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Introduction
When you entered the work world, you might have thought you’d do that job — and only that job — until you left that company one day. Until then, your day job (or your night job, if you work evenings) would be your only job.
Not so fast. Tens of millions of people in the United States, and hundreds of millions of people around the world, supplement their primary jobs with some type of business activities on the side. These people all spend at least some of their professional lives embracing the idea of side hustles.
I should know, because I’m one of them. My entire professional life has been filled with side hustles.
In 1982, I was a U.S. Air Force computer systems officer, writing software on an antiquated 1960s-era UNIVAC mainframe using an even more ancient 1950s programming language. “Microcomputers” (PCs) were just coming on the market and were all the rage, and I was concerned that by the time my Air Force commitment was up in the mid-1980s, I would be way behind the curve when it came to the newer technology of the day.
I started a computer consulting business on the side, writing PC-based applications for small businesses and not-for-profits in Colorado and Arizona. That side hustle spawned another one when I wrote my first book for McGraw-Hill, How to Be a Successful Computer Consultant, which described how to create and operate what we would refer to today as a side-hustle consultancy. That first book led to a revised edition a couple of years later, followed by 30 more technology and business books over the years.
Eventually, my consulting business and those writing projects spawned other side hustles, including university teaching, video courses for Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) and Udemy, and writing novels.
And I’m not the only person in my family who has embraced the idea of side hustles. My wife started an online boutique while she was doing business consulting, and that online boutique led to her latest side hustle: building and maintaining Shopify sites for other small businesses. My parents had a side-hustle mail-order business back in the 1970s, in addition to my dad’s full-time job. My father and uncles owned a chain