This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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You could spend an unlimited amount of money on services and resources these days. There are just so many tools out there, all kinds of stuff that you could use for your website, your email list, all these different things. Question for you today from one of our listeners. Well, it's a question for me, but I think it's gonna be helpful for a lot of people. The question is, what is essential?
Like what do you really need? And what can you not worry about? Knowing the answer to this question helps in a lot of life situations, by the way. Like we're gonna apply it to side hustling here, but you can think about it for other things. Like what is essential?
You know, and what can you not worry about? What can you let go of? I just believe letting go is so powerful. Letting go, not holding too tightly to something. It allows you to avoid FOMO, you know, that whole thing about the fear of missing out.
And it helps you focus on what matters. I believe one of the challenges of the so-called information age is that there's just so much information out there, which is great and wonderful in lots of ways, but it's also a real struggle to navigate and it produces this sense of overwhelm. So anyway, let's look at the question. Thanks for tuning in, by the way. This is Chris Guillebeau.
That detailed question and my answer coming up after the break. [Music]
Hi, this is Laura from San Francisco. I've been learning so much lately and I'm ready to jump in with my next side hustle. I don't mind paying for helpful resources, but I don't want to spend money that isn't essential. I know I'll have various monthly costs as well as one-off purchases, and I need to be frugal.
My question is, how do I figure out what information and resources are actually helpful and necessary? Also, how do I find the best resources in the first place? There's just a lot of information out there and it seems every tool wants a monthly fee. Thank you so much for your help and for making the show every day. [Music]
All right, well, first things first, I'm glad you're jumping in.
What a great time as well to think about what you don't need to do. Like at the beginning of a project, this is a great time to say, how can I prevent overwhelm? Usually we try to treat overwhelm once it occurs, but how can I stave it off, right? So with that in mind, first things first, almost nothing is absolutely essential in terms of online resources and tools. Like these things are supposed to help you, they're supposed to benefit you, make your life better in some ways, but nothing almost, I would say, is absolutely essential.
So whenever you do start to feel overwhelmed at all the different options and the things you're supposed to be doing and this service and this subscription payment and so on, just take a deep breath and realize you can probably be okay without it. Okay, again, you want tools and resources that make your life better, not that stress you out or end up creating a burden of their own. Because a business is just three things here, like A, a product or service, B, a group of people who wanna buy it, and C, a way for them to buy it. So what you wanna ask is what do you need for that to happen? And that's how you know which tools and resources are essential.
Like what do you need to create your product or service? How do you get that product or service to the group of people who want to buy it and then how do they actually purchase it? They need some platform or tool or some payment method. These are the things that you need to have. Everything else, it's kind of optional.
So having said that, I pay for a lot of different online resources. I'm not sure like how many. Sometimes I don't even wanna look at my credit card bill 'cause I'm like, I've got a lot of subscriptions there. But the thing is I've been doing this for a while, like it's my whole life. And I also know that I could survive just fine without many of them.
So if you have a website, well, you need a way to host that website. You need a way to make updates to your site, like with WordPress or Squarespace or another platform. If you have an email list, you need an app for that. I mentioned payment, you need some way to get paid. But what else do you need?
Not much. So really next, the next thing you need to do is focus on things that are helpful. And there's lots of stuff in that category. Just don't make the mistake of thinking it's essential because that leads back to the FOMO and overwhelm. Much more important, I believe, to focus on building out that product or service so that you can better serve your customers.
I'm gonna leave you with that today. Just remember, time is your most precious resource. Time is your most precious resource. So always protect your time. Think about what's actually saving you time as opposed to what's making your life more complicated, thus perhaps depleting your time.
All right, that's all for now. If you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Excited to bring you the podcast every single day this year. It's all completely free. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
