At dahil ako ay isang magastos na estudyante, I did that too. I tutored high school students and college students from other schools. Then one day a friend of mine who was also a student at the time, they approached me and they had all these online gigs and asked if I wanted in on it. And of course I wanted to make money, so I said yes. All I needed was a laptop and an Internet connection and I had both. So I became a subcontractor, essentially. Our very first project was a data scraping project, so we had to find like a thousand emails and put them in a spreadsheet.

And so I said yes to that because I was confident in my research skills and it was doable. And then I'm not sure if I'm telling this in order, but the second project was article writing. To be honest, wala akong experience sa pagsusulat ng articles at the time, but as a college student who was used to researching and writing essays and reports, I thought, why not? I think I can do this. Translatable Naman yung skills. So I went for it. And then came the transcription project. So I transcribed podcasts, lectures. Nowadays we have otter.AI, but back then I had to do all the typing manually, like word for word. I also did not have any prior experience with transcription, but I knew I had a good ear because I played an instrument back then and I typed in fast and accurately.

So Kahit wala akong experience, I said yes to the project because I had the foundational skills. So I did that for a while. And then syempre grumaduate ako, I studied for the boards, I got my license and so I spent the next two to three years after graduation, you know, with one foot in freelancing and and another foot applying for traditional jobs. Pero andun na ako eh. Nag ffreelance na ako eh. I was enjoying it. And so I decided to go all in. Why? Because I knew that I was good at what I did. I knew how to get clients, I was earning enough for myself and I did not need a license to do this. And of course, my parents weren't exactly thrilled.

We're a typical Asian household. They encouraged me to stick to the usual path, but that just wasn't for me. And so about a year after going all in, that's when I found my very first VA client. But it took me three years, actually, of trying all kinds of different things. Like, I tried creating podcast show notes. I encoded scanned old books, repurposed showbiz content on Tumblr, and, you know, all these things. They may sound random, and I guess they were, but I applied for each of them because, one, I wanted the experience. Two, I genuinely wanted to try them.

And three, I knew that I could do the work. I had the foundational skills necessary to get the job done. So if you don't know where to start, first try taking an inventory of the skills you already have. Like, what do you know? What tools do you know how to use? Then look for jobs that match those skills. And if you come across a job with a mix of things you know and things you don't know, don't see that as a hindrance. Instead, see that as an opportunity to learn. Right.

So starting today, I'm ending episodes with a recommendation. Sometimes they would be related to freelancing, sometimes they're not. And today's recommendation is not related to freelancing. It's a song by one of my favorite artists, 92914. It's called Okinawa. Go give it a listen, and I hope you enjoy it.

That's it for this episode. This is Em Signing off. Until next time, take it easy.