Read this before you start a side hustle

If you’re reading this, then you’re one of a handful of people who has been here with me from nearly the beginning.

As of the time of this writing, you are one of a less than forty people who are subscribed to this newsletter. I have about as many subscribed to Medium, and about twice that as subscribers to Substack.

In total, that means I have about a hundred unique subscribers across three writing platforms.

I think it’s awesome all things considered.

Why?

I started focusing on social media writing when I turned the big four oh. I realized that after all this time, writing was the one thing that had been sorely neglected. My YouTube journey couldn’t continue forward as my second child was going through his first year of life. That combined with the responsibilities of a 9-5 career as well as raising my oldest son along with my wife was draining every bit of motivation from me to record, edit, and publish videos.

Regardless of what all the gurus say, this isn’t easy.

Here are three things that are downplayed, ignored, or given in fine print.

1. Self-discipline

Let’s be honest.

New Year’s Resolutions are the first to go every single year. The motivation is mostly in the mind. People are excited about starting fresh, and most are riding the highs (and lows) of the Holiday Season. Whether it was the awesome gifts you got or the chance to see family again, you used the momentum to reaffirm your commitment to that thing you wanted to achieve.

Every year, it’s the same outcome.

Obligations stack up, expectations are tempered, the feelings of novelty and excitement fade.

By the end of the first month, you’ve all but abandoned that project.

• It’s hard to pick up anything new when your plate is already full.

• It’s hard to integrate it into your life when you see it in its entirety.

• It’s hard to make the commitment to a new venture in the face of established routines.

You want to start a side hustle? The potential for monetary rewards and f*ck you money are so tempting. Plenty of people are out there making money hand-over-fist and going viral from posting notes and tweets and shorts. The stories are compelling, and it sounds so easy to just post, ghost, and profit.

Bullshit.

If it were that easy, then everyone would be a millionaire.

Start with the commitment to write something. Anything. Do it for a few minutes and go from there.

Better yet, ask yourself if you could do it if you didn’t make a single cent.

2. You aren’t all that (and a bag of potato chips)

I’ve made, and am making, all the classic mistakes that someone can in this endeavor.

I started out on Twitter before it was repurposed into the mouthpiece for the richest man in the world. I wanted to improve my short-form game, and I spent hours trying to write something that would garner attention. I bought courses, collected all the giveaways, hopped on over sixty calls meeting people from across the world, and I joined an engagement group.

That last one opened my eyes to the reality of this game.

The leader was suspended from Twitter and basically rug-pulled everyone’s engagement metrics overnight, revealing the ugly truth that we were just using each other to comment, like, and retweet to game the algorithm. It worked wonderfully…until it didn’t.

The algorithm shifted, people gradually quit, and the group died.

Up until that point, I thought I was doing well and that I had a handle on the whole writing thing. I thought I knew my niche and what I was about. I thought I was clear on my motivations and my identity despite my distracted sessions of engagement throughout the day.

I was a slave to everyone else’s expectations and demands.

Stay humble. There are no shortcuts.

3. You might be the sucker

I had no clue that I would spend the amount of money I spent to invest in this journey.

Most of it is well-worth the lessons that I’ve learned along the way, and I have a few more courses left to complete. The problem is not in the content, it’s in the implementation. More than once, I got stuck in a course because it would get to the point where they would ask you to figure out your niche or your offer or your elevator pitch, and I would faceplant.

If you don’t know your “why”, then you won’t get very far.

This newsletter has been rebranded and evolved several times since its inception, and its current iteration is the one that finally makes sense to me.

The potential pitfalls along the way to getting to this point were some of the greatest risks. I could have been scammed many times. I encountered lots of people sliding into my DMs when I was on Twitter. There was one that turned out to be a pig butcher, and I only found that out when I reverse-searched some of the screen captures she sent to me about her crypto scheme. Another person hounded me from the engagement group I was in for money for over a year after it collapsed, begging me to support them.

I was lucky I got out of that portion of beginner hell.

If you want to start a side hustle, go in with both eyes open and know the possible scams.

There’s more to say…a lot more in fact…but I’ll stop here for now.

You’ve probably seen or experienced some form of each of these in your time out here, and I’m preaching to the choir to some extent. After all, most of you started with me over on Twitter and went to Medium when it started to curdle. Even Medium is having its challenging moments right now, and Substack is the closest to the hybrid of the two.

If you are considering a side hustle, be honest and realistic about your expectations.

Think years, especially if you have a family and a career.