We can no longer afford to sell 100% of our attention to one company. We have more power than ever before. The world is too big, too connected and too many choices exist to put all of our eggs in one basket. Instead, we the people are holding back portions of our creativity, passion, and innovation to invest into side hustles.
Today, companies should expect that their employees have side hustles.
The company’s offer of safety and predictability has become unreliable. Buy outs, sales, mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, reductions, reorganizations, missing Wall Street’s expectations, stock prices plummeting, governmental regulations, new fees, and fines, financial crisis’s an unstable world event all equal career instability for us.
Secondly, the company’s monopoly dissolved. The company no longer owns the means of production, the distribution channels of trade and access to capital. (Seth Godin- Thank you for showing me this reality). Today, anyone of us with a computer can create and distribute anything we imagine.
We can sell it, share it, outsource it, hire and fire, raise capital and distribute our offering. It reminds me of the Berlin Wall coming down. All of the sudden tremendous possibilities exist for those of us who used to live within the walled city.
People like us are realizing that although we have an obligation from 8 am to 5 pm, the world is our oyster from 5 pm to 8 am. As the big company continues to weaken as the safe haven for predictability and a retirement pension, we will continue to invest our curiosity, attention, and passions into side hustles.
We should borrow from the wisdom of the financial markets
Mutual fund holdings diversify risk by investing in multiple industries. One industry may be up while another is down. Side hustles don’t always produce reliability and financial predictability either. Regardless of financial performance outcomes, they can increase our joy and satisfy our unmet curiosities resulting in a positive net gain.
Don’t sell all of you. You are not for sale. Sell only the portion of you required to effectively produce positive results. Don’t skimp. Don’t fake it. Don’t cheat the system.
Invest the overflow, however small, into a side hustle.
