Introduction: Do the Hustle
I REALIZED SOMETHING HAD TO CHANGE AS I WAS DRIVING HOME from work on the way to pick up my daughter from preschool. I had spent much of the day missing her—her giggles, her made-up words, her new attempts at running—and even though I enjoyed my work projects, my mind had frequently wandered. If only I had more control, I thought, I could rearrange my schedule so I worked intensely in the mornings, when I was most creative and productive, and spend afternoons playing dress-up and pretending to be a monkey. Then, I could complete the day's work after her 7 p.m. bedtime.
To make this happen, I needed two things: more power and more money. As flexible as my boss was, she couldn't grant me a half-day schedule without disturbing the well-oiled machine of office life. And I couldn't risk rocking the boat too much because I needed my salary—badly. The sorry state of the journalism industry (and the economy in general) was impossible to ignore; meanwhile, the demands of our mortgage, childcare costs, and college savings weighed on me. Because of those major (and relatively new) responsibilities, I worried constantly about getting laid off; it was one of my frequent nightmares.
The only way to really get what I wanted was to go outside the traditional economy that runs on full-time jobs with set hours. I needed to become financially independent by earning extra money on top of my full-time job, so I was no longer vulnerable to a layoff and could, eventually, work for myself and set my own schedule. It was really about so much more than money. I wanted to be in control of my life.
Soon, I started seeing people on a similar quest everywhere: When my favorite deli down the street from my office closed down, the owner's son ramped up his own custom cake business, which let him keep his customers and replace his income stream. In my own office, I discovered a coworker who was running a social media consultancy, another who ran a print shop, and a third who maintained a productive honeybee farm in his spare time.
Through my work reporting on the economy, I met others who also maintained their side-gigs and full-time jobs alongside each other indefinitely, creating a stable, hybrid income for themselves. Many realized, as I did, that their full-time jobs could disappear at any moment, and they were keenly aware of how devastating that would be. They wanted to protect themselves and their families. A laid-off architect posted a few state-shaped cutting boards she had made for her wedding on the handmade marketplace website Etsy.com, and within months had sold thousands and turned her hobby into a full-time business, giving herself and her family more job security than she ever had as an architect. A bookstore manager, frustrated with her long hours and $28,000 salary, realized she was never going to afford the kind of life she wanted for her family without making a drastic change. So she launched her own entrepreneurial coaching business aimed at creative and crafty types. Within two years, her annual income shot to $150,000, and she gained complete control of her schedule.
These aren't your typical entrepreneurial success stories. Most of us don't even think of ourselves as entrepreneurs, and we didn't start out with the goal of becoming self-employed. (Some of us never plan to leave our full-time gigs.) For the most part, we were forced to invent a new plan for ourselves after the original one began to wobble. These are our stories of survival.
Taken together, they underscore a fact about our economy that few people can afford to ignore any longer: We all need more than one source of income today. Relying solely on a single employer is a surefire way to end up struggling, as so many Americans do. Even as the country crept out of its most recent recession, over 8 percent of Americans looking for work still find themselves unable to land jobs. For young people and seniors, the unemployment and underemployment rates are even higher. And those of us lucky enough to hold onto our jobs face pay cuts, benefit reductions, and longer hours, along with the unsettling feeling that those jobs could disappear at any moment. A 2012 Gallup survey found that close to three in ten workers worry they will get laid off, while four in ten fear a reduction in benefits. It's hard to go about our normal lives, picking up groceries and planning vacations, with that kind of anxiety hanging over us.
At the same time, life keeps getting more and more expensive. The prices of food, gas, rent, and even coffee keep going up. Not surprisingly, most Americans report feeling incredibly squeezed financially. The University of Michigan, which conducts the official survey of consumer sentiment, found that in August 2012, half of consumers reported being worse off financially than they were five years before, and the same proportion anticipated no signs of improvement over the next five years. And few have a cushion to fall back on; only one in four Americans have enough money in savings to support themselves for at least six months. News stories are filled with accounts of workers unable to find jobs after layoffs; anyone who continues forward as a traditional worker bee seems destined to end up homeless, poor, and desperate. We can't pretend that our employers have our best interests in mind or even that they will continue being our employers for much longer.
That's why so many of us have decided to look for an alternate way to live. A way that doesn't make us feel like we're balancing on a tightrope, one misstep away from disaster. We're fighting back against stress and stagnation by pursuing money-earning ventures outside of our full-time jobs (if we still have them). Often, we feel like we have no choice. We need the money, and our primary jobs aren't providing enough of it. Many of us are motivated by an extreme loss, such as a layoff, but just as often we set up shop in anticipation of that seemingly inevitable event. I found more and more people also struggling with my original question—in a world of zero job security and ever-increasing financial pressure, how can we guarantee success for ourselves and our families? The answer became increasingly obvious: We must actively create multiple ways of earning money through entrepreneurial pursuits.
In doing so, we can turn the new economy from a frustrating wasteland of lost opportunities into a thriving incubator for our true selves. Its newest features—the ease of online connections, the intense demand and competition for creative services, the temporary job market—become assets instead of drags. Not only do we improve our financial security, but we often discover we are happier and more satisfied in our new lines of work.
The cultural shift toward a more individualized way of thinking about how we earn money is so profound that even celebrities, television shows, and movies reflect it. In addition to the Hollywood work that makes him famous, Liev Shrieber carved out an additional niche for himself as the go-to voice to narrate HBO documentaries. Gwyneth Paltrow launched a lifestyle newsletter, GOOP, which promotes her brand as well as non-movie products such as cookbooks. Sarah Jessica Parker explained to Parade magazine that it was her deep desire for financial security after a cash-strapped childhood that led her to work so hard to capitalize on her fame, and, in fact, it was one of her side-projects, a perfume line, that had turned out to provide much of that financial security in recent years. Just like us, many celebrities want to take back control of their financial fates through entrepreneurial projects, ranging from product lines to websites. While it might seem like they earn huge sums of money, they often make it in chunks and don't know what or when their next job is.
Much of Bravo TV's Real Housewives’ drama revolves around the women's business ambitions, which is perhaps another reason for the franchise's addictive appeal. We relate to those ambitions. On The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Teresa Giudice promotes her cookbooks and other business ventures, while also sharing her attempt to recover from bankruptcy. On the New York version, one housewife hawks white wine while another showcases her branded toaster oven. In fact, much of reality television is driven by the entrepreneurial spirit: Keeping Up with the Kardashians (and its related spin-offs), America's Next Top Model, Design Star, Project Runway, and DC Cupcakes all revolve around people trying to make their career dreams come true on television. (“We ditched our corporate jobs and followed our dreams to make the world's best cupcakes,” says Sophie, one of the stars of DC Cupcakes, in the show's opener.)
Bridesmaids, the summer 2011 hit starring Kristen Wiig, zeroes in on the rapidly-downwardly-spiraling life of Wiig's character after her cake shop closes. As she struggles to get back on her feet, she holds down a job in a jewelry shop, and bakes at home late at night. Just as she reunites with her love interest at the end of the movie, the audience is also led to believe she will find her way back to a baking career. 2012's The Five-Year Engagement, starring Emily Blunt and Jason Segel, similarly ends with Segel's character finding economic redemption, after a string of low-paying kitchen jobs, by launching his own taco truck. Even 2012's American Reunion ends on an entrepreneurial note, with Stiffler, who's been stuck in a dead-end temp job, picking up his first party-planning gig.
It's not that the concept of finding happiness through entrepreneurship is new; Diane Keaton made the same leap in 1987's Baby Boom to launch a baby applesauce business, and Tom Cruise's character famously starts his own agency in 1996's Jerry Maguire. It's that the reasons are different. In the 1980s, as the number of working moms rose and women struggled to find balance, audiences wanted to watch as Diane Keaton struggled and found the way forward. In the 1990s, as corporate America boomed and people worried about selling their souls in exchange for rewarding paychecks, they wanted to watch Jerry Maguire navigate that maelstrom and come out ahead. And now, as we watch our jobs slip further and further from our grasps, and wonder how long we can rely on our next paycheck, we want to see our movie protagonists and reality television stars do the same, while ultimately finding a way to take back control. In its Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, the Kauffman Foundation reports that entrepreneurial activity is at a fifteen-year high, with the largest share of entrepreneurs under the age of forty-four. According to Google Insights, which tracks the popularity of different search terms, the number of people Googling the term “entrepreneur” spiked in late 2009 and early 2010, when the economy was at its most sluggish.
The shift has sparked its own language: “Digital nomads” build their side-gigs and “portfolio careers” so they can become location-independent “solopreneurs.” They talk about creating their online “tribes” to support them, maximizing their online brands to reach more people, and selling digital products like e-books and guides while they sleep. They blog about waking up to work at 5 a.m. because they are so excited to get going, and then staying up until 1 a.m. to finish a project they can't wait to put out into the world. Many of them do all this before or after heading off to full-time jobs that in some cases aren't even related to their independent ventures. They do it to pursue the dream of financial freedom.
Even Daniel Pink, who first identified the shift toward work independence in his 2001 bestseller, Free Agent Nation, says he didn't predict the current explosion in self-employment (including side-gigs), which he attributes both to new technology that makes it easier to work for yourself and to the slack economy. “Employers do not give employees security today,” he says.
Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, makes a similar point in his 2012 book, The Start-Up of You: “To adapt to the challenges of professional life today, we need to rediscover our entrepreneurial instincts and use them to forge new sorts of careers. Whether you're a lawyer or doctor or teacher or engineer or even a business owner, today you need to also think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm of at least one living, growing start-up venture: your career.”
Meanwhile, a powerful group of online leaders has risen up to affirm those instincts and get us on the path to self-employment. They are charismatic and persuasive, and their very existence proves that the dream is possible to achieve. One of them, Chris Guillebeau, author of The Art of Non-Conformity, constantly urges his thousands of followers to question the need to hold down a full-time job, own a house, and other staples of the traditional economy. He also teaches by example, supporting himself through his blog, book, and digital career guides that sell for $40 and up.
In many ways, holding onto our main jobs as long as we can while slowly building our entrepreneurial projects gives us the best of both worlds: Despite cutbacks, our full-time jobs often still come with health insurance (and possibly disability and life insurance), a steady paycheck, opportunities to develop our skills, socialization, and a help desk. Meanwhile, our side-gigs offer a chance to diversify and increase our income, pursue creative fulfillment, try our hand at running a small business, and exert more control over our work. We get the benefits of both the corporate world and the self-employed one. (Of course, there are downsides to the arrangement, too, the biggest of which is juggling what can feel like two full-time jobs, and we'll talk more about that later.)
Not everyone wants to be self-employed, and voluntarily leaving a job in today's economy can sound as crazy as burning provisions in a famine. Why would anyone walk away from a perfectly good job, even if he doesn't love it, to launch his own venture, when thousands of people are unable to find employment? Many people wouldn't. At the same time, the pull toward free agency is even stronger, because we don't know how long our current jobs will last, and, given social media and smartphones, launching something on the side can be as easy as sending a Tweet. Our entrepreneurial side-gigs offer us a third way, not as scary as full-blown entrepreneurship and not as dull as standard office life.
Given those benefits, it's no wonder 30 percent of the freelancers on Elance.com also maintain full-time jobs. Or that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about over 7 million workers, or around 5 percent of the workforce, hold more than one job. (For those with professional jobs and advanced degrees, the rate is over 7 percent.) In fact, the actual number of side-giggers is probably far higher than the official government data suggest, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics only counts those who say they had “more than one job” last week. Side-giggers who do occasional freelance work, for example, might not answer that question affirmatively.
Indeed, when a 2011 survey by MetLife asked respondents what they were doing to increase their income and financial security, one in four twenty-somethings said they were freelancing, and two in ten said they were working a second job. The numbers were slightly lower but still significant across thirty and forty-somethings as well as baby boomers: 17 percent of Generation X (now in their thirties and forties) said they freelanced to boost their income, and 12 percent of baby boomers (now in their fifties and sixties) said the same. Our side-gigs serve as our shining white knights, ready to save us from the evil dragon of the sluggish economy.
The enthusiasm and excitement of these entrepreneurs, side-giggers, and freelancers is infectious. They prove that building a life outside of the traditional economy isn't only possible, but that it's the new definition of financial success. To address my own financial vulnerability, I decided to join them and launch my own business. I had been writing the occasional freelance article since high school, but I wanted to take my side-gig to the next level, and develop a reliable income outside my full-time job. Inspired by the people I had interviewed, I launched my own line of planners, based around life events and goals: The Baby Planner, the Debt-Free Planner, the Money Planner. Under the banner “Palmer's Planners,” I opened my store on Etsy. It was thrilling, empowering, and hard.
As I discovered firsthand, there is a dark side to this movement, too. Its evangelists don't talk about it much, but being entrepreneurial means facing the inevitable setbacks. It takes some degree of blind optimism to market oneself, persuade people to pay you for it, and continue, despite hiccups and even failures. But the payoff for persevering is big: After many bumps, false starts, and surprises, I reached my goal of earning an extra $10,000 outside my regular salary for the year. More than that, I felt free. I stopped worrying so much about whether I was going to get laid off, because I had a parachute ready to carry me to safety if I found myself suddenly ejected from my job. Careers used to be like Boeing 757s, gliding us along steadily at 30,000 feet with nary a bump during take-off and landing. Now, we're all flying our own fighter jets. Bringing along a parachute for the ride should be standard operating procedure.
Almost all of the modern-day side-giggers I interviewed said that their idea started as a small hint in their minds that they thought could turn into their financial safety nets. From the baker who launched his own custom cake business to the bookstore manager who decided she'd be better off launching her own coaching business, these vanguards of the new economy tend to share nine common traits:
1. They know exactly what motivates them, and it often starts with a big loss or other major event in their lives.
2. They choose entrepreneurial pursuits that line up with longstanding passions, interests, and skills.
3. They minimize their expenses in both their professional and personal lives, while finding ways to invest in their venture.
4. They rely heavily on online communities of similarly minded people.
5. They actively and shamelessly promote their brands through social media and other grassroots marketing efforts.
6. They master time management strategies that enable them to maintain full-time jobs along with their side-ventures (and the rest of their lives).
7. They find ways to be resilient in the face of inevitable setbacks.
8. As their businesses grow, they support other small shops and start-ups by outsourcing tasks, which further enhances their own businesses, and often find other ways to give back as well.
9. They derive a deep sense of financial security and fulfillment from their businesses, far beyond money.
Through their stories, this book will teach you how to join them. We'll meet Chris Hardy, an instrument repairman who also has a talent for speaking in cartoon voices. When he offered voiceovers for $5 a pop through the website Fiverr, he soon started picking up a handful of gigs a day. He's since expanded his services and now earns one-third of his pay through his voiceovers. Information technology workers (and married couple) Beena Katekar and Sudhansu Samal built their own budgeting app, partly inspired by their young daughter's questions about what she could buy at the store. The app was soon featured in national magazines, including Parade, and they've since sold thousands of copies. Beena and Sudhansu continue to build their app business alongside their full-time information technology jobs. Videographer Calee Lee wrote a children's book after noticing a dearth of female role models in kids’ literature; she now runs a thriving publishing business that brings in as much annual income as her first job after college. And Alisha Williams, an Olympic-hopeful in track, continues to pursue her running dream, picking up sponsorships from Adidas and PowerBar, while working full time as a certified public accountant.
This book will help you get your own side-gig ready to launch—to save you from financial fear and frustration, to make you more secure and wealthy, and to give you a sense of satisfaction and personal accomplishment beyond what you get from your main source of employment. You'll be building the economy of you.