This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Oh yeah, what's up, everybody? What's up, my friends? Welcome to a brand new season of Side Hustle School. This is Side Hustle School season 10, in fact, year 10. Today's episode is 3,288.

What that means is for the past nine years, nine full years, in fact, we have had a daily episode seven days a week every single day since January 1, 2017. But I have a feeling that year 10 is gonna be better than ever. Thank you so much for tuning in. Long time listeners, welcome back. Always so great to have you.

Thanks for being part of this conversation, this dialogue, this Side Hustle exercise for however long that you have been around. And if you happen to be new, if you're just now hearing about Side Hustle School, or if you're just coming back after not having listened for a while, I don't want you to feel like you have missed out because, well, you have missed out on some things. That is true. But nevertheless, you're in the right place because we try to keep everything fresh, evergreen, like you can jump in right where you are. And I'm gonna do my best to make this year, every single episode this year, helpful and actionable for you.

You're gonna be able to do something different at the end of the year than you were at the beginning. You're gonna be able to make progress. You're gonna be able to come up with new ideas, pursue existing ideas. In fact, the entire goal of the show, the whole goal, the reason why we make this show, our mission is to help you create an income generating project, an income generating project without quitting your job, using a skill you already have and without going into debt. That's what it's all about for all these episodes, for every single day.

So you are busy, you have a day job, you have plenty of responsibilities, you've got lots of stuff that you do, but you like the idea of investing in yourself. You would love to have extra income. You might not necessarily want to be a full-time entrepreneur. Like we have a bunch of full-time entrepreneurs and business owners who listen to the show and that's great, that's awesome. But if I had to pick like my ideal customer, which is a concept I talk about from time to time, my ideal customer is someone who hasn't thought of themselves as a capital E entrepreneur.

They're just a regular person doing stuff, maybe they even like their day job. But again, they love the idea of having extra income without quitting their job, maybe building a bridge away from their job, maybe exploring a creative outlet, paying off debt, being able to take a big trip or whatever else you want to do. I mean, that's the whole point is like, there are things you want to do in your life and money is a tool to get there. So it's not all about making money for money's sake, but I do think it's important to have money coming in from more than one source. Hopefully most of us can agree on that, at least most of our listeners for sure.

So that's the goal. I want to give you questions and answers, detailed case studies, lots of stories that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. And we really kind of break down the details. We talk about how much money it costs to get going and how much they decided to charge and how they decided to do that, how they navigated successes and failures, things that went well and things that did not go well, what they learned along the way and ultimately what the outcome was, like how much money did they make and what were the profit margins and just all that nitty gritty kind of stuff. So I try to keep it balanced between giving you as much detail as possible and also keeping the episodes short and action packed.

Almost all of them are 10 minutes or less. As I said, daily episodes, seven days a week. We do not take days off here. If you take days off listening, that's okay. You can always catch up.

But in terms of us, you can count on the show being out every single day, wherever you get your podcasts, as they say. So for our long time listeners, we're gonna do some familiar segment styles, in addition to question and answer several times a week. You can always leave questions at sidehustleschool.com. We also have the first $1,000 segment. It's all about how somebody makes their first $1,000.

We're gonna bring back a segment we did a couple years ago called Failure Friday. We're gonna bring it back every other week where we talk about something that went very wrong and what the person learned along the way. But of course, lots of success stories as well. Most of them are successes, but we wanna look at everything. And that's our plan, basically.

So we might mix things up somewhere midpoint, but for now, we like what we're doing. Wanna say a big thanks to Chuck for the new intro music and everything else. Chuck Reed, our long time producer, he makes the show sound better. He catches some mistakes. He just makes everything better, so thank you.

And listeners, as long as you're subscribed to Sidustleschool, again, wherever you get your podcast, new episodes roll out every day. I don't take anything for granted, so if there is a way we can improve, let me know, I'm listening. There's no paywall to the site. There's no membership community you need to pay to access any of the 3,200-plus archival episodes. I'll tell you more about that after the break.

And we're able to do all this because of the limited advertising model. So just like a lot of podcasts, we have sponsors. I really appreciate the sponsors, too, because they allow us to do this, help us keep the lights on, and so on. So let's actually take a little break now for a sponsor message when we return a bit more about how you can be involved as we go into year 10. [Music]

All right, once again, it takes a village.

I appreciate our sponsors. I appreciate our producer. I appreciate our team. I appreciate just the whole community. So if you have a story, I would love to hear.

I'd love to know what you are working on. You can always send me an email directly. You can write on the website, as I mentioned in almost every episode, but here's a little hack. I actually do better with emails that come to me directly. So if you go to chrisguillebeau.com, that's my personal website, G-U-I-L-L-E-B-E-A-U.com.

I actually see all of those messages. If you have written me before and I missed your email, I apologize. That does happen sometimes. Last year, I had a book come out called "Time Anxiety," and this book was all about the fear of running out of time and how we often feel stressed about time. There's not enough time to do the things we want to do.

And I had a whole chapter in that book called "The Inbox of Shame," which is how I often feel in dealing with email. But just to mention, if you've written me before and I missed it, I apologize. I do read everything that comes through on chrisguillebeau.com. I also am writing a Substack newsletter. I'm gonna remix that a good bit this year as well.

For now, you can access it at europhmentalhealth.com. That may be updated at some point, but check over there. I do 90% of my work for free. If you enjoy what I do, you can check out my books, which should be at any bookstore or any online retailer, of course. You can tell people about the show and about the books and other things.

I'm also doing an annual event called Neurodiversion. This is a celebration of unique minds for people who identify with ADHD or autism or another neurodivergent condition or providers, therapists, mental health practitioners, parents, friends, partners, basically anybody in the neurodivergent community, broadly speaking, we started it last year. This year, we're going bigger and better. It takes place again in Austin, Texas at the end of March, neurodivergent.org. You can learn more about it there.

I'd love to see you there. And that's pretty much it for now. Those are a few things I'm working on. I'll share more as I go along the way, but mostly I don't want to distract you. I want to affirm what you are doing and support what you are doing and give you ideas and tips that will make your life better.

That's my purpose here with this podcast. So our goal is to make your life better. Happy 2026, my friends. The best is yet to come. We're gonna get into it starting with tomorrow's episode.

And tomorrow I'm gonna tell you all about Rinting Chickens. That's right. Coming out, Rinting the Chicken, tomorrow's story. Stay tuned. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you so much. It's Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]

From The Onward Project.