If I was to count all of the hours I’ve been spending on my side hustle, I wouldn’t be doing it.

Really, it is alot of work, more work most of the time than my actual job. I think about it constantly, I’m making sure all of my customers are taken care of. I want to make sure that the images are on par and that people are generally happy with the product I’m selling. It is a lot and I know I’m just starting, but it’s extremely important that I just keep doing the things that I’m doing. Thinking, working, bending down to pickup product, making another box when I have time, making sure my templates make sense to the customer and being ready and hungry and not thinking about the time invested to make a business go.

It is a good feeling to get a good review on the product that I sold. It pushes me to do more for my client when they are happy with my customer service. I see that this is actually possible and that each sale, each negotiation dance I play with a potential client, makes me stronger and a better businessman, it’s awesome. All I’m thinking about now is making the decent systems I have in place as efficient as possible. I’m committed, obsessed and wanting to do more and I am. I’m spending so many hours on it and I know that if I even thought about it for an hour or so as I have sometimes done in these past couple of weeks, I would say that it is a waste and that I should do something else with my time.

See, that is something that I do believe in in business. You have to put in the work. Especially in the beginning. You can’t think about the amount of hours you are spending doing those things. You just have to commit and do and get better and constantly ask yourself how bad you want it. I want this so bad, more than alot of things in the world. I know that if I don’t do the work right now, nothing happens. That could be one reason that I’m pushing myself so hard. It’s the opposite feeling I get at the place I go to everyday, the shitshow. My best friend and I joke about the shitshow and how we are ready to get the fuck out of there and how it robs our souls. It’s interesting to think right now that the little effort I give into the shitshow, at times just sitting there, is good enough for my boss. Compared to what I make there and how much work I’m putting into something on the side isn’t even close, at least right now. But the thing about all of this is that the side hustle needs me more and the success of it is on my back and my dad’s. Soon I will like to slowly take myself out of doing every fucking thing, but that feeling of knowing that I actually matter in somebody’s life for even a small fraction of it is empowering. At the shitshow I can train a monkey or a middle schooler to do my job. The person I train and myself included are all damn replaceable. Also, my boss, co-workers, boss’s boss and all of the people who depend on it deeply to live and able to exist for the time we have on the earth. I guess that is why I get depressed at times when I’m just sitting there waiting to go home.

I don’t think I can ever go back to the place I was at a couple of weeks ago. Not only by the little money I’m making to fuel the excitement and to keep me chasing that fastpace carrot, but because what I’m doing is challenging, hard and so much more rewarding. And the way I’m being compensated is by money that will eventually be the provider for me and my family in the near future.

See, that is what I’ve been longer for this whole year, a real career path into doing something I have some kind of interest in. To finding my way through the crap, trials and mind-blowing frustrating failures, questioning myself and what I believe in, actually trying a whole bunch of things and realizing that I wasn’t pushing myself enough and being depressed because it felt like I was at the drawing board again and all the stuff in between has just made me a better person. Sure to most people a grumpy, egotistical, thinking about the next move and not giving a shit about other people’s hopes and dreams, but a committed, passionate and happy about living person. You know, I don’t even care about what people think of me now. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m pushing and doing and going on with my life with some type of direction, but don’t know where it will go. To many that scares the shit out of them. To me it feels just right, just enough to push me to a place that I have never been and to get me to a place that I dream about constantly and will eventually get a chance live in.