Anti-side hustle / Parenting as side hustle

Every week anyone in our company can submit a social question, this week someone asked…do you have a side hustle, if yes, tell us about it — link out to it. I loved the question for a bunch of reasons:

1. It came from a brand new employee, meaning she felt comfortable in her first month disclosing her side hustle. She leaned into our values around transparency and trusted us enough to believe we would support her (she was right).
2. This dialogue enables others to see “oh this is a place where I can talk about my side hustle w/o immediate assumptions about “dedication to the company”.
3. Lastly, it was an opportunity for me to learn about other’s interests, someone (also brand new to Seer) owns a 10 acre kelp farm and in 2022, produced ~4,000 wet/pounds of sugar kelp, sequestering 894lbs of Carbon and removing 71.5lbs of Nitrogen from the water.

This was all GREAT right? Yup. But it was 2 answers that really stood out to me as brave.

Here is one:

Alternative perspective — I quit mine!

I’m at a phase of life where I don’t get a lot of time to myself. Selling my me-time did not make me happy even though I was making good money.

I also made peace with the fact that I don’t want to be an entrepreneur when I grow up. I used to read and hang with a lot of people who had this attitude like “you’re a sucker if you’re not trying to go out on your own.” I understand some people have a high intrinsic need to be self-employed, or are wired to easily juggle 2+ jobs — that’s not me, and so the sacrifices (which I think most agree are real) are simply not worth it.

Why did I love this? It was brave. In a world of more, having enough and verbalizing it gets you some stares, it can make people think you aren’t ambitious. I bet there are people who kind feel like they should have a sode hustle because not having one could make them look like they aren’t ambitious.

Also I love how Jason owned NOT having a side hustle, he could have just not responded.

So often once you got kids, they become the main hustle and your job feels like the side hustle.

Side hustles & main hustles have a cost — time away from other things that matter.

Then I got another answer from one of our 20 “emily’s” that was a picture of her kid — and she said…THIS is my side hustle. It’s funny how we have equated side hustle in many ways to ambition, creativity, growth in BUSINESS, but when you break the attributes of a side hustle down, you could replace etsy shop with our kids names :)

We put in time, hoping to grow them into good little people someday (our ROI), we pick ourselves up when we just don’t wanna drive to another practice, blend another smoothie, answer another question, etc — these little kids come into our zooms, get sick and ruin our plans and we get through it anyway.

Cheers to people who own, NOT having a side hustle because it has a cost that individually we all must determine the value of. Cheers to all you parents out there, doing this job is a whole other type of side hustle, yet b/c it doesn’t have a balance sheet and an EIN number we have somehow devalued that work.