While you may have your fair share of freelancer tools that help you in your day-to-day business, there’s more to freelancing than streamlined workflows.

Entrepreneurs often hear the cliche “if you have the drive, you will succeed.”

Ambition is one of those traits that drive you to seek education and innovation to better your brand and dedicate yourself to something greater, but a well-rounded digital nomad exudes so much more than ambition. Success in the gig economy simply isn’t possible without passion, confidence, fearlessness, adaptability, and humility, too.

While these traits aren’t freelancer tools in the traditional sense, consider them a part of your recipe for success:

Confidence in Yourself and Your Work

Confidence inspires trust and respect. It allows you to walk into a room full of strangers and turn it into a network of fruitful business relationships. With confidence, you can convince an investor that yours is the product worth supporting. It demonstrates your unwillingness to accept anything less than the best for yourself and your clients.

Confidence is an understanding, acceptance, and respect of self that is obvious and admirable to everyone you will encounter as an entrepreneur. Potential clients, associates, and industry adversaries will have no reason to doubt your competence if you demonstrate complete trust in yourself.

Fearless in the Face of Risk or Failure

Certainly, business ventures do not come without risks, roadblocks, and failures. The difference between a success story and a sob story is how failure is handled. Successful entrepreneurs must recognize the value of taking risks and pursue them with an acceptance of the possibility for failure. You must approach each risk with an understanding that there are lessons to be learned, no matter if you fail or succeed. Failures are valuable learning experiences if you are able to recognize the lesson and not get hindered by a misstep.

Humility

Humility is not often something that is mentioned when talking about the traits of an entrepreneur. It denotes a vulnerability that some consider to be a weakness.

But it is crucial to your success.

Humility forces you to recognize your own shortcomings. However, recognizing these shortcomings should not minimize your feelings of confidence. Practice humility to give yourself a realistic vision of where you could make improvements. Recognize that you still have much to learn. Make a commitment to your own continued personal growth and development.

Passion for Your Pursuits

Passion is a non-negotiable trait for anyone pursuing the entrepreneurial life. Entrepreneurship without passion is a waste of time and skills.

If you do not feel passionate about your business pursuits, you are in for a long, hard slog that may not lead to success. If you’ve decided to abandon traditional employment to become an entrepreneur, something must have sparked your interest. To maintain continued success, you must ignite that spark and use your passion to fuel your business. If at any time, you realize that you no longer feel passionate about your work, it may be time to move on to something new. Life is too short to waste time on things you do not thoroughly enjoy.

Adaptability

It would be unreasonable to assume that a business model created 20 years ago would be successful in today’s market. That’s because the business world is constantly evolving.

So, in order to succeed within such a dynamic environment, you must be adaptable. Adaptability requires you to pay constant attention to the trends within your industry as well as any developments in technology that can help you do business better. Do not be rigid in your business planning, so that you can allow for adjustments in the future. By planning for your own evolution, you’ll avoid being left behind as others change with the times.

Combining the freelancer tools you use in your business with these traits as a digital nomad can take you far when you want to succeed in business.

If you’re hungry for more, learn about the tools you need to succeed in the freedom economy with Spera.