mission | Beyond Your Side Hustle

How To Prevent Being Discouraged

Question from Hustleburg’s Episode 2, Answering Listener Questions: How can the solopreneur who is trying to keep up with their 9-5 while also starting their side hustle keep from getting discouraged? How did you do it?

Once you’ve decided that you’re ready to ditch your 9-5 and embark on your entrepreneur journey, you need to keep giving 100% at work, but limit it to only 100%. You can’t give your day job free space in your head outside of the time you gave at the office. Outside the office, that space is for you and your dreams.

The Question, “Why?”

Then, think about why your side hustle is your passion. Why is this “it?” You’ll notice in the interviews on the Hustleburg podcast that I start each of them with “Why?” That’s because I want to know what drives the guest. When I consult with a potential client, I ask it as well. Repeatedly. It’s likely maddening in the moment, because they feel like they are answering an inquisitive 5-year-old who only has one question in his toolbox. In interviews and consultations, I have to know.

More importantly, YOU need to know what drives you, why you’re passionate about it, and you need to share that with yourself and others. Everything becomes about the mission of what you do. Why? Why? Why? It usually takes the third or fourth Why to truly understand your underlying meaning in doing this. This is your vision of the dream you have for yourself.

Make Your Vision Your Mission

When you make that vision the focus of everything that you do it makes all of your business decisions, it makes all of your conversations, all of the things that you do regarding your side hustle and eventually your business, about your why. When you can serve your why you’re not likely to get discouraged, because you have made that vision a mission. You’re not likely to get burned out, because you have a purpose.

Focus on Your Mission

You will always be focused on the real reason why you’re doing it. That’s how I did it. I started with asking why I needed to get rid of the nine to five so that I could help other people do exactly the same.

This listener question was a part of Hustleburg’s second episode. If you have a question you’d like to have answered, please join the community here.

Top Books for the Budding Entrepreneur

We’re frequently asked, “What are some of the top books for the budding entrepreneur?” As such, here are our recommendations for someone ready to go beyond their hustle:

Start With Why b y Simon Sinek

We highly recommend beginning with Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, and we say that you should read that before anything else in the business management or leadership space. Being able to answer the “Why?” question makes so many of your decisions and helps you to define the actions that you will take. This book really lays out the case for how important that question really is.

As you’ve heard in every Hustleburg interview, I ask why someone does what they do. It’s an imperative question that will define your purpose, mission, and ultimately your business.

Building a Story Brand b y Donald Miller

The next thing that we recommend you read would be Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand. It’s very much a must-read early on in your entrepreneurial journey, because it details how you tell the story of who you are what you do and how you’ll help your customer. When coupled with Start With Why, you see how to align your words with your mission and vision when you talk about your business and why you do it. Also, as you hang around us more this will make a lot more sense, but it also details why you should be the Genie, rather than Aladdin.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

This book is one that everyone should read, but ESPECIALLY budding entrepreneurs, because a lot of people actually do need to heed the advice within. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People should definitely be read early on in the entrepreneurial journey. The book provides a literal guide for interacting with others and you would be surprised how many people fail at that despite having been in business for years. Even those seen as successful really do not do a good job of interacting with others.

The Power of Moments b y Chip & Dan Heath

While these are in no particular order of importance, Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments should probably be read earlier than others. This is especially the case for entrepreneurs in the service industry or with heavy and direct customer contact.

This book offers insight into some of the most powerful inspiration for creating an amazing experience for those you serve. We frequently say that marketing may get people in the door, but delighting them will keep them coming back. What you do and how you do it is essentially re-marketing your brand to your existing customers. Delighting them when they interact with you is essentially an extension of your marketing program, and it keeps them coming back and evangelizing about what you do and how you delighted them.

Good to Great by Jim Collins

This classic business study book definitely has to be on every entrepreneur’s reading list. In Good to Great, Jim Collins and his team share the stories and data about some of the best companies in history and how they became great. It even compares how they became great over peers of the time, how they became great over their competitors, and it ties together a lot of the takeaways from the other books on this list.

Listen to this list (and to hear the top podcasts for a budding entrepreneur) as part of the Hustleburg podcast by clicking here.

If you clicked any of the Amazon links for the books listed above, you likely saw they were AmazonSmile links for charity. We love Survivor’s Rupert Boneham and all he does for his community with Rupert’s Kids.

How Millenials Will Save Your Business

I have led millennials in the workplace, and that experience makes me optimistic about how they will save your business… If you adapt it to becoming a more sustainable endeavor.

It’s 2019.

Three years ago, millennials became the largest generation in the American workforce, making up more than 35% of American workers. While you may see “hit pieces” on millennials, poking fun at them with stories about avocado toast, laziness and mooching, and participation trophies, these stereotypes don’t live up to my observations of the millennial generation.

The list of products, businesses, and industries millennials are “killing” grows with each writer and blogger’s need to put words to page. Any businessperson worth their salt will recognize that some of these killed items are simply the inevitable outcome of creative destruction, an economic idea that industries change for the better by destroying the old to bring about the new. It’s why we no longer have buggy whip makers in an age of automobiles.

I’m not a millennial, writing to defend my generation here. Even by the most generous timeline, I miss being one by about two weeks. I have, however, led millennials in the workplace, and that experience makes me optimistic about how they will save your business… If you adapt it to becoming a more sustainable endeavor.

Millennials take over as dominant generation

As millennials overtook Baby Boomers as the dominant generation at work, a Gallup poll found that only 34% of American workers are engaged at work. That means that nearly seven of the ten sitting just outside your office are likely not. This disengaged workforce certainly isn’t helping productivity, though there is hope, and it rests on the shoulders of our largest segment of the workforce, the millennial generation.

Luckily, I’m not alone in seeing the high-quality attributes of this cohort. Millennials excel when working as part of a team. They use the latest technology and adapt to innovations with ease. Most importantly, they want their efforts to have meaning and purpose. They value their work with as much or more importance as their family, when thinking about their dream. To not tap into this passion is a big mistake.

After decades of management practices focused on reports, endless meetings, and performance reviews, we find ourselves unable to tap that potential in this generation. They feel ground into dust by the aforementioned interactions with their boss. Their desire for meaning and purpose in their work requires that we move away from the WHAT that we do to focus on the WHY that motivates us to do it. If you’ve read Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why,” you already have a head start on understanding how to lead your team, especially the youngest players on it.

Vision, Mission, and Purpose

By sharing, exemplifying, and leading the mission and purpose of the work, you motivate them to buy into the vision of your team, rather than seeing it as a quick stop on their journey to their ultimate career. Their buy-in leads to a stronger affective commitment to the organization. Couple that commitment with their blended work and social spheres and the skills they bring with them, and you can build a company swimming with talented millennials onboard for the long term. Their desire for the work they do to have meaning is met when you cast the vision of your mission.

Luckily, this desire for purpose goes beyond the workplace into purchase decisions. In addition to having your team unified behind your mission, you will also have an edge when marketing your brand to the millennial generation. Not only that, the rock star millennials on your team will also be your greatest evangelists. This is key to a demographic who doubts the advertisements they view and hear, preferring the recommendation of someone within their network.

So, when do we start outlining your mission and communicating that to your team?