Nic Haralambous
Side Hustling

I've been building businesses for so long, since I was 16, so thinking of the first one is kind of a difficult thing. When I was 16, I started a business selling Greek worry beads. There wasn't really a side hustle at school, that was the only business I had and it was a side hustle to my studying. 

Side hustles are contentious. Some people hate the idea of a hustle. Some people hate the idea of just building things that aren't your core job. For me, it's really simple. The side hustle should be a revenue-generating endeavour that adds to your existing income stream. That's it.

The slow hustle movement tries to keep the idea of a hustle, but help people understand that it's okay to build things slowly. In fact, not only is it okay, I'm suggesting that it's the only way to build things about you. Nothing that is worth building is worth building quickly. You have to do things slowly, consistently, intentionally for them to be sustainable. 

If you don't have your mental health right and you don't have the lifestyle required laid down, then everything else breaks. That's why the book that I've written focuses on mental and physical health first. Because how do you build a business if you're only getting an hour of sleep at a time? You don't, it doesn't work. So my mental health now is paramount. If that isn't working, nothing else matters.

There's one that comes to mind that I love, that is global and big and it's called 1-800-GOT-JUNK? This business is just so crazy it's trash - the guy moves trash. He had no job at the time and he had a beat-up old four-by-four, and he decided to just start picking up people's trash, moving it for them and then selling it on or getting rid of it or whatever. So he did this for a few years and that one truck that he had ended up being rolled into a half a billion-dollar business over a period of 20 years. That's the game!

I could probably spend three hours talking about fear and why people suffer from fear and why we punish ourselves and who helps us suffer from that fear. So let's try and condense it down. The first thing that I see right now is we live in a culture of doom-scrolling. We live in a culture where everybody else's opinions matter and everybody else's lives matter.

It's really simple for me. There's a phrase that should help you understand what I mean, "Don't turn your passion into a business but be passionate about the business you build". And there's a subtle but important difference here. You can have passion for multiple things, but your passions should remain passions so that when you are struggling with your business, you can get up and go and do pottery, or get up and go walk your dogs.

There's this Japanese concept called Ikigai and the basic premise, the English translation is "your reason for being" or your vocation. Now, I'm not a believer that every human in the world has a single vocation forever. It's okay if you do have that, but I believe you have vocations for now. 

The first step, if I'm going to follow the letter of the way that I'm trying to help people think about this, is to figure out what you can fit into your life. If you have an idea, great. Stop, don't look at the idea yet. Figure out, are you mentally ready to start a side hustle?

Side hustle ideas need to be efficient and straight towards revenue. A lot of people will have an idea that they want to build an app, but they've never built an app before, they don't know what that means. They don't have the revenue model, it's not in their wheelhouse. The advice for ideas is pivot towards the things that you're good at. People will tell you to pivot, that word pivot. Pivot away from...don't. Pivot towards what you're good at.