Side Hustle or Passion Project?

I’m aiming to post an edited version of this on LinkedIn, which is why it is perhaps more apolitical than I would like. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that most of the people pursued by MLMs are women or PoC, and don’t think I haven’t noticed that in a world that ought to be post-scarcity we’re all working two or more jobs, but I would like for just one thing I do to pay me human money I can use in stores. I may expand this to sound a little less capitalist.

Like a lot of you, I have a side hustle. Maybe it would be better called a passion project – I never expect it to pay in currency, but I do hope it will come to fruition and give me some level of satisfaction. I think most of us have a creative project in our bottom drawer or a business idea that we’re working on alongside our conventional job if you’re an idiot like me, you may even have both, things you couldn’t choose between and keep you very busy, but which can be tabled at a time when your ‘real’ work has to be your main focus. Whether you’re furloughed or looking for growth you don’t think your company can give you, we commonly look to the side hustle as something that’s more fulfilling creatively, financially, or socially.

Hustle is a word, like any other, with connotations. Like many words in common usage, it filtered down from the black community and is associated with the hustle of getting your art heard on the hiphop scene. Like all words its meaning has grown, and your hustle could be anything from hiphop you’re trying to get noticed to cupcakes you’re trying to get sold. Why has it become a ‘side hustle’? A ‘passion project’? In music, the hustle was originally about the need for survival in a harsh, ill-paying industry, whereas a hustle on the side suggests you are already surviving, maybe even thriving, elsewhere. A passion project has always been that – a successful film director or musician funding themselves to work outside of the genre they’ve found success in, showcasing their art as not a medium to get paid but a thing that exists simply for itself.

How many of us believe that our side hustle can be our only hustle in the future… and do we want that to be the case?

I can’t answer that question. Only you can know what your hustle means to you – is it surviving, the visceral need to put your product out into the world? Is it your passion to share an art or craft that you’ve honed, the desire to be recognised as good at it? Is it rooted in UNhappiness in your current place in the world, or happiness you find in the craft itself? I want everyone to find success and fulfilment – and whether those things are in the same field or you’re putting new things out into the world, varying your output like a prism refracting light, your output is the work you’re choosing to do.

I hope we recognise that some things that don’t pay in money shouldn’t have to, but that they’re still be vital for us. Hustle on the daily and find passion in your side projects… life is too short not to.