Experiment safely with a side hustle

What if you want to experiment with doing a different kind of work, but quitting your job outright feels too risky?

If you have kids, a spouse without an income, and not much in the way of savings, then you might prefer to take a gradual approach to the experimentation.

You can make a soft switch: reduce your working hours at your current job to 80% and spend the other 20% working on a side hustle. When you start a side hustle, you get the hands-on experience that will teach you whether you like this new direction, with the safety net of a steady paycheck from your job.

If your side hustle does well and you enjoy it, that's awesome! Reduce your job's working hours to 60% and spend 40% of your time on your side hustle. Make it a gradual process.

Why reduce your working hours before you start a side hustle? If you start a side hustle on top of working 40 hours a week (or more), you'll over-exert yourself. Sooner or later, you'll experience a lot of stress, and that will give you a distorted view of what this new work direction is like.

Either way, if you want a change, get moving. Whether you move quickly or gradually is much less important than that you start moving in the first place.

Yours,

— Peter