Every year, many of us start the month of January full of hope. The year lies ahead of us, pristine and brimming with possibility, a blank slate as crisp as the pages of our brand-new planner that will allow us, finally, to fulfill our potential. Our failures and disappointments are a thing of the past.
This is even truer of freelance professionals, which many translators are. Self-employed workers can feel the satisfaction of having more control over their careers than others, but this means that their responsibility for successes and failures is also greater. January is the time not only to assess our performance in the previous year, but often to take stock of our career as a whole. It’s a time of hope in which we can grant ourselves a second chance to fix the mistakes of the past and commit to a better future.
But this New Year spirit is not without controversy. Many decry New Year resolutions as naïve and even self-indulgent, an excuse to bask for a few days in the satisfaction of imagined progress that is rarely realized to the full extent of our expectations.
From JVE Linguistic Services, however, we want to encourage freelance translators and other professionals to look forward to a better 2023. While perfection is an unattainable goal, there is no improvement without hope, and even imperfectly realized New Year resolutions push us forward and closer to where we want to be. This year, start doing yoga, join that Italian class, or finally create your own professional website. By December 2023, you might not be a brand new person, but you will certainly be a more hopeful one.
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