Putting All Your Eggs In One Basket

The power in having a side hustle

Wasn’t this what our parents warned us? — The danger of hoping too much for that one thing and having no Plan B.

Sounds wise. After all, with age, you realize the prudence in hedging your bets, not having your heart broken by dreams that don’t transpire.

And didn’t parents generally tell you to go to college, get that corporate job, with benefits, and climb that proverbial ladder?

Of course, the irony of this is that by fulfilling their wishes, you end up putting your eggs in that single basket — the corporate job. You didn’t see it that way at the time, of course. You assumed you’d lucked out, were in the big-time, with job security and a promising career path.

This is fine when you’re young and can jump from job to job if you’re fortunate, but as you get into your forties and beyond and haven’t made it to the C Suite, age becomes an issue. When I say age, I also mean that relatively high salary, benefits and overall cost—compared to a youngster straight out of college.

As you spend these decades in corporate culture, you tend to lose any sense of entrepreneurship. After all, you didn’t have to worry about earning your keep; you just had to do a good job with your particularly trained skills.

The thing is that as time’s gone on, corporate life is not what it once was. When I hit the job market, it was still reasonably common for people to spend their career in one or maybe two positions for their entire career.

It was a mutually dependent relationship where both parties benefited. The employee wasn’t worried about employment — it was stable in their eyes, and the corporation had a skilled set of hands and didn’t need to train someone else to do it.

“Age affects us all in the workplace. We all get a little less appealing as we get older, unfortunately.”— Sarah Lancashire

But as corporations’ focus turned to those all important shareholder returns, the workforce became secondary and could no longer rely on the old deal.

Today, there’s the question of whether working for a corporation and putting all those eggs in one basket even makes sense.

Yes, if you’re fortunate, you’ll be well compensated for your time, but with 2–4 weeks notice here in the US, with no ‘fault’ needed to let someone go, all that can go away in the blink of an eye.

Unlike a government job where at twenty years service, there’s a pretty good retirement package in place, for the average corporate worker, it’s ‘find another job, and fast.’

Suddenly that person who’s possibly deemed less attractive to other companies due to age has to reinvent themselves. They had assumed that these would be the Golden Years, the money-making years. And the time when the kids are still in college, with those accompanying costs.

After twelve disheartening months of believing another similar job would be around the corner, they realize that they’re back to the beginning of their career.

The years of being that faithful employee, with no side-gig, come back to haunt them. And now they have to become that untrained-for entrepreneur. They’re not even trained to find the next job. It’s been 20 years since they’ve done that.

“The gig economy is empowerment. This new business paradigm empowers individuals to better shape their own destiny and leverage their existing assets to their benefit.”— John McAfee

So the script has changed. With there being very little loyalty on either side, the wisdom is in having that other ‘gig’ — seeing whether it has the legs to become that main gig. Certainly, the skills acquired by being that entrepreneur on the side have benefits and open up other doors outside our corporate world.

There have been studies in the past few years that state people with side-gigs tend to be happier within their corporate lives. The side-gig may be their true passion in life, and therefore fulfills a part of them that the career hasn’t, or it’s simply the extra income it brings in.

If I were reliving my career, I’d do it very differently. If I ended up working at a corporation, I’d know that it will all go away at some stage unless I’m part of Upper Management. I need to be preparing for that day by being proactive with some intention of my next move.

I’d be either focusing on the side-gig with its skills or continually looking for a way of flipping my career skills into a consulting business. Perhaps I’d be developing relationships with a stronger focus on future solo business. I’d be aligning with people that could be future business or learning from people in the consulting world about its challenges and lifestyle.

The work world has changed dramatically over my career. I am very deliberate not to pass on ‘pearls of wisdom’ to my kids that are considered safe and predictable bets in life: I’m not sure there are any more.

I try to steer them towards their passion, with a caveat that if all else fails, what else would they do as their Plan B? So they’re also thinking about that (a little — they have dreams, and that takes up most of their headspace).

It is no longer safe to solely rely on that one career trajectory. But the great thing is, you can take the power back into your own hands—instead of leaving it all up to some corporation that does not have your best interests at heart.

Knowledge is power, after all.