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How Stress Can And Can’t Help You With Your Side Hustle
The right stressors will help you immensely — if you let them.
In the name of having multiple income streams, I’ve spent the past few months starting up a side hustle. I’m not co-founding a big and ambitious startup. Instead, I’m working on a couple of personal projects at the same time. One is a small piece of software that I intend to sell. The other is monetizing my writing.
I originally, and naively, used to think that building a successful side hustle only involved blocking out some time to get cracking after my 9–5 work was done for the day. Boy, was I wrong — even if I didn’t encounter much in the way of practical problems, my own head has been getting in the way of doing productive work.
Nothing is at stake, so little gets done.
Working on side projects is my personal choice, and as a salaried worker, it won’t impact my ability to keep a roof over my head. In other words, I only have something to gain from my projects, but nothing to lose — except perhaps some self-respect — if I decide to drop them.
Nothing is at stake, and if I fail, no one ever even needs to know. That’s the first problem.
