MSH #025: How I Embraced Minimalist Side Hustles to Actually Enjoy Life
Making Money Is Easy, and Having Fun Is Easy, but Making Money While Having Fun Isn’t Always Easy
Welcome to the twenty-fifth edition of the Minimalist Side Hustles newsletter.
I’ve been making money online for over 25 years now.
My passion for the online world started with my real-world passion, which was collecting, buying, selling, and trading hockey cards.
In the mid-90s, I would spend hours and hours organizing them, trading with friends, and going to card shows to buy and sell.
I was even the youngest ever to have my own table at one of the shows at the age of 12 (my mom had to be there with me, but I ran the table).
Once I discovered the online message boards and forums, I was able to make a ton of money by simply buying cards online and flipping them here, and vice versa.
It wasn’t complicated.
I lived in Montreal, so I would buy cards of players from our local team online and sell them here for 2–3–4 times the price I paid.
The best part is that I spent the money to further my collection and my passion; It was fun, and I was making money.
Logically, my next step was to evolve along with technology and the web.
I have created many hockey card-related websites over the years.
It’s how I developed my skills for web creation.
The very first one was just a grey background with black text when web creation options were very limited.
From there, I used tools like Microsoft Frontpage, Geocities, e107, Joomla, and many others before settling on WordPress for about 15 years.
WordPress is actually what made me decide to start creating websites for other people and businesses.
Which led me to start my own web consulting agency.
It was good money, but it was missing one big thing!
FUN!
Don’t get me wrong, I loved creating websites, but I just didn’t enjoy creating them for other people based on their requirements.
New Year's resolutions can be life-changing!
My 2020 New Year’s resolution is what started the transition to where I am today with my side hustles and my life.
I resolved to transition out of side hustles I didn’t enjoy into ones I did.
Even if that meant leaving more money on the table.
The only problem is that I didn’t know what I would really like unless I tried them, so that’s what I did. I tried over a dozen side hustles that year.
Some were great, and some were bad.
It was not the amount of money they earned that determined how good or not they were; It was how much I enjoyed them.
I kept the ones I liked and trashed the rest.
And then I kept trying new ones.
Repeating the process many times over.
Throwing spaghetti at the wall is a great strategy!
I’m sure you’ve heard that throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks isn’t a great way of doing things.
Well, I disagree!
I think it’s the best way to do things.
The goal isn’t to hope that things stick.
It’s to decide which things you want to stick.
Trying different things quickly is how I determine what I want to run with.
It’s not always obvious which side hustles are right or wrong for you, but you can always bring one back down the road to revisit it.
A lot of the time, it’s not about the actual side hustle but about the way you’ve chosen to do it.
You can choose how you want to do your side hustle!
The biggest mistake I made when trying some side hustles was deciding to do it the way I was told to do it by different “gurus” or creators.
It wasn’t because they were teaching something wrong.
They weren’t trying to deceive anyone.
Their way is probably better at making money than my way.
BUT…
If I don’t enjoy it, I’m not going to stick with it, so it wouldn’t be better at earning than my way.
You need to think long-term.
It has to be sustainable for you.
You need to be able to be consistent for a long time to be successful.
Once I accepted this and looked at everything with this mindset, everything changed.
It was hard at first in terms of “trusting the process” before I could actually see success in vanity and non-vanity metrics, but it was worth it!
Here are 4 examples of transitions I made on typical side hustles:
Owning/hosting a WordPress blog to blogging on Medium.
Publishing traditional books to self-publishing short/low content books.
Starting a clothing company to print on demand.
Creating a typical newsletter to only sending 3 short sentences daily.
I’ve rebranded them as minimalist side hustles with a few others.
And as I throw more spaghetti at the wall, the side hustles I do will change, and more importantly, how I do them will change as well!
We all need income, and we all have different situations, but if you can start a transition (as slow or as quick as you can) to side hustles you actually enjoy, you’ll find life a lot more enjoyable!
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