Photo by Chris Dreyer on Unsplash

I came out of a serious predicament recently!

I was struck with a personal health emergency in the family about 2 years ago. My wife had a stroke.

I couldn’t hang up my boots, for obvious reasons!

I wanted something that I could do sitting at home and with flexible timing. Additionally, needless to say, it should also enable me to pay my bills.  

I am good at writing, I knew.

Content writing, ghostwriting, copywriting, technical writing, and scores of other similar words started resonating in my ears.

I have been in research for four decades, leading a research agency for about three decades. I needed all the time to pursue it further. I didn’t have the luxury of doing so.

I became a creative writer in 2017 and became a published author in 2019. Didn’t look back after that.

IKIGAI

I started randomly watching YouTube videos about ‘remote’ and ‘freelancing’ jobs related to writing. I stumbled upon a ‘writing course’ by Ankur Warikoo called ‘Make Writing a Career’. I learned about IKIGAI.  

It’s just amazing!

IKIGAI is a Japanese philosophy that is translated into ‘your reason of being’. It comprises 4 elements that depict the direction you take for your life/career.

1. What do you love to do? Or your passion
2. What you are good at? Or your vocation
3. What the world needs? Or your mission
4. What you can be paid for? Or your profession

I started solving my IKIGAI jigsaw puzzle, answering each of the four questions.

1. My first love is music. I love to sing, only to myself.
2. I think I am good at it, but I have no formal training, and I have crossed the age. I can no longer hold my breath.     

Music is hence eliminated. Then what?

Storytelling! I love storytelling. I love writing. Hence, my IKIGAI is:

1. I love writing and storytelling.
2. I am good at it (I guess). I have been a creative writer for 7-8 years and have been writing technical reports for 4 decades.
3. The world (definitely) needs writers (like me).
4. I can be paid for the tasks I do.

So, my IKIGAI is WRITING!

Having decided that my IKIGAI is WRITING, I marched ahead.

Road ahead

I started my research to find out the platforms best suited for my IKIGAI. I got lists of several such platforms. I watched umpteen videos and asked a million questions to ChatGPT, before settling down for:

• Upwork, and
• LinkedIn

I was tutored by these videos by Gen Z or Zoomers, as they are often referred to, with sharp brains and knowledge about the Internet and its intricacies in changing my profile to optimize it for lead generation.  

I created my website to write blog posts (https://prateeproy.com/). I created my tagline:

“FEW WORDS, BUT BANG ON!”

I started writing short blog posts on my website. Meanwhile, I had also started writing on MEDIUM, another platform for writers to showcase their talent and monetize their work.

I was now immersed in writing and also was looking for options to monetize it.

The breakthrough came quite soon. Within about a fortnight of submitting several proposals. I hit the bull’s eye.

I was awarded an assignment. An interesting and something I was not aware of.

I was given eight (8) AI-written essays that I needed to convert into Human-written essays. Using my creative writing skills, I wrote 4 drafts, each with a small proportion of unchanged words/sentences, another proportion of changed words/sentences, and added new words/sentences in such a way that the essence of the essay was not lost. The last/final draft was written in such a way that it would pass any test on an App to assess whether it was AI-written.  

It was tough but fun!  

And now, it’s miles to go!