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Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine who is doing an awesome job side hustling her way through her creative talents. She paints, sketches, draws and set up an Etsy shop to sell cards, prints and custom prints. Given that I have my own side hustle of books, she asked me something that made me think about why I do the things that I do.
She asked: “How do you reconcile the fact that your side hustle will never replace your day job?”
It is a good question and the first thing that I thought was “I wouldn’t say never” but what was important here, and what I think the question was getting at, was that “Why do all this work to do a side hustle if it will never amount to anything?”
I have had similar philosophical conversations with some of my closest friends in management consulting. If you do all this work to develop an amazing business case, or strategic roadmap, and all the client does is print it out and put it on a shelf somewhere to collect dust (i.e., not do anything with it), do you feel at all depressed for putting in a ton of work into something that will never say the light of day?
My answer at the time was no — for me, doing excellent work was reward enough. And as I thought about what to say to my friend, the same thoughts went through my mind.
