What Sets Successful Hustlers Apart from Mere Employees

Note: This was originally intended as a reaction to the article Fuck Passion, I Will Do 9–5 but 3 sentences later I realized this is something I’m passionate to talk about. I went off to write about it.

• In Fuck Passion, I will Do 9–5, the author talked about how influencers market working on their own terms and shaming those who aspire to pursue a profession
• how the toxic hustle culture affected his life (most especially his health) negatively
• Ultimately led him to decide to settle for simplicity.

In this article, I’d like to talk about how it could be done better — if money and the freelance lifestyle aren’t the main motivators.

Fortune Favors the Brave

Most people aspire to start a new business, a side hustle or any income stream yet only a few of them are brave enough to fight the temptation to go back to the stable (or better yet, predictable) life.

The security you get from the usual grind vs. the challenges of inflation, costs and competition really gets into you and knocks you back to “reality”.

You’ll know it’s not gonna work when there’s hundreds of competition, when you’ve sent more than 2000 cold emails today with no response and you’ve received 20 emails rejecting your application this morning.

The numbers just don’t lie, this isn’t for me. This doesn’t work.

The bills won’t stop to wait for you to get better at it, you just have to go back to looking for a real job.

Instead of giving up, it might be a good idea to try to at least learn to optimize to be better, wiser and healthier while choosing a different path other than the usual 9–5.

The Middle Way

Unlike those “influencers” telling you to jump on the bandwagon, I don’t discourage working corporate, nor do I promote the “hustle hard” mentality. There’s a middle way of doing things.

Heck, those influencers — with their flashy cars and inter-continental digital nomad lives — didn’t really enjoy the lifestyle from their freelance earnings. Most of the money comes from the courses they sell, their cross promotions, and the Youtube advertising revenues.

In short, they’re the product. Or we are (if it’s coming from advertising).

Anyone can do it but it’s not for everyone.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing 9–5, but not choosing to work full time is a choice that’s not for everyone.

The #1 thing that sets apart those that succeed (like really succeed in all aspects, not just financially) in side hustles from those that don’t is Entrepreneurship.

I’ve been escaping the corporate life and working as a web and marketing designer for 14 years now and I will never look back to working the 9–5.

I’m not a multimillionaire by any means, but I’m successful in my own right. I built a Career (yup, with the capital C) out of what I do, not just some side hustle for an extra “income stream” like what they’re marketing us.

I’ve been trying to optimize myself, get better, scale my business and get past the hurdles of cold calls, cold emails and other really cringe things I did in the past in an attempt to market myself better.

Yes, there are still times when I work more than the work hours… even longer than a 9–5 workday!

Why? Because I love what I’m doing.

And just like any other entrepreneur, you work longer hours on that passion project than if you’re an employee. Why? Because you’re far-sighted and you have created a blueprint on what to do and which risks to take. You’re well-informed and realistic about it.

You know how bad it will be and you believe you can do it.

There’s little to no stability in entrepreneurship, because you will never know how your idea will turn out. And for the rest of us, that’s the most exciting part.

I wasn’t even brought up rich enough to take such risks.

I was just turning 18 when I started, and there were days when I lived off instant noodles because of payment delays (payments weren’t that easy back then and I didn’t know how much to price my services.)

The early struggles went on for years until I had my own family. There are days when there’s really nothing to put on the table. But I didn’t give up. I knew I just had to learn to look past the hurdles into the goals I had in mind.

I knew there were things I had to face that were beyond my capabilities and I just had to outgrow myself countless of times through learning.

You can only succeed if you get out of the employee mindset.

But getting out of the stable zone (which is really the comfort zone), especially during these rough times, isn’t easy.

I won’t say “Fuck Passion”, I’d say fuck those who say it’s easy.

By getting rid of the employee mindset, you accept that this is a business. And like every business, it comes with risks… but you set up a concrete plan on how to tackle each one of them and bounce back with a fallback solution.

Just because you’re prepared if it fails doesn’t mean you’ll stop. You know very well that there’s good and bad days in business.

I know people who have started freelancing around the same time as me, and are still doing it the same way — working without scaling. It’s because it’s not easy to leave the safety of having something stable than to make drastic changes to your freelance business that may break your momentum.

What would an entrepreneur do?

If it’s a mindset thing, then how would an entrepreneur tackle the challenges of opening a new income stream?

• He will make it clear that he’s building business relationships, not merely working for the companies he’s delivering service to.
• An entrepreneur will get out of “offering services” and will start to convert those services into products. He will stop trying to promote his skills and will start promoting the end goal that he has to deliver.
• Because of this, he’s continuously learning how to position himself in the market and create a compelling offer
• He would consider every interview as a mutual discussion between 2 business people, rather than a job interview.

Unlike an employee, he doesn’t jump on an interview aiming to get hired… He wants to know if they’re both a good fit to work together and will decline if he feels it’s not good business.

He will put serving his clients first in mind. “Service first” and good business relationships will follow. With good business relationships, you prosper.

The entrepreneur is not short-sighted.

• The goal is not to earn money from the salary. The ultimate goal is to gain more credibility to be able to scale and increase the income with systems and workflows that he has built after years of painful trial and error.

But here’s the kicker. You don’t have to leave your profession to scale it.

You might potentially leave the 9–5 but you won’t have to abandon your title. And when you have no money to lose, it’s always a wise idea to keep your full time job stable and start your freelance business small.

Even if you’re a full time worker — a teacher, a doctor or an engineer — you can still be an entrepreneur.

You can still position yourself, have a market and earn from your expertise. You can open income streams outside of the fixed pay rate that you receive every month (if that’s what you like, whatever floats your boat) by building a product around that expertise.

You can write a book sharing advice for first-time teachers, create content for medical school reviewers or a cheat sheet for whatever engineering project.

The possibilities are endless, you just need an open mind.

Key takeaways:

• Failures are good. The obstacle is the way. Fail fast so you can learn from your mistakes and optimize faster.
• You don’t need to leave your 9–5 job to be successful with the side hustle you wish to pursue.
• Like any other business, you need to invest time and money to start or scale a side hustle. The money is on the scaling, not the initial earnings.

If you love what I wrote, please consider following me on Medium! I will be writing more articles on authentic marketing, high-converting web design and productivity for work-at-home people.