How to Find the Energy to Bootstrap Your Side Hustle
By: Kevin Katzenberg, Life Reboot Project
Tags: Side Hustle, Side Project, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur, Bootstrap

How to Find the Energy to Bootstrap Your Side Hustle

After a long days work, the last thing most of us want to do is work more.

Thanks Annie Spratt for the fantastic photo from Unsplash

You work all day, come home, and all you want to do is crash. Or, as the saying goes, “grab some Netflix and chill.” The furthest thing from your mind is getting back to the grind and work some more.

The thing is, what you really want is not to have to get up and go back and do the work thing again tomorrow.

That’s why our weekends are so sacred. We get to do what we love for two whole days.

But as we sit in the vegetative state, watching the next episode of something we’ll never remember next week, we know in the back of our mind, we need to start pulling something together in our spare time. Something to allow us not to go back to the Monday grind.

We’ve read all the stories of success online where people seemingly just like us have ‘made it’ by putting in the sweat equity and building a venture after hours which has left them in a state of total prosperity.

What type of superhumans are these people?

How did they find not only the physical energy but the mental sustenance they needed to keep pushing through when their body and mind is pushing back.

I struggled with this for a long time. I sucked up enough mental strength to push ahead with some side projects, but never any home run. By home run, all I’m saying is having a side business earn enough to replace the regular job.

When I did manage to push through my slothy couch hugging laziness and got some stuff accomplished, I looked at the things I thought was holding me back the most.

These are the things I started crushing, which actually lead to some success.

Trying to get the day job out of mind.

A great photo by Joanes Andueza from Unsplash

I struggled to get my day job out of my mind for a long time. Every day there was a new consortium of struggles and problems to solve. Every night I took those problems home with me for a little extra homework.

Most often, it wasn’t intentional.

It just happened.

I’d find myself starting to think about a project, and something at work would come to mind.

If you have a job where you can pack it away and not think about it after you leave, you might have a better shot than most for succeeding with a side venture.

Taking my work home with me may have made me more successful in the day job, but it played hell with me to get things rolling on the side.

And, the side hustle was what I truly wanted.

Can give any credible advice on how to solve this dilemma? I would say to just “give less of a shit” about your daily grind.

Can you mentally position yourself to go all in and consider your night gig your primary gig? And relegate your day employment as something just to get you by? I consider this “not owning your day job.”

Detach yourself from it.

Make your day job something you do instead of who you are.

Someday grinds are different than others. Some require you to be ‘all in’ or out totally. With my current thinking, this is what is wrong with our work society. Work must come first, and everything else second.

If you can break that mental chain, your night gig probably has a better chance of survival.

Balancing family life and other crap that goes on.

I carefully chose ‘crap’ in that subhead because seriously, we fill our lives with too much ‘filler crap’ to give us the excuse why something didn’t work.

Family stuff is the important stuff.

But, there is so much is put under the guise of ‘family stuff’ we just don’t need to do.

Either way, you will need to find that balance if you want to succeed at a side hustle.

Spending more time with your family may be the reason you want out of that bastard daily grind.

I love the colors in this photo by Matias Islas from Unsplash

Then, by all means, put your family first and do the things that make you happy.

But, take a serious look at where you can carve out blocks of time to work on your side project.

Some people forgo sleep and work on side projects long after the family goes to bed. That’s not my speed.

I like my sleep too much.

I love getting up in the morning and not feeling like I need more rest.

So, my schedule may look a little different than yours.

Uncluttering our mind.

I also struggled with uncluttering my mind. I look at the brain like a web browser with a bunch of open tabs.

As the day goes on, you keep opening more tabs.

By the end of the day, you have a ton of open tabs and a ton of things cluttering the mind.

When I got hung up most with my side projects, I noticed the cluttering fogged my brain enough I couldn’t concentrate on doing anything. I found two solutions.

First, I would close all the tabs and clean my mind of all the day’s stuff.

How did I manage this? I meditate.

I learned meditation years ago. I do a lot of experimenting with a lot of different things in my life. Meditation was just one of those things. It stuck with me, and it works great for eliminating all those open tabs of my day.

The second solution when you get too cluttered of a mind is to do mindless ‘busy work’ tasks. This is still stuff that needs to get done like checking email, responding to customer questions, or maybe billing. The problem is if you fill your whole time with busy work, the core of the business doesn’t get done.

At one point, you will need to find time to work on the project with an open mind.

You will need to break through and fight the resistance as Steven Pressfield calls it. It’s ultimately the resistance that is holding you back from making that side hustle a reality.