Most Side Hustles Are Just Second Jobs With Better Branding

I love photography and I turned it into a side hustle. I got a chance to shoot for a sports apparel brand and to be honest. It just felt like a job.

Shooting content for a brand sounds like the best kind of work. Creative, skilled, the portfolio piece that’s supposed to have others knocking. The reality was setting up gear, sorting lighting, deciphering half-written briefs and shooting over 500 photos in an hour. Cool labour. But it’s still labour.

Lots of side hustle advice talks about making money from your best skill. Given we’re all one of one, there’s a theory that this rare skill in a niche can be life changing. But rarity can mean a smaller pool which translates into fewer opportunities. Fewer opportunities mean the path to your first dollar can be long and lonely. Meanwhile someone stacking shelves at Coles is on the weekly payroll.

Both are jobs so why do we gravitate towards the niche skill over stacking shelves? Because the side hustle was never the ‘thing’ we wanted. It’s just the medium for something bigger. What we’re after is control. Control gives us access to more time, more money, more freedom.

The hustle is never the want. Control is. We just don’t say it out loud.