Nick Loper

a side hustle has a little bit more of an entrepreneurial upside where maybe you're not directly trading hours for dollars or maybe there's this vision, this hope, this dream that it could become something bigger as it definitely did for me with the shoe business.

Probably the textbook definition would be that upside potential. It's something that you have ownership over. Maybe it's an asset that you own versus, okay, I drive for Uber. Or I'm delivering pizzas or I'm, you know, doing Instacart deliveries or something like that. Right. Like that's, that absolutely counts as a side hustle in my mind.

Yeah, that word play that you just used is really key. And approaching it that way, saying, look, this is going to be a fun experiment. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to put some content out there. And approaching it that way lessens the sting of failure and kind of puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm going to test something out.

But at the same time, like you're limited on how much you can do by your hours in the day versus with you starting today. the podcast, it's all of a sudden from a single mic and two people having a conversation, you could reach thousands and thousands of people. And that is really powerful. It becomes a little bit more leveraged.

If it works, great. If it doesn't, okay, on to the next thing.

And I think there's a lot more upside, even just like starting a freelancing business. Like I'm going to do freelance writing, I'm going to do freelance podcast editing, whatever it is.

Yeah, I think it's that. You know, cash strapped nature, you know, look, we're dealing with a debt load, we're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases. And it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like, I was just looking for a way to use my free time more productively.

When I was first starting the shoe business, like I moved across the country for my day job, didn't have any friends like outside of the office, really. And so I had a lot of free times, nights and weekends. I was like, well, I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch TV.

That's a weird, it's a weird time, right? It's a weird statistic because on the surface, the economy is great. Unemployment is at record lows. Why are 44 million people feeling the need or the desire to go out and make extra money? So I think part of it is reactive, right? Housing, education, insurance, or healthcare, all of those costs have grown way faster than real wages.

But so, you know, how can I be more intentional, be more effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it?

So that's a driving factor, just the straight up cost of living and people feeling the crunch to make ends meet and pay down student debt. That's maybe the negative way to look at it.

And the more positive way to look at it is I have the ability and the desire to start something that scratches a creative itch, that is something that I have control over, that I'm interested in, that I'm passionate about. That's probably driving some of that as well. Those are the people that are more interesting to talk to than the people like, well, I need to make rent next month.

You're approaching it from a completely different standpoint.

Yeah, that word play that you just used is really key. And approaching it that way, saying, look, this is going to be a fun experiment. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to put some content out there. And approaching it that way lessens the sting of failure and kind of puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm going to test something out.

If it works, great. If it doesn't, okay, on to the next thing.

Yeah, I think it's that... you know, cash strapped nature. You know, look, we're dealing with a debt load. We're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases. And it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like, I was just looking for a way to use my free time more productively.

When I was first starting the shoe business, like I moved across the country for my day job, didn't have any friends like outside of the office, really. And so I had a lot of free times, nights and weekends. I was like, well, I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch TV.

But so, you know, how can I be more intentional, be more effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it?

Sure. Well, these will parallel Newton. So somebody wants to get nerdy and talk about physics. So law number one is like this inertia and momentum law where you might remember from physics, right? An object at rest is going to stay at rest and an object in motion is going to stay in motion until acted upon by an external force. And we see this over and over again with people who

are on the sidelines looking to get into the game, there has to be some motivating factor to get you to move, to take action, to register that domain name, to put up your profile on Upwork, to try and get that first client, to put yourself out there. And maybe that's a meeting with your boss that doesn't go as well as you planned.

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