Build in the Silence of Your Own Confidence. Don’t Tell Anyone About Your Side Hustle.

The power of silently working on building your future

If there is one killer of a side hustle it’s this: expectation.

Expectation happens when you start telling the world about your grand plans. When you start proclaiming to the world that you are going to build something in 12 months that changes everything.

That you are going to manifest it through the power of the internet and with all those watching eyes, you will succeed. I’ve seen that successfully happen (and I’m not sure how successful it actually is) just the once.

Every other time I’ve witness someone proclaim (in good faith) that they were going to change the world, all that happened is that they turned up for the first few weeks and then faded into the background.

Don’t let that be you.

Showing up for other people is a road to failure

“You will never stop seeking validation from others. It’s impossible. Instead, seek validation for better reasons and from better people.” — Mark Manson

Showing up for other people is damaging.

Contrary to popular belief, manifesting probably won’t move you in the direction you want. At least it never did for me. Manifesting won’t do much apart from get you psyched up. Which is good. It’s not the goal though.

By telling the world that you are going to do something, you all of a sudden have the weight of that promise on your shoulders. If you’ve expressed to the world that you are going to change it by starting this side hustle and then tomorrow you wake up and feel like doing nothing, you’re in a bit of a predicament.

You might think this is a good thing. That if you can’t be bothered and you flash back to your declaration of ambition and you’ll think that you need to crack on with it. But in my experience, the opposite is true. Especially in the long term.

• Prying eyes do not lead to increased performance.
• Prying eyes lead to something Sian Beilock calls ‘Choke’, when unduly pressure leads to performance catatrosphe.
• If you rely on other people to keep you motivated you won’t be motivated for long.

Showing up for yourself is the road to success

“You have to have a dream so that you can get up in the morning.” — Michael Phelps

Showing up for yourself because you want to is powerful.

Showing up for yourself because you feel like you deserve to try at building a better life for yourself (minus all the cringe that goes with that). You should show up for yourself because intrinsic motivation matters.

The science shows that intrinsic motivation is best kind of motivation. A 2012 study from Cho and Perry showed that intrinsic motivation is three times more effective than extrinsic for employee engagement. In other words, employees that are motivated to do a good job for themselves because they want to are more likely to stay in a company.

Showing up for yourself is the most powerful motivator in the world. And why? Well because you are never going anywhere. You don’t need views, likes and whatever. You just need you and you have that.

Learn to keep quiet when things are going well

“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.” — Andy Rooney

We all like when things are going well. It’s self-validation. It’s signalling that things are going in the right direction and that you might not mess this all up after all. You want to shout it from the rooftops. Here’s why you shouldn’t:

• Your success isn’t validation to the world that you are good enough.
• Your success shouldn’t be motivated by the opportunity to tell the world you’re good enough.
• You are already good enough.

Ryan Holiday said when he found out he hit the NYT best seller list he was mowing the lawn. He answered his phone from his agent and heard all about the good news. He smiled, chatted a while, put the phone back in his pocket and went back to mowing the grass. Life goes on exactly the same.

Build, measure, learn

When you build your side hustle, your main metric should be improvement.

Did people like this version more? Did people understand you better this time? Do people resonate with this product better? Is the product market fit stronger this time? Do people feel happier with this iteration?

Those are the measures. Improvement trumps everything. You are aiming to improve your little piece of the world, whatever side hustle that might be. That goes for writing, making a product, building a service, creating a business. Whatever. Did it improve?

So you build, you measure the response and the you learn from it. Once you’ve got your feedback you ask questions like:

What is the thing that people love? What matters to people here? What element of this thing really hit home with people? Where did the initial attention go?

And you take those findings and you iterate into version 2.

Simple.

But none of that means you need to shout about what you are doing to anyone that listens. Sure it’s nice to talk about what you do but if you want to stick around for the long haul, if you want to make a go of this thing, don’t get into the habit of talking about something to gain validation from someone else.

Final thoughts

Build in silence. Build for you. Create your own confidence.

Don’t rely on other people’s well wishes or words of encouragement. You don’t need them. Similarly you won’t then dwell on people’s nasty comments. It’s not ignorance so much as a strategic play.

If you don’t react when people are cheering you on, you won’t react when people are hating. It’s the detachment of reliance on the voice of others. You don’t need them. You need your own confidence to hit this thing with the best version of yourself.

Without prying eyes, building in the silence of your own confidence, you’ll do great things.

So after months and months of work, my first book is out, you can order it here and get full access to my writing here.