This side hustler replaced her job in less than a year and makes $37,000/mo.

Our best ideas to make more money come when we need them most – to pay off large bills our lives depend on.

Although starting a side hustle based on your passion is often a good place to start, needing to pay off a bill many times is an even better motivator towards success.

Just think about any movie scene where two people are trying to come up with missing funds by the end of the week and you will know what I am talking about.

As human beings, we are much more motivated to achieve things based on what we don’t want to happen rather than what we do want to happen. It’s the only reason any of us even have the energy to endure the stresses of working a 9–5, gotta eat right?

And it’s no different with Lilly Skjoldahl’s story on how she went from stressing over a $10,000 dental bill to creating a furniture flipping business that makes her $15,000 to $37,000/mo in revenue in less than 12 months.

For the most part, she had no idea she would be doing what she was doing today, all she knew was that she had a thirst for business, a bill way overdue, and a job that seemed to be sucking the life out of her. But by reading her story we can all learn that she was not picky and is the perfect example of following our intuition.

Matching others energy.

Trying to solve problems that you are passionate about normally means taking lots of time to become good at something and doing lots of research to define the real problem before solving it.

But when you have bills to pay, you just look for the quickest solution. Lilly found hers by scrolling through the Facebook marketplace. Where thousands of other people were also trying to make some quick cash.

The best way to find fast solutions to your money problems is to always go where the money is being moved around the fastest. After being inspired, she took $50 to buy a piece of furniture and some supplies to decorate it to resell for $200.

Not knowing that she’d enjoy decorating the furniture, on top of having extra tools to use after the first sale, she was onto something. You don’t always have to find your passion and then offer a product or service. Many times, you can just start doing anything useful and feel passionate about being and feeling valued by others.

We often forget that money is also a social currency and an exchange on an energetic level. Lilly’s intention were to execute the idea to pay off the $10,000 but later on saw that the kind of work she was doing in the process was much more rewarding than anything she did in healthcare as a project manager.

Never judge a book by its cover else you will miss out.

However, that doesn’t mean that her work experience was completely useless. Those same project management skills were put to use by delegating all the tasks she felt were boring or lacked experience in.

• engagement with audiences on social media thanks to her fiance’s cousins.
• Finding a manager to help with brand collaborations to open us new income streams.
• Hiring bookkeepers, CPAs, and financial advisors to keep her record in order.

That way she could spend most of her time doing what she did best and enjoyed the most, the creative stuff. She took her productivity to another level once she realized that quitting her job to work full-time on her side hustle was a smarter choice.

One thing she did mention was that she is always trying to learn more daily. Finding new ways to provide value in her business. She says it doesn’t matter what industry or field they are in, if they have business expertise she was motivated to find out how she could use what they know about her business.

This is contradictory to what most “gurus” will tell you and it is a faster way to go if you think about it. As I watched plenty of success stories on YouTube, I also found that they didn’t overthink their niche or business model, they just took action.

Many even said that you can do plenty of things wrong and still make lots of dough. Being in a rush to pay off an expensive bill motivates you to take more action and receive feedback quicker than you would trying to be perfect.

Less is often more.

At first, Lilly would scroll for hours on social media (Instagram mainly) to find sources of inspiration for her next design. But later on, said that the more she did so the less creative she felt.

Part of creating is using what you have to get what you want, or in this case, need. It is much easier for side hustlers to use their resources wisely while on a tight budget than when having an overflow of funds. We leave more room for waste.

And we fall short of our purpose as we get distracted by the shiny objects. She started her business with $50 and flipped it into $200 many times over. That’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur. To turn nothing into something.

I find this interesting because normally when side hustlers think of an idea, they think about all the people who have gained success before, hoping to jump on the bandwagon. These people seldomly get the result they desire cause they are in a state of competing for small pieces of a pie.

But when you can turn a group of people or a marketplace from rags to riches, you are doing more than business, you play a key part in expanding the economy and you create a name for yourself. If you find yourself struggling to create value, remind yourself of your purpose behind working on your idea to regain the spark.

Embrace the unknown.

Lastly, the best way to test any new side hustle idea is to see how fast you can take action on it. The faster you can take action the more you can learn from it. It’s best to choose an idea that you can embrace not knowing everything about right away.

Because of this, simple businesses are often the best way to go. Trying to follow your passion can complicate things. As you think about the million and one way you could do something cool.

Where’s if bills are due, you light a fire on yourself to find a quick solution and avoid overthinking. That’s not to say that you would not take action from your passion but there is a higher chance of treating it like a hobby or a source of therapy rather than a business.

The best part of Lilly’s story is that she was forced to think objectively the whole time to get results. When you start a side gig based on your passion, you may think you know it all due to your experience.

But when you have bills to pay, you will approach your business in a different way. Allowing yourself to move forward even though you don’t know all the details. That doesn’t mean you can’t find success from your passion, but it does mean that having different sources of motivation often leads to different routes to self-development and side hustle success over the long haul.