of marketing. This is why you have to learn marketing. Because if you're a freelancer, you can be like everybody else and it might be difficult.

But when you learn marketing, maybe you also have a YouTube channel. Maybe you have a good Facebook following or you use LinkedIn or whatever. You have a nice website. You've got all these extra things.

This will help you get more and more and more freelance jobs. So, you can just post something on Upwork. That's okay. But when you do all this other stuff for your marketing, it's much better.

So, that's why you need to learn marketing. A lot of people, probably most people don't know much marketing. So, it gives you a big, big advantage. English and marketing.

Amar Waba says, what are the weaknesses of being a freelancer? And how can they be addressed? That's a great question. Okay, the weaknesses of being a freelancer, number one, I've mentioned already, number one is getting work, right?

Finding work. If you're at a job, they just give you, do this, do that. But if you're a freelancer, no one's just going to call you up and tell you to do something. You've got to find those jobs.

You've got to make those connections. That's marketing. So you need help. How do you address it? You must learn marketing skills. So that's what I'm saying.

Read Dan Kennedy's book. That's a start. And then you can, you know, what, millions of books about marketing? I don't know. Hundreds of thousands of books.

There's a lot of books about marketing. But Dan Kennedy is a good one to start with. He's very good. So you address it by that way. The second thing, you'll start getting jobs.

You're making money. But it's unpredictable. This is the challenge number two. For being a freelancer. Unpredictable, right? Because it's hard to know.

Maybe sometimes just the holidays, for example. Like at the end of the year, maybe you don't get many jobs. A lot of people are taking a break. So your income can drop in December.

Right. So this can be scary for some people. On the other hand, maybe a different month, maybe for some reason, June is a really big month for you. Right.

It depends on the kind of job you do. So we can go up and down every month. In fact, it will. It will never be exactly the same every month. So this is potentially a problem, but only if you don't plan for it.

You plan for it by always saving money. You want to have enough money to live, I say, you want to have enough money to survive and live at least, let's say, at least for two months without income.

So then, if you have a low month, You're okay. And then when you have a big month, then you want to save extra. Whenever you have a big month, you're making some extra money, save it because there's a chance you might have a bad month.

So you need to always have savings that you can use for the bad months or the low weeks, that kind of thing, or an emergency. I think those are the major issues.

Flutkanal says, English language is the first one, but Chinese is coming. Indeed, Chinese and Russian and Arabic and Spanish and probably Brazilian Portuguese are all, you know, have also their uses. Yeah, they're strong and growing languages. So, if you only learn one foreign language, learn English.

If you can learn more, then these other languages are also, can be quite useful, obviously. Jose Pena says, I started listening to AJ eight years ago. Oh, wow. And applied all his advice, not only to English, not only to English learning, but to life in general.

The results couldn't be better. Thank you, AJ. Awesome. That's great. Jose, congratulations. All right. I want to hear your British accent. I don't do a British accent.

I'm American. I can give you an American accent, but not British. Amina says, can you believe that a hypocritical person is more acceptable than a good person in a job?

Yeah, it's possible. Sure, there are all kinds. Look, there's a lot of, we talked about office politics. So in jobs, the best person does not always get the job, right?

Like if there's a job opening. and you're looking for interviews, the best person does not always get the job. In your own office, in your own job, the best person does not always get a raise, does not always get more money, right? Maybe the boss likes somebody else in the office, even though they're terrible.

All kinds of things happen. We know this. So this is, again, why you have more security when you are a freelancer. Because, yeah, you might get one bad job, but then it's done, and then you get another one.

You choose who you want to work with, and that's good. So it's yet another problem of working in jobs. Okay, I think we are almost done. Take one more and then finished.

Manuel says, do an English marketing course. It's not a bad idea. Combining two of my skills. Interesting. Manuel Celestino says, I want to get the Learn Real English course.

How do I get it? Unfortunately, the Learn Real English course is not available now. Joe and Kristen decided to stop doing it. They're working other jobs now.

And, you know, maybe I can talk to them about getting that because, you know, I made it with them. So they're part owners of that course. So I need their permission.

Next time I talk to them, I'll ask if I could sell it for them. See if I can get it from them if they don't care. Okay, cool. So, this is the last one.

Mike M.M. says, I'm a customer service representative and my job is horrendous. Nice word. Horrendous means terrible, horrible. But I'm grateful because I'm saving money.

Good idea. And hopefully I can find something as a freelancer. Thanks for all your advice. You can, Mike, because I don't know what industry you are, but believe me, customer service, being a customer service rep, is something that a lot of people look for.

You could almost be like a freelancer with a regular job. You could be like a... It's called like a virtual assistant. So you might have, you might maybe get three, four, five clients, for example, online.

Like let's say there's... I don't know, like somebody selling a weight loss product online. They have a website, right? So people buy the product, but they need customer service.

And the owner probably doesn't want to do customer service, right? Because they get emails, people saying, help, you know, I bought your course, but I can't download it.

You know, having trouble with the audio or this lesson there, you know, whatever. There's always customer service issues. So you could, someone like that, the owner of that website would go on Upwork looking for someone to do the customer service every day, right? To answer the emails and help the customers.

You're doing it now already, and a job, so it means probably less flexibility. But maybe you could do it as a freelancer, maybe not just for a few small companies. You get three, four, five. So if you lose one, you still have income.

Don't just do it. If you do it for one company, basically it's just like working a job, which might be okay. It still could be very flexible. because you're not actually their employee.

You could do it from home, your own hours, right? But as a freelancer, again, you can choose your own jobs. You could look for ones that are only email. You could look for ones where you could do customer service.

It doesn't need to be a certain schedule. You can do it whenever you want to. You just got to answer the emails every day, but you could do them in the morning. You could do them at night.

You could do them... from a coffee shop with your laptop. You could travel the world and still, you know, answer the customer service emails and questions, right?

So customer service is definitely something you could do as a freelancer. You just need to find a few probably small companies that would hire you to do it.

It'd be great. I've used people for that myself. So really, really good. All right, well, that's it. So to summarize how to be your own boss, you need three types of skills, three kinds of skills to be your own boss, right?

Number one, you need the technical skills, your job skills, whatever your job is. If your customer needs some experience doing something, whatever you're going to do.

Number two, you need English skills. You need English if you want an international freelancing career, right? To get jobs from everywhere. It's much easier when you can do it in English.

Many, many, many more jobs because then you have the whole world. And then number three, marketing. You must learn marketing. Start with one of Dan Kennedy's books.

For English, of course, go to my website, effortlessenglishclub.com. You can get all my courses there, effortlessenglishclub.com. Lots of love to you. See you next time.

Bye for now.