There is a great new buzzword making the rounds, and it deserves some profile. The concept is the “side hustle,” outside-of-work activity that keeps people interested while making a bit of extra money. People who have a good side-hustle have great things to say about it.
Side hustles are jobs that pay you to learn, so consider them “real-world” MBAs as Sam McRoberts refers to them as in this article in Entrepreneur.com. You are likely to learn sales, negotiation, and website design. Several authors note that you are obliged to learn a lot of time management skills. There’s nothing quite like being overly-busy with something you love to motivate you to organize your day properly.
Amongst the benefits of side hustles, one of the biggest is figuring out what you want to do with your life. We have all had day-jobs that weren’t thrilling. The idea is, name your biggest passion, get out and do it, and explore if that kind of work is really for you. It’s important for those in early-career who are still trying to find their calling. One millennial, Samantha Matt, wrote a 2015 blog post in the Huffington Post in which she cuts to the heart.
“Even if you’re not 100 percent happy at your day job, if you’ve got something in the works on the side that you absolutely love, that will ultimately lead to happiness…”
She talks about a number of functional career outcomes but you can tell from her tone that she’s just wildly ambitious and wants a career that is engaging and taking her places.
“…when I first started out, writing a book was not something that was in the cards. With a side hustle, you learn to always stay hungry and that will get you climbing the career ladder to success faster than you ever imagined.”
Mike Templeman in an article from Forbes describes increased opportunities to network, as the side-hustle opens you up to new a whole community. There’s nothing like sincere conversations about a labour-of-love to open up connections with a community of peers. Samantha Matt is doing what she loves, and she doesn’t mind doing the kind of thing that people normally think of as soul-sucking. She now enjoys chasing the dollar, she is motivated to work extra hours, and she is building her resume as a thrill. She can network for fun.
Don’t you wish you could have this life? At work, don’t we all wish that our peers or our employees could also have this kind of motivation?
Templeman describes how the extra energy from his side-hustle gave him more energy in his day job. His regular workplace “…was a place for me to socialize and push my limits… I started getting promoted because I was putting in extra effort all over the place and my ideas were getting recognized.” He describes an increased willingness to be creative in the workplace, because he had energy and mojo.
For the uninitiated, intrinsic motivation is that sense of acting on drives that come from inside you… to follow your heart, as it were. By contrast, society is often prescribing what you ought to do, and those prescriptions can make joy disappear. The big secret about side hustles is that by disregarding society’s prescriptions you can become more successful. And that is because you are listening to yourself, driving yourself, and putting in a stronger effort.
It’s a much-needed improvement on the idea that you should “follow your dreams.” You might have met people who caused themselves great harm by abandoning something secure in favour of a semi-delusional dream. What is different about the side-hustle, is that you have the option of holding onto the security while making safe experiments with your dream career. The side hustle gives you permission to fail.
As I described in my review of the McKinsey research on the Gig Economy, the key to gigs is that they are fulfilling if they are voluntary. Voluntary-ness is more important than the amount of money earned in terms of job satisfaction. But the money can arise from the higher productivity associated with motivation and courage.
Where does this courage come from? Some of it comes from developing your own bargaining power. McRoberts asserts that having a single point of failure is brutal to your career mobility.
“So why is it that most individuals have just one income? A single income means you’re trapped. You have fewer options, you’re in a weaker position to negotiate, and you’re in bad shape if that main-stream income happens to goes [sic] away. Granted, employers typically want it that way, because it puts them in a position of power.”
People are deciding that the expectation of devout loyalty to one employer is a con job. How can any employee in this crazy world express faith that their current employer will take care of them for years to come? As employees we need to develop our BATNA, short for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. In bargaining theory, a strong BATNA gives you something in your back-pocket that protects you from exploitation and allows you to be calmly brave when you ask for more. Your bargaining alternative is critical to the game of life in which everything is negotiable.
One last important point comes from Templeman when he notes you still need to check that you’re not breaking any rules with your employer. So yes, you need to be calculating, and cautious, and shrewd. Only then can you get on with it and follow your dreams.
Stuart Murray Speaks 