This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up? Hello, greetings, and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. Here we are approaching the end of the first month, the first month of our new format in 2019.
Personally, I'm still working on last year's holidays, you know, those end of year holidays, but apparently time marches on. I'm coming to you today with the weekly classroom segment. Now, last week we talked about different categories of side hustles, specifically identifying the difference between products and services. Before that, we looked at where money-making ideas come from. I want you first of all to understand that money-making ideas are everywhere, and gaining that skill of observation can help you in so many ways, no matter what you end up doing next.
But of course, that's not all, because what if you have a lot of ideas? That's what we're gonna talk about today. It might sound like a good problem to have, but of course it's still a problem, especially if the presence of so many ideas prevents you from making decisions and focusing. For more than 1,100 days now, I have made this show for busy people who don't have a lot of time. So if you relate to that description, you know it's not possible for you to take action on all your ideas.
In fact, even if you were a full-time side hustler, just try out different ideas every day, there's no chance you would ultimately be productive or effective doing that, okay? So what do you do when you have a lot of ideas? Well, today I'll show you a tool that I have used and recommended for years. I know a lot of other people have used it as well. I first wrote about it in the book "Side Hustle," from idea to income in 27 days.
So if you've read it there or if you've heard me talk about this before, I'll make sure to use an all-new example here to keep it fresh. So here's how it works. When you're starting out, you might struggle with ideas, but in the long term, being able to identify potential ideas is rarely a problem. Side hustle success comes from making those ideas come to life. Making ideas happen, implementation, execution, whatever you wanna call it, that's where the real value is.
In fact, you'll often have more ideas than you can handle. So what do you do if you have two or three different ideas or four or five or a dozen? Should you try them all at once? Well, probably not. Should you just pick one?
Well, here is, first of all, some general all-purpose advice. So here are two things that I think apply to just about everyone, no matter your situation. Number one, get clear on your goals, okay? We started with goals at the beginning of the year. I come back to that all the time, just myself and my own life of all the different things I could be doing, the different opportunities.
Why am I doing a certain thing? So what is your goal for your side hustle? Are you trying to make money soon? Are you trying to build a long-term asset? Are you exploring a different creative skill?
Whichever idea or ideas you choose should connect directly to your goals. For example, a long-term mission is different from paying off debt. Your next steps, your approach, your strategy could be quite different, depending on which goal you were pursuing at that time. Second, remove the pressure from this decision. Listen, I can't tell you how many times I have heard people just expressing almost anguish over which idea to choose.
And I'm like, look, you're not selecting an idea forever. Okay, this is not a side hustle idea marriage. You are selecting the right idea for you right now, okay? If this idea doesn't work, if you change your mind, if you decide after 30 days or however long you wanna do something different, then you do that. That's okay.
It's much better to make a decision and move forward than to remain stuck out of indecision. All right, that's the general all-purpose advice. Now I wanna teach you this specific tool, okay? It's called the side hustle selector. And I'm gonna show you a stripped down version of it here.
If you read the book side hustle, there's a more in-depth one there. Just for the purpose of keeping things simple, I'm gonna give you three variables, okay? So three variables to consider. And this is what you look at whenever you have more than one idea. The first variable or characteristic is feasibility.
You can measure it just by asking how confident are you in the ability to begin turning this idea into action in a short period of time? In other words, can you see a path, a logical path from start to finish? Like you might not understand how to do each part of it. There might be further research involved, et cetera. But you can understand, okay, from where I am now, it is or is not feasible that in a short period of time I'll be able to turn this idea into action, okay?
Second characteristic is profitability. How confident are you in the potential to make money from this idea also in a relatively short period of time? Now, if you're not sure, that's okay, but we're looking for a relative ranking, okay? So you're gonna answer these questions for each idea that you have. You can give yourself a little one to five score.
The more confident you are, the higher the score. If something seems highly feasible, you give it a four or a five. If you think that it's definitely gonna be profitable, you give it a four or a five. If it's the opposite, obviously you give it a one or a two, or a three somewhere in the middle. Now, the third characteristic, the third variable is motivation, all right?
It's pretty simple, and you have to say it like that too. Motivation, how excited are you about this idea? All things considered, do you wanna spend your limited free time working on this idea over the next few weeks or months? Again, rank it on a one to five scale. Five, you're really excited.
One, you're not excited at all, somewhere in the middle, et cetera. So now when you have more than one idea, you've got each idea ranked according to these three variables, feasibility, profitability, and motivation. And again, this may not be entirely precise, but that's okay. This is all about making a back of the napkin evaluation because looking at this data can often help you decide between competing ideas, or at the very least, it can reduce the number of options you're considering. If you had five ideas and you realize one is actually very complicated, or you're not sure at all it's gonna make money, or you're not excited about it, that's a pretty good reason to discard that idea, or if it makes you feel less anxious, just tell yourself you'll put it on hold, but remove it from your frame of vision and just focus on the remaining ideas.
And your goal here eventually is to get down to one. The one, not necessarily the perfect idea, not necessarily the idea you're gonna do for the rest of your life, but the one idea you're gonna choose for now. And what I always say to people in the end, if you are in anguish over this final decision after whatever analysis or logic you've done, at a certain point, you just have to pick something. And there is no harm in doing that. Again, the harm is in indecisiveness.
The harm is in remaining stuck. So it's okay to pick something and then change your mind later, but do make sure you actually make a selection. Now, in a moment, I'll give you an example of how this works in the real world, and then an assignment for you to apply this to your own ideas, because we are gonna actually work on paring down your ideas, so that we have something to work on for the rest of the year. First, I would like to give a quick thank you to our sponsor for making all of this series completely free to you. I really appreciate them, so here's a shout out.
And then we'll move forward with that example and assignment. [Music]
So let's imagine that there's someone out there who is a welder, and this person is also pretty creative, and they like cats. And let's pick one more thing. Let's say they're interested in helping people set goals or kind of figure out what they should do with their life. So from here, we'll look at three potential ideas for them in terms of their revenue model.
Is it a product or service, et cetera? What is it? We won't go too much in depth here, so you'll just have to imagine some of the details. But let's say that our first idea is online welding tutorials. And this person is like, you know what?
I've been a welder for a long time. There are a lot of people out there interested in learning a trade, but historically you've had to go to trade school. I wanna show a lot of the basic principles of welding, talk about different equipment, talk about how to learn next steps and so on. I wanna make a series of YouTube tutorials. And then from that series, I'll make a comprehensive multimedia product that I'll sell.
So I'll offer some tutorials for free, and then others will be available for purchase through this multimedia product. All right, second example. They like cats, they're pretty creative. Let's say they wanna make a wedding stationary for cats. They're like, cats are always left out of all the invitations.
We wanna make a series of invitations. If you're a cat lover and you invite somebody to your wedding, I'm just making this up, okay? I'm not saying it's a feasible idea, but not to get ahead of myself here. Cats are always left out. So I'm gonna make this wedding stationary for cats.
That's idea number two, and idea number three, just building on that idea of goals, helping people make decisions. We're gonna say that idea is life coaching. Okay, so idea number one, online welding tutorials is a product, or at least it would become a product, wedding stationary for cats, also a product, and then life coaching is a service. This person is trying to figure out what to do. They haven't ever owned a business before.
They have a lot of responsibilities. They're busy welding and watching cat videos. So they decide to sit down and use this tool. It just takes about five minutes. They assign a ranking for each characteristic and each idea, feasibility, profitability, and motivation.
They look at those welding tutorials, the wedding stationary for cats, and life coaching, and what they realize through the ranking process is that at least for them during this season, one of these ideas is much better than the others. That idea for them is the online welding tutorials. They decide that cats are pretty fickle. It's always hard to get them to use Venmo. We're gonna take that off the list.
Life coaching, a little bit vague, not sure how I deliver it, et cetera. But welding, online welding tutorials, really specific. You know, they already know how to make videos. Let's say they've thought a lot about this product and packaging, and they're excited about it. I think you probably understand how it works.
It's pretty simple. Like I said, it doesn't need to be a complicated analysis, but it can help you eliminate ideas that are not good for you right now. Now, it's also okay to have more than one idea and do more than one thing. In fact, if you like doing more than one thing, then the side hustle lifestyle is perfect for you. I certainly do.
But again, I wanna keep focusing on this point of who the show is made for. Somebody out there who doesn't have a lot of time but wants to create a new source of income for themselves. If that's you, you're gonna have to prioritize. And so I want you to relate your choices to your goals. Like I mentioned a few minutes ago, I want you to ask which project is most feasible, most profitable, and that you're most excited about.
This is kind of the trifecta that you're looking for. I think it's really good for you to decide to focus on that idea for a specific season. Doesn't have to be forever, but let's say 30, 60, 90 days, something like that. And then if you really don't know what's best, after all of that, I want you to just pick something. Flip a coin if you have to so we can move forward.
I don't want you to remain stuck. Each classroom feature will include an assignment, and here is today's. You probably know what's coming. Your assignment is to pare down your list of ideas by ranking them with the side hustle selector. Or if that tool doesn't work for you, some other way.
The whole point is to eliminate any ideas that aren't a good fit right now, and make a decision on which idea you're going to work on first. Pare down your list of ideas, eliminate the ones that aren't a good fit, and make a decision on your priority for the next season. [Music]
All right, you can read notes for this in every classroom episode this year at sidehustleschool.com/classroom. I'll also include a more detailed version of that side hustle selector. If you want to go overboard and actually look at the other variables as well, all that will be there.
It's completely free. This has been episode 1122. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project
