Livadata

Lately, I stumbled across the question: “Should everyone have multiple streams of income?”

It’s a popular idea, especially in hustle culture circles — but I think it can be harmful to personal growth and wellbeing. Hustle culture wants you to believe you’re falling behind if you don’t have a side gig. But is that really true?

Can you imagine everyone took that advice and went freelance to work for themselves? If we all became freelancers tomorrow, who would be left to run the businesses we rely on? We’d all just end up at the next networking event, staring at each other, waiting to be hired by someone else who’s also self-employed.

Should we instead keep up our full time gigs and start taking on gigs on the side? Selling training courses or starting a crochet etsy shop? I applaud anyone who does this, but my view is that for many people this pressure to have a side hustle creates a false pretence of being behind. It’s an ask of itself to excel in your full time role, keep up your certifications and personal development. 

My full time role is at Dufrain, whose original motto was “Get Busy Living”. To me this statement is a rejection of hustle culture. If you know Dufrain’s origins, you’ll know this quote comes from the Shawshank Redemption (our founder loved this film – Andy Dufresne becomes “Dufrain”, and here we all are. I believe in the mid 2010s everyone was sent a copy of the film on DVD. That was before my time, so don’t take my word for it, but here I digress.)

The full quote is:

“It comes down to a choice: Get busy living or get busy dying.”

It is an acknowledgment that we are all here to make our lives better. Working hard is important, enjoying your work is important, but none of it matters if it’s not making your life better. We have a family centric culture – leaders with diaries blocked out for a half hour at 3pm to do the school pickups, using office time for collaboration, workshops and alignment rather than for the sake of it so we empower people to remote work the rest of the time where it suits them. 

One of my dear friends (the wonderful Victoria who you can find here: Victoria Jane Assists) is a very impressive self employed woman balancing her virtual assistant coaching business, dog sitting via Rover (which is how we met!) and probably a whole host of other things as she fancies. We often compare notes in the differences and alignments of our approaches. 

Victoria is free to flex up her work to boost her income where it suits her, whereas I have the same amount at the same time each month. On the flip side, when at the pub together one Friday night, Victoria commented on how switched off from work I was. “How can your work be so busy, such a focus for you, you enjoy it so much, and yet a few hours later it’s not on your radar at all?!” Perhaps Apple TV’s Severance had a real effect on me… but I really put this down to the culture Dufrain have created. And it’s not “work hard play hard” (a culture I associate with boozy lad culture organisations that give me the fear personally…) – it’s a recognition that we are all people, with lives, families, or in my case just a very demanding Cavapoo puppy. Work matters, but life matters more. 

Work life balance doesn’t need to come at the cost of career progression. In just over 4 years at Dufrain, I progressed through 4 grades from Consultant to Senior Manager. Was there a couple of late nights? Of course there was. Project deadlines, or bursts of an idea I simply had to get done before the inspiration left me. But what’s important is this was always on my terms, and never demanded of me. My progression came from constant commitment to being my best self, asking for and acting on feedback, and seeing the goals of Dufrain as my own. 

If investing in yourself, your own brand and your side hustles is your route to making your life better – then I applaud you. But let’s also accept that if you, like me, enjoy a different pace, a work life balance that means switching off at 5pm on a Friday and not thinking about work until 8am on Monday morning, you are not behind. So I close off by saying instead of stressing about multiple income streams, focus on getting busy living – whatever that means to you.