Watching YouTube Videos On Side Hustle Ideas To Make Money Taught Me This: Don't Side Hustle.

Have you ever come across a YouTube thumbnail that says something like, “I made $3000/day doing a side hustle!”? I’ve seen so many of those, and I’ve watched quite a few of them, too. While watching them, I found out that there are numerous ways to make money these days. These videos made it sound incredibly easy to make money.

One of the YouTube videos that I recently watched was about making money by selling digital products on Etsy. The concept here is selling AI-generated images on Etsy. These images are used to create patterns for blankets, coffee cups, T-shirts, and more. They are downloadable digital products which require no physical manufacturing. All of these sounded really intriguing and promising at the moment. Before I knew it, I was spending more than two hours watching these videos on how to generate patterns for a freagin' blanket. But then I paused and thought, “Why the hell am I doing this right now?”

What I was doing might have had the potential of making $3000 per day, but I was stretching myself too thin. I was already dedicating more than a third of my day to my job as an engineer and more than a fifth of my day on GMAT study and reading/learning about investing. If I were to spend 2-3 hours a day managing an Etsy shop, I would have to cut back my study/reading time, which is the last thing I want to do. This is because I love delving into investment books and exploring various businesses. If I had more time, I’d do more of it, not less.

My realization that I was almost wasting my time reminded me of the podcast episode I marked as “Listen again”, which is #295 I had dinner with Charlie Munger, on the Founders podcast by David Senra. The notes that I took while listening to this episode include the quotes from Charlie Munger (All quotes below are excerpts from the episode). The best quote by far is,

Stop multi-tasking.

Lured by the $3000 per day possibility, I was carving out my precious time that I could have spent deepening my understanding of investment principles or analyzing annual reports. If I had invested that time in reading, I might have become a bit wiser than yesterday.

Look at this generation with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren who just focuses on reading.

Well, he is damn right. Spreading my efforts too thin will never lead me anywhere. I’ve even talked about wanting a singularity in life. Multi-tasking will never help me achieve that.

You lose things when you start to envy. Things like confidence, self-love, and happiness.

I also noticed that the motivation to watch these lucrative YouTube videos often starts from envy. I envied the people claiming to make $3000 per day. This made me think, “I want to be like that. Why am I living paycheck to paycheck?”

I soon learned that this kind of thinking is detrimental to my mental health. It erodes my self-confidence and instills doubt about my abilities. I remembered that, for this precise reason, I deleted Instagram from my phone a year ago. I found myself following too many people who seemed to be “living their best lives”. When I exposed myself to only the highlights of others’ lives, I began feeling miserable. But I quickly learned that it’s important to realize that most people use Instagram to showcase the best snippets of their lives, not the challenging parts. If you’ve had a similar experience and felt dissatisfied with your life, you’re not alone. Just get rid of Instagram. Envy does you no good.

It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy. You have to cure yourself of this. Curing yourself of this is key, key for a well-lived life.

Self-pity has no utility. Envy doesn’t either.

To me, self-pity begins with envy. So, stop comparing. Free yourself from envy. Concentrate on your life, not others’. If you’re working on a project, finish it (this includes me as well). Do not digress. If you aspire to excel at something, to the point where you can make a living from it, work hard to become the best at it. Transform yourself into an irreplaceable asset with high barriers to entry. Believe in yourself that every day, you’re improving, bit by bit. These daily improvements will compound over time. Allow time to do its work of compounding.

I’ll conclude this blog post with one last quote that I’d like to share with you. It is to reflect on ourselves and assess if we’ve strayed from our primary endeavors. If we have, let’s be mindful and return.

Extreme specialization is the way to succeed. Most people are way better off specializing than trying to understand the world.

(Below is commentary by David Clark, the author of The Tao of Charlie Munger.)

Specialization is the key to survival in any species and that is the key to success in any business. Specialization protects us from competition. Why? Because specialization presents a barrier of entry to the competition, and the more difficult it is to become specialized the greater the barrier. If all we do is what everyone else does, we will spend our lives competing head-to-head with everyone else. But if we specialize in something and excel at it, the specialization will set us apart from the rest of the crowd. Do we take our Porsche to the local car mechanic who works on everyone's car? Of course not. We take it to the shop that specializes in Porsches. It charges us twice the normal hourly rate and gets away with it because it is a Porsche specialist. It is the specialist who makes the big bucks.