This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, greetings. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is our weekly recap. It is, in fact, our 25th recap of season two.
Here we are approaching the end of June 2018, at least for those who are listening in real time. I do my best to keep most of the stuff that we talk about probably 95% relevant, regardless of when you're listening. If you're just catching up later, that's totally fine. But over here in my world, I'm getting ready for the World Domination Summit. If you're not familiar with World Domination Summit or WDS, eight years ago, I started this event in Portland, Oregon, going across the country and inviting people to come and join me and a small team of remarkable volunteers.
We wanted to bring together people from lots of different backgrounds who are all doing something remarkable themselves or have the desire to pursue a big dream, perhaps, whether that was a dream of being an entrepreneur of some kind or just starting some kind of side hustle like so many of our listeners, or some of them wanted to travel and see the world, perhaps make a difference in the world somewhere. As I said, that was eight years ago, and we have been doing it ever since, every summer in Portland, Oregon still. And the adventure begins again this week. So I'm getting ready to have this kind of take over my life, and I don't mean that in any bad way. It's a good thing.
I just mean I'm gonna be really, really busy with it. And in fact, I have been in the previous weeks with lots of planning. Just in case you are listening in real time and you wanna come and hang out, main stage tickets to WDS are sold out, but you can still register for WDS Connect. This is kind of an introductory experience that allows you to attend your choice of more than a hundred meetups and your choice of a dozen half-day workshops called academies. You can also connect with a bunch of amazing people doing interesting things.
So just go to worlddominationsummit.com to learn more. Again, that's worlddominationsummit.com. And of course, if you're not able to come to Portland, I understand you can also follow along from afar. I should be posting it on my social media, especially my Instagram, which is 193 countries, 193 countries. That's what I'm up to this week.
Whatever you're doing, I hope you're doing something for yourself. I know you probably have lots of things you have to do for other people and that's fine, that's life, but I hope you take some time for yourself and work on something that matters to you. Work towards something you believe in. Perhaps that side hustle, that second or third or fourth source of income so that you can create more options for whatever it is that you hope to do. That is my hope for you.
All right, in today's recap, I wanna tell you about two productivity tools I've been using for myself. One is an app and one is kind of a general resource or just a methodology. And both of these things have been helping me a bit, so I thought I would just pass them on. I also have some comments about one of our episodes this week that I'm calling the archetypal side hustle story. That was episode number 535, the IT guy who earns an extra $50,000 a year restoring vintage radios.
I really liked that episode and I think there's a lot that we can take away from it. So that's coming up in a bit, but first I just wanna say a quick little shout out, a quick little thank you to a couple of our listeners who have taken the time to leave reviews for us in Apple Podcasts. Now I usually mention this at the end of the weekly recap, how it's just a kind of an awesome thing when people take a moment to leave a little rating and review, tell other people why they listen to the show. And of course I realize everyone is busy, so if you don't have time to do it, completely understand. But there were two I saw this week that I really liked and I just wanted to share with the rest of our community.
One person, this is MC at Garrison, says hope to be featured here one day. I've become addicted to this quick daily dose of inspiration and encouragement. Real people all over creating smart little side hustles for extra money. I listen every day and even if it's a field or area I'm not necessarily interested in, I am interested in the ways they make these things happen. Highly recommended, awesome job, keep it up side hustle school team.
Thanks so much MC at Garrison, I really appreciate that. And the second quick note comes from Kimberly 911. And Kimberly said before he passed away, my dad and I had a daily phone call during my commute to work. To fill the void with something positive, I subscribed to side hustle school. It's informating, motivating, funny.
Yes, I'm a fan of the puns. Interesting and a terrific start to a productive day. Keep the episodes coming. Love and thanks, Kimberly and Phoenix. Kimberly, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to write that.
I'm so, so sorry about that tremendous loss you've experienced and I'm honored that we can bring you a small piece of joy every day. So thank you again and yes, we will keep it fundamental. Absolutely. If you would like to leave us a review like that, you can do that in Apple Podcasts. You can probably do that wherever you listen to podcasts.
Some of the different platforms or systems have a different format for it. But like I said, whether you have time for it or not, I'm really grateful that you're out there. And I always like to know what you're up to as well. So feel free to share what you're working on this week. Feel free to share your number one goal.
If you have a comment or a question, just let me know and we'll try to feature as many as possible on the show. We have a hustle hotline. That number is 8449 hustle. It's also 8449487853. If you're like me and have a hard time spelling things out on your phone.
Or if you prefer, you can just send an email to podcast@sidehustleschool.com. And yes, we do read all those emails that come through. I want to just take a quick little break and say thank you to our sponsor. And by the way, I don't always go into a lot of detail about the sponsorship thing, but I do want to say that I really appreciate our sponsors. We work hard to find sponsors and companies that are a good fit for our listeners.
And I actually really love this model of being able to produce the show completely free to you. That is because of the sponsors. They allow us to pay our production team. They allow us to feed the cat. And all that is in exchange for a pretty short message, which often includes a special deal for you.
So without further ado, here is today's short message on behalf of them. [Music]
All right, so two productivity tools or resources. The first one is an app called BeFocused. This is an app that's available for Mac desktop or iOS. So iPhone, iPad, et cetera.
I'm not sure if there's a PC version, but it's a pretty simple tool. So I imagine there's something similar, if not. Pretty much all this app does is allows you to set a timer and focus on certain tasks for that time. So you may have heard of the Pomodoro technique, which is essentially just doing this, basically. Like saying, I'm gonna work on this task for 15 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever it is.
I'm not gonna do anything else during that time. Like once I hit the timer, I can take a break or move on to something else. But this is the time that I'm gonna spend working on this task. So BeFocused is just a kind of an easy little tool that helps you do that. You can add your different tasks.
You can set a timer. It has a little alarm that goes off. You can customize the alarm sound. Nothing complicated or fancy, but I have been using it over the previous few weeks and it's helped me a lot. So I believe the desktop version costs like $5 and the iPhone version costs $3.
You can buy both of them and it syncs between your devices. And they also have a free version. So you can check it out and see if it works for you before you spend your $5 or your $3. The second tool I wanna mention is more of a concept of tracking your time. And this comes from an author named Laura VanderKam.
You can go to the website 168hours.com and download a free spreadsheet where you kind of keep up with all of your time on 15 minute or 30 minute increments for a week. And the ideas are gonna notice some patterns from that. Laura has done a lot of research into this and she's tracked your own time every single week for months and months, maybe years now. And her premise is that you have more time than you think. So pretty much everyone listening to this, at least our target market, our target market of suicidal school is people who are busy, who have a lot of responsibilities, who don't have an abundance of free time.
Well, Laura's philosophy is even if you are busy, you have more time than you think. And if you pay attention to how you spend all of your time, you can probably identify patterns, make some changes to do more of what's important to you. So I might actually turn this into an extended cut at some point, 'cause I think it's so important and has so much potential to change your life. But the point for today is I've been tracking my time over the past two weeks and I've been noticing some things that are gonna help me, I think. So when you pay attention to how you spend your time, you'll find more opportunities to do what's important to you.
And she actually has a whole book on this concept called 168 Hours, which I've been reading and finding very useful. So the book is called 168 Hours. The tool is at 168hours.com. Of course, we'll link all of that stuff up in the show notes. [Music]
So let's look at the archetypal side hustle school story, episode 535.
When I say archetypal, this story is about old radios, vintage radios. This guy who buys and resells, or buys and repairs then resells vintage retro radios. Now I think you know this if you've been listening for a while, but just to clarify, I don't think everybody should go out there and buy retro radios. The point is there is something you can learn from his story. Just like that very wise comment we heard earlier from someone who left us a kind review.
It's not that you're supposed to be interested in every single topic. What you're supposed to do is see how you could apply this perhaps to your life, or at least just kind of learn how other people have done it in their own way. So this was a great story. If you haven't heard the episode, sidehustleschool.com/535. In this story, this guy who was an IT professional with an electrical engineering degree had been looking for something to sell on eBay.
And he had bought and sold things before, but it wasn't really like a method to it. And while he's at a flea market one day, he stumbles on these 1950s radios. He's able to purchase these radios for $15 each. Not much of an investment, not much of a risk. Goes home, learns to repair them, looks online, read some forums, and then he puts them up for sale, and one of them sells for $50, and one of them sells for $200.
And so he says, huh, could be something interesting here. Now speaking of busy, this guy was really busy. He had a 50 hour a week job. He had a young family. So he had to be smart with how he spent his time.
At first he thought, I'm gonna go find more radios at other flea markets. But then he realized pretty quickly that that was gonna take a lot of time, and it wouldn't always lead to good results. So then he realized he could buy other radios online, buy radios that needed repair, fix them, and then turn around and sell them. So he's kind of working with the constraints that he has. He finds an opportunity, but then he matches that opportunity to the constraints he has.
Then at the same time, as he gets better at this, he sets a monetary goal for himself. And he says, you know what, this is my side hustle. I only have a few hours a week to work on it, five to 10 max. I want to earn at least $100 an hour on this project. Fortunately, he really liked what he was doing, but because it's a side hustle, not a hobby, it needs to make money too.
So he made sure as he went forward that whatever he did would match that goal, at least $100 an hour. From there, he explores some other options. He eventually creates his own website using Shopify, because eBay has its own platform and there are pros and cons to that, but he wanted to be able to actually sell direct himself. Then he develops an additional revenue source from people who come to him, wanting old radios repaired. Like they didn't want to sell them to him, they wanted their radio fixed.
And so he said, okay, I'll try to do that too. But he maintained his same goal, his same monetary goal of at least $100 an hour in doing so. So the reason I'm taking you through this, it's kind of like a through line, is what I described it as in the episode. As he goes along, there's this system of exploration. I'm going to try this, I'm going to try this.
Oh, this one thing is going to lead to something else. Okay, I'm going to specialize in this thing. I'm going to specialize in this topic of retro radios. It's something I'm interested in. The more I do it, the better I get at it.
I believe he said he's now repaired more than a thousand old radios. And he's looking at next steps. He's looking at possibly having a retail location. He's looking at combining voice technology or other modern technology with these old radios. But the point is he didn't start with that.
The point is he started with what was in front of him, the ability to buy something for $15 and then fix it, resell it for $50 or $200, and then continue to explore that. Okay, so it reminds me of a question I got from a listener recently. I actually get this question fairly often, but there's one particular listener who asked me about it recently. And he said, if I'm going to start a side hustle, do I have to grow the business? Do I have to make it something bigger than what I'm starting with?
And you know, my answer is always, you have to do whatever is best for you. Okay, there is no have to, right? I guess you don't even have to do what's best for you, but that's generally a good idea. So the radio guy, I believe his name was Alan, he didn't have to create a standalone website. If he wanted to just stick with eBay, he could have.
He didn't have to take on that additional revenue source. If he didn't want to repair other people's radios, he didn't need to. He just did those things because they were best for him. So it's a great place to be when you have options. It's a great place to be when you have possibility.
That to me is what a side hustle is all about, this empowerment, this agency that comes through possibility because of something that you create for yourself. Lots of other great episodes this week, of course, but I just kind of wanted to highlight that one because I thought it was so interesting and so reflective of what I hope many of our listeners will do. All right, so much more is on the way. Got another series of great stories coming out every single day starting tomorrow. And then the next day, and then the day after that.
Our upcoming episodes include topics such as a sugar box, something about fashion and something about vacuum cleaners. Not quite sure what that is about, but we will find out. Actually, the headline that I see here is vacuum cleaners lead a mom to become a children's book author. Okay, so I need to read that story to see what it's about myself. Before I sign off for the day and the week, I wanted to say thank you to everybody who makes this possible.
Of course, our listeners, you, first of all, and foremost, our sponsors as well, and also our amazing production team. So I record the show on location wherever I am, then I put it in a little Dropbox folder and it magically kind of goes across the internet and our production team takes care of everything else. That team is led by AC Valdez. It also features Sarah Barrett. Back in Portland, Oregon, we've got show notes and content management, lots of other stuff being handled very capably by Whitney Karinek.
Also got my good friend, Jed Chang, helping out with things, as well as my cat, Libby Guillipo. In every episode, I always say inspiration is good, but action's better. It's because my hope is that these stories will inspire you and equip you to take action. I hope to feature your story here one day, and I hope you'll join me tomorrow and every day next week with more stories and actionable ideas. Consider this an investment in yourself, a pretty short and easy, hopefully entertaining investment in yourself.
Our episodes go online at 601 a.m. Eastern time every day. Once again, this is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
