The Grasshopper, May 17, 2024
Finding your voice
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Falling in Love With Something You Can Do For the Rest of Your Life
The opposite of a side hustle
Like a lot of writers and readers online, I am seriously sick of this side hustle crap. It’s symptomatic of a disease promoted by unimaginative people pushing the idea that big money can be easily made with little effort, if you know a secret. A secret that these writers will share with the world.
Use a little common sense here. If that ‘secret’ was so lucrative why would anyone tell the world about it?
Despite this obvious flaw in the logic of this stuff, we are still barraged with it ad nauseum. There is a path and it is not secret and does not need to be. There is something out there you can do that will endlessly fascinate you for the rest of your life. But I cannot tell you what it is because it’s yours, not mine.
When I heard the statement in my title during a documentary last night I was struck by it because I have found my version of that elusive goal, the thing I find endlessly interesting and challenging. And not surprisingly it has been front and center in my life as far back as I can remember.
Mine is the ability to express myself through my writing, but yours could be anything and that is the real secret. There are an infinite number of occupations on this planet and any one of them offers the potential to go deeper if you embrace it fully.
There is a catch. Embracing any activity deeply is a long path. When you start you don’t know what you don’t know. Then you might reach a point where you think you know and that is the point where most give up, not because of laziness but because of complaisance.
Call it cruise control. You’re in a safe place where you can do ok but if you don’t push past that you will likely find yourself stuck in a rut. And that’s when side hustles and promises start to look good. I know, I’ve been there and I wasted a lot of time and experience in the process.
Years ago I decided I wanted to write books and get published by real publishers, the kind that pay you upfront. I went about methodically learning how to do this, doing a lot of homework and learning from the experience of others. And I soon had a book deal for a non-fiction how-to book, a genre which has been largely replaced by Google and YouTube.
But at the time it was a big deal. And I went on to write, get paid, and publish five more books, variations on a formula. And I could legitimately call myself a professional writer on some level.
But what I was is an intern still learning the basics of navigating the medium.
Eventually I leveraged those books into a career as a marketing communicator, the job where I could combine writing with actually making a decent living. It was a compromise but one I could live with and I did reasonably well.
I was writing at the craftsmanship level but something big was missing. I had no voice of my own. I shaped the voice I had to the requirements of the job at hand. Then something happened. One day I found myself writing a novel.
I’d tried before but it always petered out and I did not know why. But this time I started speaking in a voice that felt completely me. I knew that there are no rules when you write fiction but I’d never really understood what that implied.
No person or thing was standing over my shoulder directing what I was doing. I was creating a world of my own, with no expectations. In hindsight it was a pivotal learning experience and it took place later in life long after I was convinced I knew what being a writer was.
In my case it was writing but for you it could be whatever your passion is. Maybe it’s teaching, maybe it’s restoring cars, or playing music, or any one of a thousand occupations. All those occupations share some common traits.
You become competent enough to call yourself a teacher or a musician. That might be the danger point. I think of it as a plateau or comfort zone and it is the place where many settle, happily or with a sense that something is missing.
This is where you have to find a way to open yourself to what I call the universe, for lack of a better term. In my case it came when I wrote the first few paragraphs of that novel, not really knowing where they came from or why they came at that point.
I just knew I liked doing it and after years of writing I was suddenly realizing how much more there was to excavate and that I wanted to keep digging for a lifetime, if necessary.
I completely understand the allure of the side hustle, that thing that may open the door to something better. But think about this. The desire for that secret is a symptom that you have to go deeper into something, so you no longer need to fantasize about an escape route from your life now.
It’s out there. But it’s probably not fast, easy, or expected, in fact I think you have to be open to a passion you’ve forgotten or that shows up one day and looks right. I can’t tell you what that is but it’s out there.
You’re not likely to find it in the promise of a headline offering fame and riches, a headline likely written by someone who has yet to find their voice and probably doesn’t even know it exists.
That passion is in you. Look for it and it will surface when you are ready.
~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen.
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