The Allure of Shitty Side Hustles
It’s Friday night and I sit on the lounge watching sports. I should be relaxing but instead I am scrolling through market research questions. Online surveys, available to the masses, which doesn’t leverage any of the skills that I have refined over many years.
Enter the world of side hustles. Things that we work on in addition to the usual 9-5 job.
The return on investment is rather terrible. Yet for some reason I chase these shitty side hustles by choice.
Let’s Talk About Side Hustles
Firstly, I hate the term “side hustle”. It’s a term which has popped up over the last decade, likely led, or at the very least encouraged by, big businesses who often appear to be paying exploitative wages to their employees. Apologies, I mis-spelled “independent contractors”.
It sounds alluring at first:
- “Earn money in your own free time”
- “Make up your own schedule”
- “Money when you need it”
- “No cap on earnings”
Side gigs used to have more of an entrepreneurial feel to them. Someone going out and forging their own way, taking some initiative. But now with the rise in the popularity of the term they sound almost cringeworthy.
I’m fortunate that I don’t rely on side hustles and the gig economy to survive, I do little bits and pieces by choice.
The internet has really opened up the options when it comes to doing a little something on the side. Barriers to entry are low, the potentially audience is only capped by the population of planet earth …or at least those with internet access.
We must also address the elephant in the room. This very story is just another example of a shitty side hustle.
The Two Main Buckets Of Side Hustles
We can probably throw these side hustle activities into two buckets:
- Piecework for someone else: This is where i’ll throw my surveys. It’s a few dollars here and there. Some people refer to it as “beer money”, as that’s about all it’s going to pay for. A beer or two each week for maybe an hour or two of your time. Also in this bucket are the likes of driving for Uber Eats, where you are performing a task, in this case delivering cold food, in exchange for a pre-defined return on your effort.
- Creative endeavours: Building something. This is where I have spent thousands of hours over many years. The likes of building websites, YouTube channels, article writing, working on the marketing, the advertising, and everything else that goes along with these activities. You are building something, without knowing if you will ever be paid a cent for any of it.
It is this second group, the creative hustle, that provides the largest benefits, although the least certainty of any return.
It is then also no surprise that it’s the second group that I am largely chasing.
Variety
Many people say that they don’t want to work. I’m guilty as charged here too. But that’s not quite the whole truth. I just don’t particularly enjoy doing the same types of tasks for 40 hours or more a week in big 8 or 10 hour blocks condensed over 5 working days. I also don’t particularly enjoy being told exactly what I have to work on.
But often this is the life that we are signing ourselves up to when we leave school and start almost any career.
This is where the shitty side hustle steps up to the plate. Suddenly it is an opportunity to work on something different. Most people work because they have to. They spend years training and building up skills in order to become better at a specific activity, which then allows them to be promoted and earn more money. Trying other things isn’t financially viable for most people. Living is expensive. If you want to live a comfortable life with a nice house and car, seeking variety by bouncing around different entry-level jobs isn’t going to pay those bills.
How many professional car mechanics do you know who would work at their job for free? Probably close to none, they are largely doing it for the money and look forward to the end of the working week as much as most other people. But then think about how many dream of spending their weekends locked away in their garages building and tinkering on similar projects, probably some of those same mechanics too. People enjoy performing work, but only work which they are choosing, the type which often doesn’t have a financial incentive. In the case of working on project cars, it’s more of a money sink. Albeit, a delightful money sink.
I couldn’t stay motivated writing for 40 hours a week. I couldn’t stay motivated editing YouTube videos for 40 hours a week either.
If I were doing surveys for 40 hours a week, I sure wouldn’t be sitting on the couch on a Friday night doing them in my free time.
It’s often not the type of work that is the problem, much of which is actually rewarding, but the lack of variety.
The Feeling That You Should Be Doing More
This is a dangerous cultural problem, the feeling that you should always be chasing more. Part of it may be a “Keeping Up With The Joneses” thing linked to showing off material goods, but the other more damaging part is leaving people feeling as though the have never done enough, they should be doing something else in order to be a “better” person.
At which point can we allow ourselves to say that we have done enough? We could all cut out television, cut out entertainment in general, and instead spend a few hours a day studying for an MBA or a degree in Ethnobotany. But is that what is meant to make us feel content with life?
Am I really allowed to just sit back and relax all weekend? Isn’t that “being lazy”, when instead I could be trying to make more money.
The shitty side hustle comes barbed with this dangerous hook.
The Creative Outlet
An alternative title could have been “the joy of building”, as building and being creative is a joy.
Many of us in our normal 9 to 5 hourly or salary jobs don’t have the freedom to be overly creative. Maybe we have the freedom to select a font color, define a new process workflow, or the order that we stack shelves, but we normally don’t have the freedom to dream interesting things up and watch them come to life.
Side hustles, maybe better labelled as startup micro-businesses, provide this flexibility. Starting from scratch, you have the possibility to build anything that your heart desires. Most of it won’t end up being a successful as you hoped for, but you still have a product that you can point to and say “I built that, and it didn’t exist before.”
It’s taking a step into the arts.
The shitty side hustle allows you to build.
Builds Transferrable Skills
Throughout life we all take on a number of different hobbies. What you begin to realise is that the more new hobbies you pick up the easier they are to get rolling with.
I decided to go camping a few years ago, so took a quick inventory of the things that I needed to purchase. Many necessities from the list were already covered off due to my previous hiking purchases. If I want to start a musical instrument, my guitar experience has the musical theory for a large part taken care of.
Almost every solo YouTuber will pick up camera recording skills, video editing skills, image editing for thumbnails skills, and maybe a little bit of SEO skills or copy-writing skills thrown in too. And let’s not forget marketing.
Shitty side hustles help to build non-shitty skills that you can use elsewhere in your life. These opportunities will usually come up at unexpected times.
Potential For Big Things
They have the potential to be absolutely anything. This is more-so the creative endeavour type of hustle, rather than the task-based slave contracting.
I find the first few weeks are usually the most exciting of any new shitty side hustle. On day number one of starting a YouTube channel you may have the thought that you could end up as big as a Mr Beast or PewDiePie.
The creative endeavours, especially when internet-based and close to infinitely scalable, do truly offer this possibility too. Although the odds of making it huge are extremely slim, it is far from impossible. Many others before have reached those heights through the same sorts of methods.
What is often not realised by many though is that variety, a benefit of side hustles mentioned above, needs to take a step back in order for many projects to succeed. The long grind, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of video editing, are often the recipe described by the best in the business.
It’s not quite the glorified side hustle in a few spare hours on the weekend that many marketers will tell you. These are real businesses.
And maybe being a business owner, or just the fact that you can get away with telling others that you are a business owner, is enough to keep some interested in these pursuits.
The shitty side hustle has big possibilities, but you’ll probably need to shift your side hustle mindset if you want to make them a reality.
Perspective
I tell myself that I am doing these things for money. And that is partially true, as if there was not the dangling carrot of potential future money I may not go down these paths. But it’s not the whole truth.
These are my creative outlets. I enjoy learning new skills. I find pleasure in performing these activities.
I love building. I love competition.
The shitty side hustle is very alluring.
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