Data Geek Charts Course From Analyst to Author

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

[Music]

Hello and welcome back. New year, new you. We're so excited to begin a new year at Side Hustle School season three, episode 734. My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're here. In today's story, bored at work, a young economics analyst gets creative and designs charts about love and breakups.

She ends up with a book deal and a better job. All kinds of stuff happens when she follows her curiosity. Also, there's a sentence in the first part of this story that I will draw your attention to. That sentence is, she felt stifled and decided to channel that feeling into something creative. So hey, as we are starting a new experience together, do you feel stifled?

Do you feel stifled in your job? Do you feel stifled in your routine? Do you feel stifled in something else? Why not channel that feeling into something creative? Because, as I said, and as you'll hear in this story, when you do that, all kinds of things can happen.

That story, Data Geek charts course from analyst to author, is coming right up. [Music]

Liz Voslin was in her early 20s, barely new to the workforce and totally unhappy at her day job. The life of an economics analyst is one of crunching numbers in data, not necessarily creativity and passion. She felt stifled and decided to channel that feeling into something creative. When it comes to making something new, it's good to start with what you know.

Liz was an expert at charting data in interesting ways. So she decided to begin creating graphs, charts and diagrams that shined a humorous light on society and life. She took anecdotal data from everyday life and created her first charts. Those first charts were published right before Valentine's Day, entitled "14 Ways an Economist Says I Love You." They included things like how I love you in pie chart form and funny stock charts indicating explosive growth in the love markets. She put them up on her personal website and shared them with her social network and the page proved a hit with her data nerd friends.

That gave her the confidence to move further. She emailed a few blogs that wrote about finance and economics. Each email was personalized for each blog, explaining who she was, why she liked their work and why they might be interested in her charts. The combination of targeting the right market at a specific time, Valentine's Day in particular, meant the approach worked. The mega popular Freakonomics blog picked up her content and that set the ball rolling.

Before Valentine's Day was over, her work had also been featured in The Economist, The Financial Times, CNBC and more. That was the catalyst she needed to develop a small following. Liz continued to create charts over the next year and gradually she inserted more and more personal stories into them. She analyzed the absurdity of the job interview process and graphed it out. When she went through a breakup, she charted that.

She even made analytical diagrams of what it was like to be an analyst. That was her most meta creation. Over time, her illustration skills got better and better. Also, promoting her work became easier as she'd already been featured on prominent sites. The ability to say, "Look at what other successful thing I've done," was a very persuasive tactic in getting promotion.

Before long, she'd been featured on a dozen more high traffic websites and was even interviewed on NPR, providing humorous advice on how to land a job. A year into charting and illustrating, Liz had built an audience, but still wasn't making any money directly from her side hustle. But it did lead to other opportunities, including a new job as editor at Genius, a popular music startup. It was a more creative role and she landed the job because she proved to her new employer that she wasn't just a number-crunching zombie. Liz kept illustrating, and from time to time, she would land a paid client.

She'd built up a good social following by interacting as much as possible with anyone who showed an interest. One day, she noticed a particular account was liking every single one of her posts. She did some snooping and noticed the person doing the liking was actually a literary agent, four authors of business-related books. So just like when she contacted those first blogs, Liz took a chance and sent an email. It took 30 minutes to type up and craft the perfect email, but it worked.

A few weeks later, Liz had an agent. This was a special moment for her. She felt it gave her some professional recognition and that she had proof she wasn't just doodling in a corner of the internet somewhere. From there, the chart of Liz's rise was going up and to the right. She and her agent pitched a book concept to publishers and received an offer.

That book is called "No Hard Feelings, The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work." The best part of all was that the advance she received, the book advance, gave Liz enough money to quit her job and focus on it full-time for an entire year. During that time, she had to live frugally, but she considered it a small price to pay for creative freedom. In February 2019, Liz's book will be released. She's also returning to the workforce because her side hustle has brought her another great opportunity. She'll now be starting a new role in an HR company that's aiming to make work more meaningful to people at every level.

From job to side hustle to year of writing a book and now back to full-time work, it sounds like Liz has charted the perfect course. [Music]

So the goal of starting a side hustle, some kind of income generating project, it's not always to quit your job. So some people out there are like desperately trying to get out of their jobs. Other people are perfectly content where they are. That's why I think the main goal is to expand your options.

So I often use that phrase. I realized like last year I was talking a lot about expanding your options, but I'm not sure I ever really defined it or focused on it specifically. So in this story, we'll do that a bit more as we go along. But in this story, Liz expanded her options by building connections and then building up a portfolio of work. She was also sharing that work and then attracting more and more followers.

And all this together led to a lot of other opportunities, including perhaps most substantially that book deal and the chance to focus on it full-time for a year, but also the new job that she's going to. And also the chance to speak to a whole community, especially as she shares more and more personal work. So all of these things came about, all these opportunities arrived because she pursued that creative passion, because she followed her curiosity and decided to share something she had made with the world. So no matter what your ultimate goal is, I think it's always good to expand those options, expand the choices that are available to you so that you can do more of what's most important to you. That is ultimately what it's all about.

No matter your situation, no matter how you came to this part of the exploration, ultimately this is about getting more freedom to do what's most important to you. So with that encouragement and clarification, I will sign off for the day. Much more is coming soon. The show notes for this episode are at sidehustleschool.com/734. We have free show notes for every single episode, detailed resources and links to anybody that I talk about.

You can see some of Liz's work, follow her, keep up with her about the book, all that kind of stuff. And last but not least, the Side Hustle Society is returning soon. Our newly remixed online community is going to launch really soon. If you'd like to be part of that or just hear more about it, come to sidehustleschool.com/society. There's a little wait list that you can join there and we'll send you some information.

Thank you so much for listening. You're a rockstar. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.