SUGGESTING I see seeking freelancer:work ratio is about 1:5, and that says something in these difficult times. I have been a freelancer all my life (27M), and

SUGGESTING I see seeking freelancer:work ratio is about 1:5, and that says something in these difficult times. I have been a freelancer all my life (27M), and one thing I continue to improve is working on my own side projects. It is difficult to rely on a freelance income, and if I can suggest one thing to fellow freelancers, it's that you have to work diversify income sources. Not all projects bring you money, bit all of them make you learn new things. Working on new projects help you learn new skills. For one project I worked on recently, I learned a lot about advanced regular expressions and floating point calculations with an arbitrary precision. For another, I ended up learning pretty much every subcommand of openssl. These niche skills can set you far ahead to keep your existing clients. SQL, for example, is surprisingly not well understood. Side quests are important.