Search online for the best side hustles and you will be bombarded with multitudes of activities! Leaving you with no excuses not to try at least one of them.
In the broadest sense, we group side hustles in 2 categories;
1. Activities you do once and get paid once.
Pro: Quickest way to get money when you complete the task.
Con: No income unless you do the work.
Examples: User surveys, Food delivery, Day trading
2. Activities that you put in a lot of effort with no obvious results at the beginning. But with consistent efforts over time, the compounding effect will show results.
Pro: After building the necessary foundation and structure, requires only regular maintenance and will be easier to scale.
Con: Depending on the muse, it’s a long term investment of time and effort.
Examples: blogging, YouTubing and Affiliate Marketing
Choosing the path
As we already have a day job, the only good reason for still slogging after the long day, is to build (somewhat) passive income side muses for the longer term.
While we are still young and energetic enough, we are trading our time and effort for money. Setting in motion for the day that money works for us instead. The goal is to buy back time with money.
Here’s how we will pick our next side muse to experiment with;
- A hustle idea that we’re excited to work on,
- Part-time commitment only (we still have our day jobs),
- High possibility of a clear (small) win in 4-6 weeks
- Tap on our existing resources with as little or no new cash investment as possible.
Remember the objective of a Muse Sprint: to know and complete the entire process from start to end and work out which parts bring us joy.
We have to be realistic, since we pick side hustles that are for the longer term, to expect little to no results.
But hey, we are planting seeds for the harvest and most of the transformation happens under the soil.