10 Lessons in 10 Years of Freelancing with Wudan Yan

SEASON 8, EPISODE 9

It's been 10 years since Wudan started freelancing, and she's learned a lot of lessons over the past decade. Now, she's running three businesses at the same time. Most of us will probably just run one business at a time, but for those who want to think expansively and run several businesses simultaneously, Wudan gives you a peek behind that curtain.

In this episode, Jillian Anthony interviews Wudan. 

Jillian is a writer and editor with 13 years of experience in journalism and media. She is the former lead editor of Time Out New York, and her writing has been published in Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Pop-Up magazine, Contently, and many other publications. As a freelancer, she works with major tech, travel, and media companies in many content and marketing roles; is a regular public speaker at events like SXSW; and helps writers find their footing in the freelance world. She authors the newsletter Cruel Summer Book Club, about making space for your art and yourself, and hosts a podcast of the same name.

Wudan reflects on what she's learned over her career and dives into what it’s like to juggle three businesses.

Full Transcript Below:

Wudan Yan- Hi everyone. Welcome back to The Writers' Co-op, an anti-hustle of business podcast for freelance creatives. I'm your host and executive producer, Wudan Yan. So somehow we are barreling towards the end of this season, and as I mentioned in the beginning of this year, I'm having folks check in with me twice a season on what's going on in my own freelance business. As I thought about how my business has shifted specifically this year, and the theme of this podcast season: The Year of Expansive Thinking, I realized that perhaps I could also help offer a bit of wisdom on thinking expansively. I've now somehow been freelancing for 10 years. My career has taken me all over the world. I've now started three businesses, all with extremely different business structures, sometimes running all three of them at the very same time. I'm not here to say that running three businesses is necessarily a good idea. The thought that most people just have one job has crept into my mind basically every single day this year, but it's a possibility. And I figured that since I've been doing all of this—and I'm gesturing broadly in my recording space—all of this for a decade, I probably have some wisdom to share. So that's what this episode is going to be about: 10 lessons about freelancing, one per year from me. These lessons span everything from craft, business, life, and more. Joining me in conversation today is co-host Jillian Anthony, who will be leading this conversation. Jillian is a writer and editor with 13 years of experience in journalism and media. She is the former lead editor of Time Out New York, and her culture writing has been published inCosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Pop-Up Magazine, Contently, and many other places. As a freelancer, she works with major tech, travel and media companies in many content and marketing roles, is a regular public speaker at events like South by Southwest, and helps writers find their footing in the freelance world. She is the author of the newsletter Cruel Summer Book Club about making space for your art and yourself, and hosts a podcast under the same name. Before wedive into today's episode, did you know that we have an online community for The Writers' Co-op? If you're looking to do big things in your freelance business this year or just crave ongoing support from a welcoming, safe space, join The Writers Co-op Slack community. Members are sharing best practices and tips when it comes to running their freelance business, and I cannot overstate how important it is to have a psychologically-safe community to help bounce ideas around. Sign up today at the All-Access level on Patreon to get a link to join. That's at patreon.com/twcpod. All right, here's me and Jillian. Jillian, thank you so much for coming on The Writers Co-op. It's a pleasure to have this conversation with you.

Jillian Anthony-Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here and to talk to you more about your long career already,

Wudan- A decade does not feel that long in the grand scheme of things, but it also is long enough.

Jillian- Yeah, absolutely. How did you first get started as a freelancer? It's not always the way that people jump into journalism, so I'd love to hear how you got your start.

Wudan- That was a decade ago, in 2014 where I quit an academic career in cancer biology, and so I basically jumped into both journalism and freelancing without a background in journalism. I didn't study journalism at school, and of course, I was in grad school for a science and research-based career. And so I've talked about why I've made this leap and long story short is that I was really inspired by narrative nonfiction science writing, and way less inspired by working in a lab and pipetting all day and potentially also killing mice all day. I started telling everyone. I was, like, broadcasting it to my friends, because I was so fed up with my program. And one of my friends was like, oh, did you know that I did an internship one summer at college with, like, Popular Science, I think it was. Like, I worked with somebody there who also became a freelancer, but didn't go to journalism school. Would you like to talk to her? And just saying what I thought to be the scary thing out loud opened so many connections to me. And, you know, I met up with my friend's friend. I met upwith so many people, and learned about how they began their careers to give me ideas on how to start my own. And what those conversations really did is give me the confidence to both learn the skills to be a journalist—the research, interviewing and writing skills to do the work that I wanted to do. And it also gave me the confidence that, like, it was possible to do it as a freelancer, rather than going back to school or taking on a staff job and so on and so forth.

Jillian- Yeah, that's wonderful that you had some people to show you the way like that. I do find that there are so many journalists who are so generous with their time and skills, as you have been as well, especially on this podcast and other places. So as you're learning to be a journalist, you obviously had to really cultivate that beginner's mindset, really go into this entirely new career with an open mind and know you're gonna have to learn all these new skills. So what was one of the skills you learned during your first year of trying to be a freelance journalist, getting to know this field, learning the work you're doing, that turned out to be a key building block for you over the next 10 years of your career?

Wudan- Yes. So one of the things I had to really learn, and, you know, I knew, like nothing. I knew very little about how pitching worked. I knew very little about the publishing world, and I for sure did not have the skills to do the writing that I aspired to do. And so I would say that was one of the key skills that I had to learn, because as a scientist, writing means writing research manuscripts, mostly for another scientific audience. But communicating to the public, and even knowing like what new study might be interesting to everyone else in the world, and not just people doing the science, was a skill that I really had to hone, and then also figuring out how to tell the story of the people doing the work in an interesting way that other people would actually want to read. And so the way that I honed the skill was actually through fact-checking. And I say that because fact-checking meant that I was getting pretty much finished stories that other journalists have written about science, medicine, environment and society. And what fact-checking allowed me to do is reverse engineer a story, basically. See where the writer pulled a certain fact, or see how they selected for a very specific quote, or communicated a scene of like the science or medicine happening. And kind of seeing other people's process made me be like, oh, this is the way—or a way—to tell a story. And of course, the first time I wrote my own feature, it was, gosh, pretty painful. I didn't really know how to lead into the story, but I was really grateful to have friends and partners and so on and so forth be like, do you see what's happening in this New Yorker story that you loved? Try doing that here. And I was like, oh, okay, here we go. So yeah, it was a lot of learning. But I got into this work because I love narrative nonfiction, and I wanted to produce it. But I, frankly, had no idea how, without a formal education, but I think there was just so many interesting ways to piece it all together, informally as well.

Jillian- That's really interesting, thinking about fact-checking as reverse engineering a story. One of my first internships, I was doing a lot of fact-checking and kind of getting my feet wet, also you know, calling people up and asking them questions. And so you do learn a lot of those reporting skills. But yeah, it's interesting to think about that as the true foundation of anything that's there, and how you're actually telling the story.

Wudan- Exactly. And the other thing I want to say about skill building is that it can happen at any point of your career. One thing I notice a lot is when freelancers feel stagnant in like, rates or the services that they're offering or their freelance business kind of writ large, it's usually due to having to learn a new skill, whether it's a new skill that can really, you know, like land them writing clients that pay more, or open them up to a new service area. And so, yeah, I do think having—constantly, having that beginner's mindset helps people further along than they might think, rather than like, I need to negotiate for a higher rate, you know?

Jillian- Mhm. So as you're learning all of these brand new skills, you also decided to take a big new jump in life. You decided to freelance abroad in Thailand for your second year as a freelancer, which is, you know, a very risky thing to do. Not everybody is willing to take on so much personal and professional risk, especially at the beginning of a career like that. So how did that year of trying all of these new things, taking risks, learning new skills, how did that affect your future as a freelancer and a business owner, and learning how to take risks and upping your tolerance for trying new things?

Wudan- Yeah, that's such a great question. And I do want to provide some context here and say that I basically had, you know, a full-time tutoring job that allowed me to freelance during the day. And at the end of my first year of freelancing, I had a full-time three or four month magazine feature writing internship. And after that, I was like, welp, it's pretty expensive to live in New York City. So I might as well move somewhere a little more cheap. And other important context is that I was 25 at the time. I had no financial obligations. I was not partnered. I, you know, had no family obligations or anything. And so I had a lot of freedom at that time. And I kind of applied my beginner's mindset to be like, well, I enjoy international reporting. And so I lived in Thailand for four months in 2015 and the question about building tolerance for risk is really critical here, because I think that's what it appears to be at the outset, but I think I needed to build confidence that trying new things in my career and business would be okay. And when I moved to Bangkok and lived there, I started reporting stories and selling them to outlets in the US, which was my intent, and I realized, like, oh, I can do that. Like, I can sell stories from overseas. And that was something I brought into my freelance business for many, many years after that. I've talked a lot about building confidence on The Writer's Co-op, and I talk about building that evidence for yourself, right? Because you can look at other people and say, like, oh, they did this, but also like, there are all these other factors in their lives that really enabled them to accomplish what they did. But there's nothing really like creating evidence for yourself and then holding that up as a mirror to be like, yeah, I did a scary thing once, and it was fine. And so if I want to do a different scary thing again, like, it probably will also be fine. So whether you say, oh, I built risk tolerance or confidence, like, I see those as one of the same.

Jillian- Yeah, and I think also you're learning that your risks sometimes don't pay off, and that's also okay, right?

Wudan- Yes, yes. Or like, taking risks in a very controlled way, or giving yourself a window of time to take a very specific risk and see how it pans out. In any way, you're getting a lot of information about yourself. But I loved living abroad. I did have to move back to the US, however.

Jillian- So when you moved back, what was that like for you? As far as, you know, transitioning back to being a freelancer in the United States and having a higher income bracket to clear?

Wudan- In Thailand, I remember my monthly rent at the flat was 350 a month. And then food was extremely cheap, because there was delicious street food that was cheaper than getting groceries, right? And so I could live really well on just 2,000 US dollars a year. And then I decided to move to Seattle, which in 2016 was not one of the most expensive cities in the US, but it has since grown to that level. But I did, as you say, have to make, you know, like 1.5 to 2x more money a month. And so I kind of realized that I wasn't very smart and intentional in the same way that I am about my business now. I think the interesting thing about being a freelancer is that, you know, they're kind of, everyone does their own thing. And sure, we can listen to podcasts and hear how other people navigated it, but there's nothing more sobering, and there's nothing better than a learning experience than being in a situation yourself and having to figure your way out of it. And so I kind of was like, okay, well, I have to make more money, so I'm just gonna, like, tell everyone I am able to work. I am able to write. I am able to do press releases. I am able to fact-check. Anything that helps me towards my income goals or, like, gives me a little bit of stability. Like, let's just see what happens. And so I took on a wide range of work when I came back to the US. And it was extremely haphazard. It was extremely stressful. But I also believe that, you know, in order to hone in on what we want to do, we also have to do a lot of things that we don't want to do. And so that year three of my freelancing was really instrumental in figuring out, like, okay, let's keep this. Let's discard that. And—or like, let's raise my rates on this service, because I've been doing it long enough and I have enough confidence to ask for more.

Jillian- I think that feeling of, you know, when you're feeling money scarcity, work scarcity as a freelancer, it's really common to just kind of start flailing around and kind of panic picking up work. I've certainly been there as well, and it's great when you get so much work and feel a little more secure. But how did you start moving away from taking whatever work you could get, just to pay the bills or whatever you needed, to taking on work that you wanted to take on that was in line with your goals and also was paying you better?

Wudan- Yeah, so when I started my freelance career, I got this advice from a few others, which was, yeah, it's okay to do work that just like, pays your bills and doesn't fill you up emotionally, mentally, spiritually. But also the reason we get into freelancing is to be able to do the things, whether it is work-related or life-related, that really, like, feeds our soul. And so, you know, while 40 to 60% of my income might have been from kind of things that I saw as boring at the time, that enabled me to have enough confidence and space in my schedule to pursue passion-based stories. And I will say, although I kind of had a scarce mindset at the start of year three—that is like, oh, I have to, like, scramble and take everything on—what that actually taught me was that there is an abundance of work out there in the things that I did want to do. And I would have only learned that if, like, I was just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. Did that answer your question?

Jillian- Yeah, yeah. definitely. Yeah. You have to sort through lots of things to find what works for you. And as you were going into your fourth year of freelancing, you, you know, you've tried all these things, you found what—a few things that work and that you want to keep and a few things you want to move on from. Could you talk a little more about how you created your mix of income stream for yourself and kind of what that looked like at that time?

Wudan- Yeah, so from years four to, I want to say six or seven, I really believed in this concept that I've coined on the show called rotating stability, which was—my life was very chaotic for the very beginning of my career because I wanted to do international reporting. And so when people talk about having an anchor client, right, I'm like, I can't promise anyone that I'm going to be at my desk for 20 hours a month for an entire calendar year. I just can't. I was, frankly, traveling up to four months a year and reporting during that time. And so my lifestyle that I wanted would not support me really having, like, one stable job. And so I basically rotated in. I basically, because I told everyone, you know, I'm open for work, I had a stable of clients who can, you know, like, in January, I can have $2,000 of work for them. They could come again in June, when an asynchronous schedule would work better for me. Or if a magazine needed fact-checking, well, I can't promise them to that every single month, but I can promise that, like, for the months that I'm not traveling and reporting overseas, right? And so, but having that roster of clients to call on really helped me, again, just like be able to pay rent. And so a lot of my early work was content writing, fact-checking, and then journalism, with fact-checking and content kind of being like 40 to 50% and then journalism actually was a huge component, because in the start of my career, I really wanted to establish myself as a journalist.

Jillian- So, you were trying a bunch of different, you know, avenues And finally, finding people that were okay with your schedule and that needed the kind of work you wanted to create, which it definitely takes time to kind of build that roster up. It is very solid advice to keep building multiple income streams. But do you have advice for people starting out, you know as freelancing now, about building up that stream or kind of avenues you can do that today?

Wudan- Yeah, I think income diversity is more important than ever. In media, particularly if you just have one employer paying your salary and for your health care, that's actually quite precarious. And so when I think about what's possible now, because the media landscape has changed a lot. Like, right now, media is in freefall, decline. I think there are much fewer opportunities for folks to get onboarded at, you know, publications that really gave early-career journalists a chance. So I don't know. It's a little tone deaf to think that everyone out of J-School, or early in their career, can land an internship at the New York Times, which is that's how the pool of opportunities feels like right now. And so what I did in the start of my career was know that there wasn't any shame in doing non-media work to earn that ground floor income. As I said in the first year for me, that was being a test prep tutor, and that company actually gave me, like, more than enough to live on in New York City as I was building clips, gathering skills, building people on my network, and so on and so forth. And so I think that advice can still resonate, because there are lots of jobs out there that can you know, like, pay you what you need to live, but also perhaps reserve creative and analytical space for people to pursue, like, whatever creative career that they want.

Jillian- Yeah, I think that's great advice, and I completely agree. And as you were getting more used to your craft, and now you're solidly, you know, five years into your career, you hired your first team member for yourself, an editorial assistant. I would love to hear about why you decided to do that, and what sort of work you outsource to your editorial assistant. And also, you know what you learned about creating your own team for yourself as a freelancer, because I think that's something a lot of freelancers don't take advantage of.

Wudan- I agree. Hiring an assistant and hiring help was the best. It was the best damn thing I could have done. So in year five, so now we're in 2019, I wrote a viral piece about how three publications were late to paying me. And instead of just sucking it up and being nice, I was not nice. And I basically asked all of them to pay late fees, either by myself or via a lawyer or by filing a complaint through other methods, so on and so forth. Anyway, everyone paid up because I was so persistent, and I think that lends to the virality of this piece. And people still, you know, like five years after, still reach out to me about it. But chasing late payments and following up didn't take so much time as it did emotional energy. I just remember, like, riding my bike to the gym, and, like, doing my workout, and like climbing with friends and feeling so angry at the injustice. And, like, you know, wandering around the city, even if I was just like running an errand or doing something like not work related at all, my brain would just go through what I would say, like, diplomatically in an email.And it just took up so much emotional space. And so, you know, if you're late to paying your rent or credit card bill, eventually things move to collections. And I was like, I wonder if I can have somebody doing my collections. And so that was the first thought that led me to get an editorial assistant. So my first EA definitely helped follow up on invoices that were about to be due, and gave them like, a separate email in which they pretended to be my book—I mean, they were my bookkeeper—but a separate email that came from a bookkeeper, right? So clients, if they were like, oh God, we have to pay Wudan, somebody else is holding us accountable. They're like, we better, you know, we better comply. And so I think there is something psychologically about that. But I also outsource things like research. Like, if I was writing a story and I wanted to assert something, I would ask my EA to help back that up with a source. If I was coming up with people to interview for a story, I would have my EA make a list of experts I could interview, and so on and so forth. So there were so many uses. And you know, in 2019 I was still traveling quite a bit for work. And so what was so amazing about outsourcing to an assistant is that my desk work still got done when I was on the road, and that blew my little mind, quite frankly.

Jillian- Yeah, that sounds amazing, especially dealing with the admin work of invoicing and follow—I just do think that's unfortunately such a consumer of freelancer's brain still, you know. I found it's gotten worse this year, at least for me, as far as following up on payments and stuff. And I don't know if you would just want to mention that, you know, at least in New York State, finally, we are seeing laws that are actually legally allowing freelancers to demand late fees, which I have been taking advantage of.

Wudan- That's awesome. Yes, yes, New York State, the entire state before it was just New York City, has the Freelance Isn't Free Act now signed into law. And so when clients are late to paying, whether you live in New York or the client is based in New York, is what I understand the law saying, you are entitled to double damages. And so many freelancers are like, what percentage late fee do I charge? I was like, well, it kind of depends. I mean, I'm lucky too. In Seattle, there's also a law that basically replicates New York's Freelances Isn't Free Act. The other thing I want to say about outsourcing stuff to an assistant is that the more I get into my career, the more I identify as an entrepreneur over anything. And in the world of entrepreneurship, there's this idea of working on the business versus working in the business. And so when I think about my own editorial business, working on the business means, like, having a grand vision. It means doing the creative work that's going to get me more work. Working in the business is all this admin stuff that you and I are talking about right now that seems like wildly uninteresting. And so if there's a way to, kind of like, outsource the working in the business component to other people, that really has opened up headspace and has really allowed me to grow my income as well as a freelancer.

Jillian- Yeah, that makes so much sense. Do you have any specific advice for where people can find support like that if they if they want to start looking?

Wudan- Yeah, so I remember sharing my posting on Twitter, which I don't use anymore, so I guess LinkedIn is the new Twitter or Threads. In any case, social networks that target the people that you're looking to hire. This can be professional Slack communities, your own email newsletter and listservs, some private Facebook groups that you're a part of. Those are all really great places to get the word out that you're looking, yeah, to fill a position.

Jillian- Now you've got your start of your own team. Moving into 2020, you launched your first business, The Writers Co-op.

Wudan- My second business.

Jillian- Oh, I'm sorry.

Wudan- That's okay.

Jillian- My apologies. You first had your editorial business, right?

Wudan- Mhm. yes.

Jillian- And then moved on to your second business, of The Writers Co-op.

Wudan- Yes.

Jillian- So as you launched The Writers' Co-op, and you were moving forward to providing a creative community and a place for other creatives to come to you, to ask questions, to get support for all of that. But you're, of course, still working on your own creative journey as well, still building your own editorial business. So as you kept moving forward, you finally hit that really big financial goal that so many people talk about, which is the six figure club. Making $100,000, which, you know, is very exciting, and you know, is certainly an above-average income, especially for freelancers. But you also experienced a lot of backlash from, you know, hitting that number at this time, because you experienced a lot of burnout and overwork. So what would you say about that time in your life and experiencing that burnout? And what do you wish more people knew about hitting that kind of mythical milestone?

Wudan- Yeah, I mean, a lot of milestones in life are societally defined, right? Like, marriage, buying a house. Well, what does that actually signify? Right? Like, society thinks that's a marker of adulthood, but, like, is that your marker of adulthood? Right? And I think similarly, freelancers attribute a lot of extrinsic value to hitting a six-figure income. And the funny thing is, I wasn't even intending for that to be the goal at the beginning of 2020. It just happened to be that way because the pandemic forced me. I mean, I wasn't able to do my normal thing of traveling three to four months out of the year to work on narrative nonfiction pieces, magazine stories. And so all of a sudden I was home, and as a science journalist who has expertise in like science and research and medicine, lots of editors wanted me to cover Covid. And I felt such a profound obligation to do that in service of getting accurate information out to the public that I constantly said yes. And it wasn't until, I don't know, like, September or October that year, I was like, oh my god, I'm so close to making six figures. Also, I feel like I'm gonna die. I'm just so incredibly tired. And so I think, like, number fixation is real. People have it. And I'm not here to make an argument for or against it, but I do want to be real with people and say that, you know, sometimes income goals isn't so much about the money or like getting to it, but it's how you get to it. You can overwork yourself, as I did that first year and get to that figure. Or you can be really strategic and price projects appropriately, target clients who pay more, prioritize self-care, for instance. So you're able to open up space during those work hours to work very efficiently or at a pace that suits you to hit those income goals. And so I think, you know, there's this obsession with the number, but sometimes the methods can really differ, and some methods can, you know, I think, have really severe mental health repercussions. So I believe every freelancer should have income goals. It is inherent to how I set up my freelance business and how I advise many other people to set up their freelance business. Because if you don't know how much you need to earn, how are you going to price your offerings accordingly? How many—how do you figure out how many clients you need, so on and so forth? So I think knowing that number is important, but the how that you're going to get there is equally important.

Jillian- Yeah, that must have been an extremely intense year, not only dealing with Covid yourself and keeping yourself and your loved one, safe and all of that, but then also writing about it constantly. What was that burnout like for you, and how did you realize you needed to step back and take some rest?

Wudan- Yeah, so I've written about this a little bit. I'll link to it in the show notes. Very early in my career, I wrote a piece about the emotional toll of science reporting. And so much of journalism, you know, can focus on the trauma of, say, covering war or conflict or even interviewing survivors of sexual assaults, but there's so many other ways that journalists take on the secondary trauma from the people that we are interviewing. And so it wasn't just the cadence of work, it was also hearing these stories about how people were really, really, really suffering. And to be clear, you know, I covered Covid, and then people had me work on the protests, and it was very much so enmeshed. I got a therapist, because that felt like a must, not a nice-to-have, and that was supremely helpful in just aiding me through my thought process and breaking really toxic habits that I have had my entire life. But have, you know, really shown their head in 2020 but yeah, I think journalism is so important, but in order to do that important work, we also need to take care of ourselves.

Jillian- So after that extremely difficult year, how did you take care of yourself in a better way, and, you know, come back from that burnout so you could start being more creative again?

Wudan- Oh, that's such a good question. And there are some pretty good resources about burnout. One book that really helped me clarify my understanding of what burnout is is called Burnout by the Nagowski sisters. I can provide a link to that in the show notes. And it basically described burnout as dealing with a system that's very broken, constantly, over and over again, and just having to operate in that system. I mean, that really resonated with me as a woman of color, as a journalist, because it does not always feel like I live in a world and work in an industry that has my best interests at heart, and so it required me to set my own boundaries. So since the fall of 2020, I have not worked Fridays. I work a four-day work week. I take anywhere from two and a half to three months off on vacation every single year, and it sounds counterintuitive, but working less and working more smartly has enabled me to work better and still hit the amount of money I need to make. So yeah, that was really eye-opening, too. Back to my point of, like, there's so many methods of like making the amount of money you want, whether it's like 100k or 200k or even just like 80k right? Like, it really forced me to prioritize rest.

Jillian- Yeah, so o as you prioritized rest for yourself, and learned how to take real time off, which is so important for all of us. I love to hear that you do that every year. Of course, you were still running both of your businesses and continually learning, okay, how do I support other people and support myself? So how do you do that balance between being a coach and being a mentor and supporting other people's work while still fostering your own creative goals?

Wudan- It's really hard. I think here's the thing about goal-setting, right, and having like a vision of what you want for your own freelance business is that not all of those things have to happen at exactly the same time. And so, you know, when I look forward at an entire year, I can say to myself: This year, I want to accomplish this in my editorial business. This is what I want to do with The Writers' Co-op. This is how I want to grow in, like, some other way, whether it's in skill or service area, but, like, I'm not going to start that sprint on those three big things all in January. I can say, like January or quarter one, I'm going to focus on my editorial business. Quarter two, I'm going to focus on something else. It is literally like—when people talk about the back burner, this is what I envision, you know, in terms of, like, learning how to prioritize. Because our capacity to do everything all at once is limited. I think that is probably universally true. But I think figuring out what is the priority in a given quarter and then nailing it down to what's the priority in a given month or a given week, and I do that weekly planning and monthly planning all the time. This year, I worked on launching my third business, Factual, and that began all the way back in February. January, I was like, I'm gonna sit down and make a plan. And then I basically, like, petered out everything I had to do from February to launch in October. And so that's not an everything happens all at once situation at all. Because it couldn't be. I needed time to idea,te and I also needed to understand, like, what was going to happen in my own life in like, quarter one, quarter two, or very specific months that would either allow me to have a lot of capacity to build something new or not, right? And so I do feel like freelancing is constantly juggling a lot of pots and a lot of burners.

Jillian- Yeah, of course, juggling many things, but also leaning into the seasonality, and, you know, the quarters, just like you talked about. We are going to have more space, more time, more mental capacity in certain times of the year than others. Even just more physical energy. So I think that that's something that we can all learn to flow into easier, rather than pushing ourselves to the brink every chance we get. Smetimes we're gonna give more and sometimes we're gonna be able to give less.

Wudan- Yeah, I mean, in high school, I ran varsity track for four years, and I was a sprinter. And what I learned as a sprinter is that you can only sprint for so long before your entire body starts failing. I just have very vivid memories of, like, completing a 400-meter dash, and, like, bent over at the finish line, because I couldn't do anything else. I was completely spent. And in adulthood, what I have learned is that it's really hard to have a sprint mindset all the time for the exact same thing. Because, I mean, burnout is inevitable, and we have to take care of ourselves in that process.

Jillian- So 10 years into learning how to successfully juggle all these different things and starting two businesses, you—like you mentioned, you started Factual, your third business, which connects nonfiction writers with fact-checkers, which is, you know, your very first skill you ever learned. So it's kind of cool to bring it full circle like that. But what was it like to build this third business after you did have all this knowledge you've gained of 10 years of freelancing, all those skills, plus starting two other businesses already?

Wudan- Yeah, so I will say, you know, The Writers' Co-op came into the world in 2020. End of 2022, early 2023, I took full ownership of The Writers Co-op. And from 2020 to early 2024, I kind of kept wondering, like, where my ambition has gone. And some very smart writers have covered this. Anne Helen Peterson, for instance, there's an entire book about ambition out right now. And, you know, I think the pandemic—and I hate blaming everything on the pandemic—but I will say the pandemic has really, like forced a lot of us into figuring out not just what we need to survive, but what we need to thrive. And I think for me, it was a lot more basic than like, self-actualization through my job. And because of burnout and recovering from that, I forced myself into this period of like sustainability. Of like plateauing, basically, right? And that's why I was like, ugh, am I not ambitious about journalism anymore? Am I not ambitious about like, podcasting? I mean, fill in the blank.. I kind of just went down the list. But what I really needed was this dormant period, kind of like how bears lie in a den for many, many months every single winter, to just like sleep and nourish themselves, before they come out again and can do something else. And that's what it felt like to finally have enough energy this year to launch Factual. So on an energetic level, that's what I really needed, to find sustainability to, you know, take the amount of time I needed off to just like, hold steady. Because it's—just as it's unsustainable to sprint all the time, it is unsustainable to constantly being growing, because that's exhausting.

Jillian- Do you feel like you're entering another period of kind of sustaining now that you have launched the business?

Wudan- Yeah, I think it has led me to reprioritize what I believe needs to happen in my work and in my life, and kind of move from there, what I try to impress on so many freelancers, through The Writers' Co-op and through my private coaching practice, is this constant awareness and reflection of what's going on in your life and business, because those things are too very much so enmeshed. They're different, but they're very enmeshed. Because life often informs how much work we're able to take on. Or what kind of work period that we can take on, right? And so, because life is constantly in flux, work must be as well. And I'm talking specifically about running freelance businesses, because we have so much control, right? Over what our freelance business looks like, where we work, what hours we work, so on and so forth. And so that awareness can help us make better decisions. Because what I see most commonly when people come into my coaching room is that, well, I did all these things, like two years ago, and now it's not working. Meanwhile, my life has changed. It's like we can't do the same thing all the time. And so, you know, like my work situation has changed this year. I now run three businesses. And that's a lot, and I still have to hold steady and hold very firm boundaries in a lot of aspects of my life, such as taking time off and socializing with friends and all of that. That still enable me to do all three. And I mean, that is a gargantuan task, and I'm reminded many, many times this year that, like most people just have one job. So yeah, it's constant reflection, constant iteration, constantly changing.

Jillian- And you mentioned ambition, and you know, the return of your ambition, which I definitely have felt in the last year and a half, I would say. What is your ambition for the future? Something you wouldn't mind sharing with all of us?

Wudan- Ooo that's uch a great question, and something I'm thinking a lot more of. As I said a bit earlier, I identify a lot more as an entrepreneur than a journalist or a podcaster or fact-checker. And I think as media crumbles, ending up in more and more conversations about like, not even what's your plan B, at this point. It's like, what's your plan D, what's your plan E?And I'm really grateful that freelancing, running my first editorial business, and then launching The Writer's Co-op, and then launching Factual, has given me a real glimpse into that other world of entrepreneurship. I have a lot more confidence now that I can build another business that can't like, may or may not be media-adjacent, but at least I have the skills. At least I understand the foundation of how to build a business and like the marketing and, you know, the brass tacks of it all. And I wish more freelancers saw what they are doing as, like, a small subset of being an entrepreneur, because that is a really applicable skill. You know, earlier this season, we had Ashley Cisneros, Mejia, talk about how to break into different industries, different service offerings, and there's this big focus on skills, rather than what we call a particular product that we're putting out in the world. And so I love that freelancers get to hone a lot of their skills as entrepreneurs, because that has a lot of applicability outside of media.

Jillian- Yeah, absolutely, there are so many different paths to take, and you've taken many of them yourself. So thank you so much for sharing so much about your 10 year career so far. And I'm so excited to see what comes next with Factual and what else you're gonna show us over the next 10 years. Thank you so much.

Wudan- Thank you so much, Jillian. These were great questions.

Jillian- Thank you.

Wudan- Thanks so much to Jillian for co-hosting this episode. You can follow her on LinkedIn. We'll leave her profile in the show notes. This episode of The Writers' Co-op was written and executive produced by me, Wudan Yan. Our producer is Margaret Osborne, and our editor is Susan Valot.