Freelancing is nice and you can find many advocates convincing you becoming a one. While there are obviously benefits in freelancing, there are also unpopular related topics people are avoiding talking about.

Here are some myths about freelancing based on my personal experience:

Choose project you willing to work on

Reality: projects are choosing you. Indeed at the certain moment you might choose between couple of projects but usually for keeping a cash flow active you will have to catch every opportunity with certain level of common sense.

You can find yourself doing less interesting things without improving market's trending skills and you should be ready for that.

Work from anywhere

Reality: working as a developer / part of agile team requires communication which in its turn requires participating on meeting with colleagues. It's nice that in theory you can work from exotic beach, but time zone, reduced distraction and good network coverage will be required.

Mental aspect is important as well: working from the beach slowly eliminated the border between work and life time, which every freelancer should keep clear.

Better work life balance

Reality: when you are a freelancer you work more, period. Suppose you are freelance software developer, besides of your full time (40 hours a week) you are paid for, you will also need to deal with searching for a new projects, invoicing, contracting and other boring topics. To emphasize: in order to handle freelance business you have to support and maintain topics which not directly relate to your expertise such as Sales, Accounting, Legal, Marketing and etc.

It can make impression as 15 minute tasks to you, however every topic is time consuming. You need to keep them in mind since no one is going to pay you for doing them. Slowly, the border between your personal life and business going to fade and you can find yourself literally working 24/7. Of course, with self-discipline and delegation you can get your time back but it will require an effort as well.

The imposter syndrome

Reality: As a freelancer even if you are participating on all corporate meetings, you are always external employee. The time limited nature of your contract makes you feel rather not belonging and that’s what it is.

Freelancing is a mind set and "single man" company to manage, is not suitable for everybody. Keep this in mind when you planning becoming a one.