I Followed the Crowd and Added Two Side Hustles to My Main Career: Here Are 3 Lessons I’ve Learned

7 min readDec 26, 2020

As hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake off the thought of another stream of income meandering into my cash pool. The excitement bubbling up within my mind swallowed all the doubts I had. High on excitement and big on promise, I dove head-first into the side hustle hole.

That was in mid-2017 when the spark of the flash lured me to the photo studio. I wanted to be like a colleague who shot weddings every other weekend. He persuaded me I could even divert into architectural photography, which, for a real estate surveyor, was music to my ears.

In 2019, a colleague suggested we co-authored a peer-reviewed article. I didn’t know any better than to offload rounds of rapid-fire follow-up emails to the editorial team. Judging by the echoing silence I got in response, I guess most of them went into the trash folder.

Dejected, I realized I could channel the frustration into writing articles. Between starting a WordPress blog and writing on Medium, the pen is proving to be a powerful weapon, if not quite mightier than the sword just yet.

As the year trudges to the finish line, I sat down to count my blessings and recount the lessons I’ve learned combining two side-hustles with my career in real estate. They were bountiful, thanks. But here are only three.

The more you have on your plate, the more time you can create

When I thought of starting a photography business on the side of my grueling work schedule as an Estates Assistant, part of me wondered whether I would have any time left to brush my teeth.

But the siren call of more money was enough to convince me to at least give photography a shot. Even though I smiled at the first paycheck, my second career threatened to take up too much time if I didn’t zoom in and focus on the fine details of my time allocation.

So I did a time audit. It turned out the mindless scrolling on Twitter and Facebook, and my mini-addiction to watching every WhatsApp status took between two and four hours of my day. I knew if I focused less on my friends’ rants and strangers’ stunts online, I could take back some of those hours.

Adding another side hustle in writing meant I had to keep an even tighter rein on my time. Challenge accepted. Now, outside of my morning routines and breakfast, I try to write about two hours Monday to Wednesday and read for another hour before midday.

My lunch break, mail time, and social media take over until around 3 p.m. A 20–30 minute nap follows. In the evenings, I keep a fluid schedule that mixes taking writing courses, doing research work, and reading articles online with spending time with the family.

I try to schedule photo sessions and property inspections for Fridays, but depending on the clients’ demands, these could fall on any day.

I‘ve scheduled my laundry for Saturdays, mostly while I listen to the Guardian Football Weekly podcast or a few NBA-related pods from ESPN. I am free to go to church and do a whole lot of non-work-related activities on Sundays. But most importantly, I do not starve myself of the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep.

I stay on schedule about 60% of the time, but that’s a decent mark considering the chopping and changing I have had to make as my commitments change.

It’s hard to speak for everyone because we are all different. For example, I don’t have pets, kids, or extended family to cater for. And I have a partner who respects my schedules.

But I have realized that the more work I have had on my hands, the more creative I have become with my time, leaving me with more time to spare.

More work will make you better than you could imagine

I always try to be the best in every endeavor I take up. This means I have had to read more pages, endure harder practice sessions, battle tough failures, and learn from those failures. But it turns out that’s the best route to a bountiful harvest from different fields.

YouTube keeps feeding me with lots and lots of photography tutorials. And thanks to platforms like Edx and Coursera, I‘m taking courses to learn how to write better, how to communicate clearly. I am now aware of some basic rules of writing and communication, and I can see when a newbie breaks them.

When my photography side business took off, I soon realized there was more to it than posing people and clicking shutters. I had to learn skills like sales, marketing, customer relations, and bookkeeping on the fly. I’ve also learned to network and support other writers — well more than what I thought writing was about.

But when I look back, I realize I would not have learned most of these skills so fast if I was only on my first career as a real estate surveyor. I am happy with the progress I’m making.

Similarly, when I look at a few of my colleagues who have also added different dimensions to the careers school prepared them for, I see how they’ve gotten better. Some have mastered public speaking, teaching, disk jockeying, etc.

Yes, I can say I have gotten better and learned more skills from adding two side hustles to the career school prepared me for.

You’d best ignore a lot of the grind and hustle advice

If I had listened to some of the advice on hustling and grinding, I would’ve ground myself into powder.

“Grind, work hard, sleep less, work, even more, keep your nose to the grindstone and grind harder,” you’ll hear some evangelists preach.

A colleague even advised me to wake up an hour earlier, scrap the nap and sleep an hour later than my usual bedtime so I can steal two and a half hours from nature. I bought it, not knowing any better then.

But it didn’t take long for me to realize I was harming myself more than I was benefiting from the marginal gains I enjoyed. That was even before I read about some of the effects of the lack of adequate sleep.

People have gone after Gary Vee for leading a grind and hustle culture that threatens to turn people into mules glistening with sweat. But when I listened to him, I realized that was not what he meant.

In this YouTube video, he said hustling means going all-in and maximizing the 15 hours a day when he’s awake. In another video, he says he takes between four and seven weeks of vacation in a year.

Yes, some startup founders have had to work harder, sleep less, and take even fewer vacations, depending on their roles and goals. I’m no organizational psychologist, but I have also realized everyone doesn’t require that level of work to be successful.

Thankfully, I’ve not had to survive on four hours of sleep a night, as some ultra-hard working people do. Occasionally, a tight deadline pushes me past my 10 p.m. bedtime or takes up most of my day, but that’s normal.

When I see the threat of overworking looming, I occasionally delegate roles like location scouting and photo editing. This frees up even more time for me to recharge my batteries.

In short, trash a lot of the grind and hustle advice that says to work yourself into bare bones before you can taste the juicy fruits of your labor.

Conclusion

I may not be the archetypal entrepreneur who came up with a disruptive idea that turned the world upside down to make it better. People like that are the exception.

But for me, when the side-hustle train — with lots of people hanging from the sides — curled into view, I hopped on and joined the party. No, none of them rakes in a million dollars in revenue yet, but that was never the goal.

Along the way, I have learned a lot of invaluable lessons, the three most important being:

1. The more you do, the more time you can create.

2. The more you do, the better you’d become.

3. People misunderstand a lot of the grind and hustle advice.

Yes, you can run a small business or two on the side of your career and still have your body in one piece.

It’s hard, and you may have to be super creative and innovative. But since when didn’t you have to possess those qualities in the 21st century?

I Followed the Crowd and Added Two Side Hustles to My Main Career: Here Are 3 Lessons I’ve Learned

The more you have on your plate, the more time you can create

More work will make you better than you could imagine

You’d best ignore a lot of the grind and hustle advice

Conclusion

Written by Faridhadayat