Balancing serious sidehustles and full-time work

Erik, the author of Developer Hegemony and founder of Hit Subscribe, invited me to chat about balancing sidehustles and full-time work in his ... thing ... it's like a podcast but also a live AMA with the audience. What's that called?

We talked about:

• why I left Slovenia for San Francisco
• how I decided to abandon my freelancing career in favor of a full-time job
• how I run my side business
• why I refuse to make it full-time
• the fact everything you do has a cost and ROI
• you pay with time or with money, but you always pay
• how a sidehustle can help your main career

And I said "to give you some context" a few too many times.

To give you some context, Slovenia's entire GDP fits into the amount of stock value Facebook lost with that 6 hour outage. Yeah.

Your income depends not on what you do but who you do it for. The bigger the ROI the more value you create the more you make.

The part we didn't get into with Erik is the idea behind why to have a business or other revenue stream alongside a dayjob. That's the Barbell investing strategy.

You put most of your eggs in the safest basket and gamble to the max with the rest. Cap your downside, maximize your upside.

I wrote about this in Pay yourself first where I describe my asset allocation after 5 years of Silicon Valley.

Erik also asked about time management.

There is no secret. You can cut distractions to make time and you can buy time with money.

It's interesting how my thoughts on that evolved since @chantastic asked in a React Podcast episode on Hustle and Focus.

These days I think more in terms of leverage and less in terms of youthful exuberance and hustle. 2 years ago that approach was barely nascent.

Compared to a true leveragist, I have lots to go. Baby steps :)

Cheers,
~Swizec

PS: you can read more about the seriousness of my side business in 5 years of infoproducts or how I made $369,000 on the side