If you are active on social media and specially clubhouse, it seems that everyone has a side hustle. From secret gift shop on Amazon to driving for Lyft to making soaps. And I am not talking about people who are just doing it to supplement their incomes, many of them have cozy corporate jobs and make enough monies to live a comfortable life. But many don’t feel the purpose or satisfaction from their current jobs. They might love it as it gives them the wealth to live a good lifestyle but it also makes many of them miserable to seek out something different. Pandemic last year has just accelerated the trend as it gave people even more time to be miserable locked up inside homes. Frankly, I am also among the same ranks! But rather then starting a side hustle, I started learning more about business and general leadership principles. That made me apply for an online MBA last year. Fast forward to year 2021, I recently did a course as part of the MBA about career and life.
The course starts with the IKIGAI framework, though purists don’t like the western interpretation of the framework. I lie somewhere in the middle. For me Ikigai may or may not have anything to do with career and keeps on changing through different stages of life. Nonetheless, it’s still useful to find your areas of career interest using this framework.
One of the thing this analysis pointed to me was to explore some side hustles as that can increase the satisfaction with work life and give purpose to it, along with additional stream of income. Although, it is ironic as I was initially looking at side hustles when pandemic started and ended up applying in an online MBA to learn more about business and leadership and ultimately learning that side hustles can be one the way to increase one’s satisfaction with work and life! 😉 So I started googling for side hustles again but this time I armed with information taught in the course. You will find tons of blogs and even reputed sites like entrepreneur.com suggesting lucrative side hustles, but none of them talks about the history of side hustle. How they started and when did people started feeling to build their side hustles to find deeper meaning of work. I did found the hustle culture’s black roots on a fabulous NPR blog. But that hustle is not what I mean by side hustle in this blog. I was little surprised to see that this seems to be rather modern phenomenon. In fact side hustle appears to have only been used in mid 20th century.
‘Side hustle’ appears to have entered our language in the 1950s, when it was used to describe both scams and legitimate jobs.
Merriam-Webester
However, one random day I watching a YouTube video. In this video, we were getting a virtual tour of samurai house in Akita Prefecture of Japan. In the tour, one of the Japanese guide basically tells the host about the different ranks of samurai and then goes on further to share that samurai who were lower in rank, would make wooden artifacts from sakura (Cherry Blossom) trees to supplement their income and perhaps finding a deeper artistic meaning by doing that. Who knew out of all people, warriors were the pioneer in side hustle and gigs!
Do you currently have a side hustle? Please tell me more about it on LinkedIn