Side Hustlin’: Your Ticket to a Job You Actually Enjoy Doing.
AS IF IT WASN’T ALREADY tough enough to find any job, you’ve also gotta fight off a bunch of obstacles to get the job you actually want.
This is especially true if you’re fresh out of college, degree still crisp around the edges and hope for a bright future still burning strongly within. Yes, you’ve got some valuable skills, but you don’t have much experience of using them successfully within a real business scenario, right?
University might’ve got you focussing hard on a single path — maybe two, in some cases. But somewhere in those four years or so, you took a look at your vocational ticket and realized it was one-way and that you might be forever confined to a career as a dentist, cleaning the rioja-stained teeth of neglectful patients.
Or maybe you’ve realized that your law degree was a mistake, that you’ve had enough of reading ridiculous small claims cases and need to deviate from your current borefest of a career path (no offence, lawyers out there). Having made the decision to change track, you end up stubbing your toe on a different problem from your graduate counterparts: you don’t have all the necessary skills for your new direction.
So how do you escape the limbo and avoid getting stuck in a professional rut? Easy: it’s the reason Spider-man had a gig as a local newspaper reporter, why Kanye West has decided to branch out into footwear design , and why Whoopi Goldberg used to work as a beautician. In a morgue. For real.
Pretty much every legend has one or had one. Ladies and gentelmen, jobseekers and thrillseekers, introducing: The Side Hustle.
Whether it’s taking a class or just geeking up with a book on a subject close to your heart, the Side Hustle can wear many different faces; it can be a weekend hobby or it can be a full-blown business.
But whichever shape or form it takes, the principle behind it remains constant: using your free time to take on a new task, evolving it, and repeating (iterating) it until it becomes a permanent skill. The results can really surprise you, as the stories you’re about to read will demonstrate.
This is the Tyba Guide to Side Hustlin’...
Having a Side Hustle exposes you to new opportunities.
Harry Campbell (pictured above) got himself a job as a driver for both Lyft and Uber — two companies very much at the center of the global city ‘Ride Revolution’.
Uber is an $18 billion dollar startup, and one of the fastest growing in the USA. Oh, and, at the time of writing this, they’re also hiring for a few positons on Tyba, by the way — just a heads up.
Meanwhile, Lyft is no slouch either, although it’s definitely the kid brother in the rideshare family.
Harry’s day job is actually working as an aeronautical engineer, where his projects are often measured over a period of months, rather than days or hours. So he often finds himself with a little extra time on his hands.
Being the business-minded, entrepreneurially-spirited chap that he is, Harry started looking for other ways to make money, which is how he ended up with a Side Hustle as a driver. He started out as a passenger and, during one of his rides, the driver let slip that he was raking in around $30 an hour for his efforts, whether he gave rides to passengers or not.
Harry didn’t need to hear another word. The very next day, he sent in an application and, before he could say “check your mirrors”, he was driving for Lyft in his spare time.
Now, while the extra cash flowing into his pocket was a great bonus, the thing Harry really loved about his new Side Hustle was meeting new faces from all sorts of places and backgrounds. It was just a totally different (and fun) way of networking for him.
In fact, he loved it so much that he eventually signed up to become a steering wheel jockey for Uber too, and now shuffles low-profile celebrities, interesting travelers and even athletes around town at the weekend for both companies.
So, curiosity killed the cat and led Harry to a Side Hustle that was simply supposed to be an additional money-maker. But it ended up becoming a paid hobby that surprised him by how much he enjoyed doing it…
A Side Hustle lets you push your boundaries and explore new options.
Photo credit: NEXT Berlin via flickr
Alex Ljung never actually meant to become an entrepreneur, but if there’s a great example of how to work a Side Hustle, Ljung is your guy.
He’s the founder of Soundcloud, by the way. You know, the audio distribution platform that boasts around 175 million unique listeners a month and an army of audiojunkies uploading roughly 12 hours’ worth of audio every minute? Yep, that Alex Ljung.
Alex was always interested in music and technology. As a teenager, he dreamt, like many a music geek, of becoming a sound engineer. He even produced an album on his own from within the humble studio that doubled up as his bedroom. The album actually ended up landing him a gig at a post production studio once he’d finished high school.
The unexpected success made Alex realize that maybe he had bigger fish to fry where his career and his passion was concerned. So, he went to college to study human-computer interaction and had plans to go on and work in research within the field.
Then, one day, he bumped into another fellow student — his future Soundcloud co-founder, Eric Wahlforss — and this meeting of minds would start to resculpt his dream like silly putty once again. In the much more open, idea-fertile forum of a university campus, Alex and Eric were able to pursue the projects they were actually passionate about together.
We were working on stuff and…suddenly realized something was missing and…we just had to do it. It wasn’t a choice or anything…A startup…became the vehicle we chose to actually do the thing we wanted to do. We wanted sound to be something different on the web.
That’s Alex describing the birth of Soundcloud like a slightly surprised yet proud first-time father.
Taking inspiration from the likes of Flickr and Wordpress, platforms that encourage user creation and make it easy to do, Alex and Eric harnessed their passion for audio and music as a means of expression to create Soundcloud.
So, from a Side Hustle as an amateur, bedroom disc jockey to founder of one of the most popular music platforms today… Pretty good going, wouldn’t you say?
Side Hustles are for ANYBODY and can be ANYTHING.
As you’ve already seen from Harry Campbell’s story earlier, absolutely any Tom, Dick or Harry can have a Side Hustle. You don’t necessarily need to be struggling for cash or working a job you don’t enjoy.
Take John C., for example: you might say that John is quite a lucky chap. He’s in his late 20s, lives on a three-acre plot of land in a nice home with his wife and two kids, and is already semi-retired.
“How is all that possible?” you ask. Well, John has a seasonal job working as a maintenance contractor at nuclear power plants. The job means that he has to work like a dog during the spring and the autumn but, on the flipside, gets summers and winters off.
John’s buddy Ron runs a portable toilet and septic tank business. You know those odorous cubicles of doom you try to avoid using at festivals unless it’s an absolute life-or-death situation? Yeah, those — they’re a business.
Initially, John started helping Ron out with some organisational issues. Then, one thing led to another and, before he knew it, taking care of society’s shit became John’s serious Side Hustle.
Now, some people may turn their noses up at this story (pun fully intended), but, for John, it was the realization of a dream — no shit. As a kid, he wanted to become a garbage collector — to be the guy skitching on the side of the truck and lobbing the bags into back.
In his own words:
“I like physical work and I truly think that waste removal is the backbone of society. It’s not quite my childhood dream job of trash removal, but septic pumping is pretty darn close. Wait for your septic to backup and let me know what the most important job in the world is lol!”
It’s a fair point, but the bigger picture is that the unsexy Side Hustle has allowed John to stash away a decent chunk of his income for rainier days and still keep his main hustle, which he also happens to enjoy. That all makes for one happy — if a little smelly at times — hustler!
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Getting your Side Hustle game going.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re thinking of founding your own company, working at your dream company, or just moving up the ladder in your current company: the Side Hustle can become a very valuable sidekick.
It’s a great way to shake up your skill set, meet other interesting people of a similar or even different mindset or even discover a talent you didn’t know you had. So here are a few resources to get the ball rolling:
- If you’re an aspiring techie, there are a whole bunch of virtual and physical classes available that’ll help bring your coding skills up to scratch. This can come in handy for a number of professional endeavours or hobbies, such as starting a blog.
- Shared workspaces are becoming a popular destination in cities all across the world for those looking to give their networking game a boost. They’re also great for anybody who works remotely. Check out WeWork or Grind, which are a couple of the most popular shared workspaces of the moment.
- If you just want to meet like-minded professionals or regular humans in your neighborhood, Meetups might be for you. Organized activities covering almost any hobby or passion you can think of. For the people, by the people, in just about any city you can think of.
- You’ll be surprised how many local universities and colleges offer classes and courses for non-students. It might come at a financial cost, but it’s never too late to hook yourself up with a new skill and expand those proverbial horizons. Alternatively, there are loads of online course providers available these days, too.
If your patience permits and your will encourages it, come check out more wise words about the world of work from my teammates and I, right here.
Happy hustlin’.
