The Art of Hustling: How To “Eat What You Kill”

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“It doesn’t matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once.” — Mark Cuban

I promised I wasn’t going to write a book about “how to make a six-figure income in six weeks,” but it’s important to understand the power of hustling — making your own money and having control over how you make your income.

Why is it important to learn how to hustle? Because any other option puts the fate of your life in someone else’s hands.

Regardless of how much money you make, how long you’ve been at your job, or even how much you like it, you’re always at someone else’s mercy, and you’re always at risk. You don’t ever need to become a capital E entrepreneur. I’m definitely not. I don’t really “own a business.” I’m a writer who has some little online hustles that make me enough money to live.

I do have the three things you really want, though.

  • Control — My money isn’t guaranteed, but it’s tied to my effort. I can work harder and make more money. With a non-commission job, you make the same amount of money regardless of the effort.

While this chapter isn’t about getting you to quit your job this second, move to Bali, and become a digital nomad, it’s important to understand both the position you’re in and the possibilities that lie ahead of you if you learn how to become a hustler. As with many sections of this book, I’m going to start by dispelling some lies and replacing them with the unfiltered truth.

Lies You’re Told About Entrepreneurship

In Chapter 1, I talked about the fact that society wants you to operate under an old model: the industrial and corporatist model. Again, no conspiracy theories at all. It just made pragmatic sense to get people saddled with debt, tied to their employers, have few other options, and to hook people into consumerism to keep them working.

As I also mentioned, it was a pretty good bet to just be normal back then. You’d have a nice job and could support an entire family as “the company man.” But now things have changed. The old model is dead, but many don’t realize it. This has and will continue to bite people in the ass.

Just as the perceived state of employment lags behind the current reality of it, the same can be said about entrepreneurship. The old model of entrepreneurship was, in fact, quite risky. First, you’d have to go shill yourself to the bank to get a loan. Then, you’d have to have some sort of physical space to provide your service or sell your wares. If you were in a product business, you’d need to take on the responsibility of the inventory first and try to sell it. Even with service businesses, you needed to pay rent for the storefront, utilities, etc.

A few decades ago, you’d essentially have to start a business with debt or be lucky enough to find a backer, which was way harder to do back then than in today’s age of venture capital and angel investing. Of course, the payoff could be huge. Ask Sam Walton. But the risks were high, too. Walton almost got wiped out of business all together at one point when the owner of his storefront tripled his rent for no reason.51

The remnants of this old model of entrepreneurship left an imprint on people and still stays with us today. That’s why people will often tell you it’s “risky” to start a business, even though in a very real sense, it isn’t. One of the last things I’ll do is guarantee your business success, but I can guarantee you an opportunity regardless of who you are.

First, you must unravel the lies of the old model.

Entrepreneurship Is “Risky”

Many people have the mistaken belief that you still have to sack yourself in a bunch of debt, burn your bridges behind you, and become this bold, daring, risky person to become an entrepreneur. Untrue. You don’t need to become some Silicon Valley guru to own a business.

Nor do you need to go into any debt or put your livelihood at risk whatsoever. The idea that you’re not starting a business because you’re protecting yourself and your family is a cop-out excuse. Why?

Because almost anyone of average intelligence can start a business as a result of the most important invention of all time. You know, this thing called the internet. The internet has leveled the playing field. Any of us can try to be anything we want in 2020 and beyond (for the most part). The key words are “try to be.”

There are many examples that carry little to no risk; businesses you can start for less than $10, like starting an affiliate marketing blog through WordPress for a couple of hundred bucks, amounts of money you spend all the time.

And you can work on a business as a side hustle in your spare time.

  • Aytekin Tank built his multi million dollar company JotForm on the side for five years before he quit his job.52

Entrepreneurs don’t love risk. They hate risk. For every Steve Jobs, there are thousands of business owners who bootstrap their companies and build on the side until they feel comfortable quitting.

We’ve gone over how to find your strengths. You use those strengths to start a teeny tiny little side gig that won’t bring in much money at all to start. You keep tinkering with it as a hobby until you can make $1,000/mo with it. After $1,000 a month, you begin to build confidence to go further. And all of this can be done with little to no risk.

Here are some examples of dirt cheap businesses or hustles you could start.

  • Affiliate marketing — You could start an affiliate website for as little as $3.95, the cost of web hosting through a company like Bluehost.

These examples are very basic. Of course, you can end up spending more time and money to make these businesses successful. The point? Very few people are so destitute that they can’t afford to start a business or side-hustle.

You Need To Be a Genius To Start a Business

I blame Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I think there are two types of entrepreneurship: capital E and lowercase e.

Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, venture-backed companies like Uber, Facebook, etc. are capital E businesses. These examples are often what people think of when it comes to entrepreneurship.

You can do just fine being a “lowercase e” entrepreneur. Solopreneurs fall in this bucket, people with their own little affiliate blogs, e-commerce shops, etc. Freelancers fall into this camp, some people say freelancing is technically a job, but you still can ramp up your income as a freelancer in a way a job doesn’t allow, e.g., doubling the price of your services. And when you store up some cash you can hire staff, train them on your skillset, and turn your one person shop into a company. Someone who makes handmade jewelry and sells it on Etsy comes to mind as well.

These types of businesses can become very profitable and scale, but you don’t need to have this grand vision and genius level IQ to get the job done.

I’ll expand soon, but you need some of these basic skills and supplies to start a lowercase e business:

  • A computer (or even just a smartphone)

This list seems long, but it’s not. The skills seem out of reach for some, but they’re not. People just get hung up on wrapping their head around it all and starting. You’re smart enough to get the hang of the tech stuff, and you’re skilled enough to learn basic marketing.

The skills that matter most are patience and persistence. These skills are hard to master, of course, but they’re worthwhile. I’ve seen so many people with different levels of intelligence, backgrounds, circumstances, etc. succeed in business where I know the only two variables required are patience and persistence.

Talent always matters, but there’s not much of a talent barrier when it comes to simple online business.

Most Businesses Fail

There are a bunch of statistics flying around about how many businesses fail: 50%, 80%, who knows. I think those numbers are off.

What does failure mean to you? If you run a dropshipping company that carries no inventory cost, try it for six months, get no sales, and decide to quit, did you fail? Or did you just give up? To me, business failure looks like the person who does drop a pretty penny on a storefront and goes broke. Having to bankrupt your business is definitely a failure. But when it comes to many of these low-risk ventures, failure isn’t really a thing.

Make no mistake about it. There are levels to the entrepreneurship game. Levels above my paygrade. At these levels, failure carries real consequences, and there is real risk involved. But at the scale I’m trying to teach you about, the most you’ll really lose out on is the money you spend on website hosting, advertisements, etc. You won’t get wiped out if you do it right. That’s the point.

Now that we’ve dispelled some of the myths and lies, let’s talk about the mindset and way of thinking you need to adopt to become a hustler.

Learn To Become a Master of Leverage

This is my third book, which means on three separate occasions, I spent a dedicated amount of time creating a product. Those three separate occasions, due to leverage, pay me over and over and over again. Leverage occurs when what you produce begins to work and produce profit for you without your additional effort.

Sure, I put things in place to promote my books — advertisements, email funnels, traffic to my site, etc. But for the most part, the bulk of the work is done upfront, and I keep getting paid. On the website I write for, people engage with articles I wrote months ago, and I get paid for that engagement. Leverage creates freedom. Leverage equates to the idea of “making money while you sleep.”

Without leverage, your income is forever tied to your time. When your income is tied to your time, you can never be free. I know you’ve heard this before, but let the idea sink in. Imagine being able to reap the rewards of your effort over and over again. This affords you time to build more assets and products that create even more leverage.

I have three books making money for me. I use affiliate marketing on my websites to earn some extra change. People come to my site through Google and buy a product I recommend, and I get paid. I only have to make the resource that mentions the product once. I have a service where I help aspiring writers build their own audience. If I were to turn this service into something like an online course, it would become leveraged.

See, the whole idea is to have more money coming in than coming out. It sounds simple, but when you understand how leverage can help you accomplish this, it’s profound. Once you build one asset that pays you money without your additional effort, you’ll become addicted to it. You can either refine those assets into better products you can charge a higher price for, or you can create more assets.

What do people do who make money from assets like products? After taking care of their expenses, they take their extra profit and put it into investments like index funds. They invest in rental properties that create monthly cash flow. They hire people to help them earn more money. These types of strategies create more leverage. Your money (usually) makes even more money for you. The market has gone negative for an entire year only twice in the past 100 years — the Great Depression and the most recent financial crisis. The more your money grows and compounds, the more you earn. At a certain point, it grows at a crazy rate.

All wealthy people have leverage; the bulk of people who work jobs don’t. This is the only difference between the two.

The Life-Changing Magic of Compounding

People say they know how compounding works. They do, but they don’t, really. See, if you understood the unfathomable power of compounding and embraced it, you’d behave much differently. The average person behaves in a way that’s antithetical to understanding how compounding works.

They’re in debt to the gills:

  • Mortgage

This addiction to financing and being a borrower instead of a lender is the №1 reason why people consistently stay broke. It’s because the entire concept of “financial literacy” is bunk.

Morgan Housel explains this well in his essay “The Psychology of Money”:

“Investing is not the study of finance. It’s the study of how people behave with money. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. You can’t sum up behavior with formulas to memorize or spreadsheet models to follow. Behavior is inborn, varies by person, is hard to measure, changes over time, and people are prone to deny its existence, especially when describing themselves.”

“… Managing money isn’t necessarily about what you know; it’s how you behave. But that’s not how finance is typically taught or discussed. The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.”54

That’s the rub right there. You know you’re not supposed to be in debt up to your gills, but debt is alluring and beguiling. You know you should squirrel money away and invest it, but delayed gratification sucks. When it pays off, boy does it pay off, but the time and shrewdness it takes to master is often too much to bear for most people.

Again, I’d be doing you a disservice to make all of this seem easy. It’s not. I don’t have a better bottom line answer for you than “You’re just going to have to do it.” The best I can do is illustrate the concept in a way that’s appealing enough to compel you to act.

Why the First Six Months of Your Hustle Matter Most

Before you’re able to compound money, you’ll need to learn how to compound your skills. See, people make the mistake of thinking the entrepreneurial hustler type journey is this long slog when in reality, the most difficult obstacle you’ll face happens right away.

Most people quit before they hit the tipping point where your skills compound and everything gets easier. Success isn’t mysterious. It’s mathematical. The more time you spend improving your craft, the higher your chances of having creative breakthroughs. This is due to the Power Law.

The world’s top artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders know the power of the Power Law. This is why they persist, even when things don’t seem to be going their way. They know that toiling away at their craft will eventually lead to explosive growth.

In the book Zero to One by Peter Thiel, he talks about the importance of the Power Law when it comes to our lives and careers. He says that instead of “diversifying” by having a wide range of mediocre skills (i.e., a multiple page resume with tons of “extracurricular activities”), we should instead focus in one area in order to take advantage of the Power Law.

If you look at the math, it’s hard to argue against. When it comes to becoming great at what you do, one plus one equals more than two.

One Billion X Better

This idea came from a post I read from James Altucher about becoming “1% better” each day. According to the Power Law, if you become 1% better each day at what you do, by the end of the year you’ll be 38 times more skilled, pretty good!

I took this idea and combined it with the popularized “10,000-hour rule,” from Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell,55 that says you reach a higher plane of creativity and skill after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Depending on how much you work per day, achieving 10,000 hours of practice will usually take 10 years.

I did the math on getting 1% better on a daily basis for 10 years according to the Power Law. It came up with a number so high the calculator couldn’t spell it out.

I wanted to see how many days it would take to increase your skills by a ridiculous yet fathomable number. I chose 1 billion. Any guesses? It would take you 2,083 days, a little bit shy of six years, to become 1 billion times better at what you do.

Is this an exact measurement? Not even close. The point is to illustrate the power of focusing on doing the work each day until you reach breakthroughs. If you put in the workday in and day out for that long, the person you started out as wouldn’t be able to comprehend the one you’ve become.

Fighting Through to the End

All of this sounds good, but actually taking the time to get 1% better each day takes a level of commitment most of us haven’t made, or aren’t willing to make. Staying consistent is hard. You’re going to reach many setbacks and plateaus before you reach fast growth. Accept this up front. People who don’t do this almost always fail.

They ignore the power of the Power Law. Once you make it through the initial phase of doing the work (over and over and over and over and over), one day your skills will experience a steep rise. When you hit explosive growth, you can put your foot on the gas pedal, leaving your doubts, fears, and anxiety in the dust.

If you’re reading this book, you’re likely at the beginning of this curve:

You don’t realize how much you’ll grow as you progress forward. The flatter start of the curve represents the period where most people quit — before 90 days, before six months, etc.

Once you hit that accelerated part, things become easier. Easier in the sense that you know what you’re doing, and some of your skills have become second nature. People mistake the word “hard” for what the correct term should be, which is time-consuming.

The art of hustling just takes time to get good at. It took me five years of consistent work to get to a point where I feel real financial freedom, but it wasn’t grueling or anything like that. I liked what I was doing and became more competent at it over time by practicing at a moderate pace. That’s it.

Skills beget other skills, compound, and create more leverage. This means it’s easier for you to learn new skills. The side hustle is the perfect entryway into building a life, skillset, and bank account that compounds and grows over time.

How To Start a Successful Side Hustle and Make Your First $1,000/Month

There’s nothing wrong with having a job. Jobs are stable. Jobs can be fun. You can reach all of your career goals through a job without ever starting a business. Nothing is black and white. Everything has pros and cons.

While a steady income is great , let’s go over the drawbacks again:

  • You have no control over when you get your money.

Contrast that with “eating what you kill.”

  • There are few better feelings than making money directly for something you made or provided.

The Many Levels of Hustling

If you want to permanently remain at the side-hustle level, you can. You can get to $1000/month and increase your lifestyle a bit. What would an extra $12k a year do for you? I’m guessing quite a bit.

If you want to pursue your side hustle at a moderate pace — without waking up at 5 a.m., grinding and “crushing it” until you have a panic attack, or moving to Bali — you can.

You don’t have to put entrepreneur in your Twitter profile (actually, don’t do that). You can slowly and patiently start to earn a little side-hustle income and reap the benefits from it. Nothing extravagant. Having a side-hustle is less about the money you make and more about the person you become when you pursue one. It’s also the perfect route to true entrepreneurship.

I’ve noticed a trend, all the real entrepreneurs give the exact opposite advice from what most entrepreneurship coaches and Silicon Valley gurus give.

  • Don’t take risks. It’s called a side-hustle for a reason.

Next, let’s look at some ways you can earn money.

Freelance Writing, Design, Coding, and Marketing

Lots of people try to freelance, but they go about it the wrong way. First, they’re quickly disillusioned by the “race to the bottom” mentality because they sign up for Upwork and find that competing with developers in Pakistan who will work for $3/hr doesn’t pave the road to financial freedom. Pro tip: Don’t go to a freelancer mill to start freelancing.

Want to know what works? Good ol’ fashion outreach. Create a portfolio. Reach out to businesses (they have more money than individuals), and pitch your stuff. Keep pitching until someone accepts, and improve your skills in the process.

Send 100 emails to get 10 replies, three meetings, and one contract. Voila. As with all keys to life, working hard and doing shit repeatedly (while iterating along the way) seems to work. Who knew?

Here are some great freelancing resources to get you started:

  • Makealivingwriting.com

E-Commerce Businesses

You can start e-commerce businesses with low overhead. You don’t even have to carry the inventory. E-commerce businesses are great for people who don’t necessarily consider themselves creative.

So let’s say you don’t want to be that creative type. You could sell bamboo sticks on Amazon (this is a real company). You could be the type of business owner who simply finds great products, positions them, and promotes them.

Of course, you’ll still need to learn the skills to help you sell more, like copywriting, advertising, sourcing manufacturers, etc. But these are the type of skills you don’t have to be innately creative to learn.

If you are the creative type, e-commerce works just as well for you. There are websites like Etsy, where you can sell your products online. You can start your own website using a cheap and simple-to-use platform like Shopify to sell your work.

This is a super broad and simplified version of what it takes, obviously. The point is simply to show you that there are many options available.

Lifestyle Businesses

A lot of people have muddied the lifestyle business niche. This isn’t going to be a sales page or a Facebook ad about “making six-figures in six seconds.” People do build lifestyle businesses. It’s just not as easy as some people make it seem.

The short version of the process: Write/video/Instagram/whatever about stuff you’re interested in, build a following around it, find something to sell them that they actually want.

It takes hard work, but it’s fun. I’ve barely covered all the possibilities when it comes to starting your side-hustle. Places like Side Hustle Nation go into much more depth than I can.

There’s opportunity out there to make some extra change and build a more comfortable and exciting life for yourself.

So why don’t most people do it? Well, you need skills to pull off a side-hustle. To get those skills, you have to hustle. Not at a breakneck pace, but not at a snail’s pace either. The more skills you build on top of one another, the more opportunities you have to create a custom-tailored career.

Build Your Talent Stack

Do yourself a favor and read the book How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Succeed.56 Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, wrote the book. In it, he shares an interesting concept anyone can apply. If you asked Scott, he’d tell you he’s an average drawer at best, funny but not hilarious, business savvy but no Buffett, and good with words but no Hemingway.

He’s pretty good at a handful of skills. On their own, they’re not worth much, but combined, he suddenly becomes the best in the world at the combination. When you stack talents, your skills amplify each other until you have “career capital,” meaning you’re rare and indispensable.

If you’re rare and indispensable, you can charge more, have more autonomy, and have access to more opportunities; skills beget skills, and success begets more success.

Here’s a pool of items that make great potential for a side-hustler’s talent stack:

  • Writing

Above the money, you should start a side-hustle to try and get good at a valuable skill. Then, you can start more hustles and experiment until you have a skillset and portfolio unique to you.

Break the Monotony

Imagine you own a little online jewelry shop. Nothing fancy. You went on Shopify, and set it up in a few hours. You don’t carry any inventory, and the products go straight to the customer. It’s just something you’re doing for fun; a hobby.

You make a few hundred extra bucks a month. When your car breaks down, you have the money to fix it. Or you and your spouse randomly decide to take a weekend trip because you can.

Time goes on. You’re enjoying your hobby. Because you enjoy it, you start to get curious and read more about marketing the store. You implement the techniques. The store grows, and grows, and grows. One day, the income you make from the store matches the income from your job. You can keep your job and have the extra money, or you can scale your business.

The moral of the story? You have the option. Side-hustling, trying creative experiments, and tinkering with your career provides optionality. That’s the biggest benefit.

I’m not here to tell you what to do or try to sell you an entrepreneurship course. I’m here to promote the idea of trying low-risk ventures to spice up your life and your bank account. I know you want to do it too. I know you’re a little tired of the rat race and monotony. Why not give it a try?

Here’s the thing. One chapter of a book isn’t going to show you the process of how to start a business or a side-hustle in any justifiable way. This is a primer I included because the concept is important.

The rest of this book will support you on an entrepreneurial journey (both big and little e), but as far as the business resources themselves, there are some very good online courses and places on the web — both free and paid — that can teach you what to do.

They work, but you have to do them.

This book isn’t very long. You could read it in a few days. The lessons from it will take months to years to implement and a lifetime to master. Self-improvement is hard. Making money is hard. No book will remove the difficulty of these aspects. OK? OK.

First, you discover your strengths. Second, you start your side-hustle. Then, you navigate the winding road from nobody to somebody.

To do this, you’re going to have to understand how to take the right risks. That’s the №1 thing you’re afraid of, isn’t it? Risking your livelihood, ego, and future on an uncertain outcome. This next chapter will tell you how to pull off your “evil plan” without having to risk much at all.

Courtesy: Medium.com

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