F🦆 Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom tells you to pick a lane. To niche down. To focus. That job-hoppers and generalists will eat the scraps of employment. That if it wasn't hard, we wouldn't call it "work"!

My god, what a load of horse shit.

Somehow, the rich and well-connected aren't told to stay in their lane. They're celebrated as entrepreneurial, diversifying their portfolio, multi-talented and polymaths. But you? You're just unable or unwilling to choose a path. Tsk! So stubborn!

But if it were possible for you to choose just one thing, wouldn't you have done it by now?

Work is existential in the US. Not exaggerating.

So when someone says, just pick something. Often you do just...pick...something. And you do the thing. And it feels like a waste of your time. And you're called entitled or lazy for saying so.

When was this "conventional wisdom" conventionalized? In the 50s when you could be a single earner household supporting a whole family? In the 80s when hustle culture started? It's 20fucking25. Half of the jobs that existed in the 50s are gone and half of the jobs that existed in the 80s will, if they haven't already, be outsourced to AI.

And this is why so many people are either trying to design their own work or trying to build something of their own on the side.

Because you should have control of your life. You're selling your time not your whole fucking being!

And what if your skills are varied? And what if you need to see the full cycle of your impact? And what if you actually want a life outside work to pursue other interests? Why👏🏻is👏🏻that👏🏻so👏🏻unconventional?

For most of my adult life, I hardly knew anyone who only had one job. I personally had two things going at once for more than a decade. It seemed normal to me in NYC to have your bills-paying job and your this lights me up job, but this was also true when I lived in Savannah.

Sure, many of the people I knew were bartending or waiting tables to support their dream. And some, like me, just wanted the stability to experiment with what else I could do. I call this my sidecar job. The thing that rides beside the main thing that carries something (or someone) that brings you joy.

I will never forget the way that Brock, a waiter/med student I worked with put it into perspective one day after a particularly nasty customer practically spat on him. He said, "This isn't my life, this is a job. This is her life. Mine is somewhere else."

I was able to kick off my first business because the money job made it easier to concentrate on marketing and client acquisition. I didn't need every conversation to be a sale.

My friend studied K-Pop dance alongside her money job and parlayed that into a whole-ass marketing niche for herself!

And look what people were able to explore during the pandemic when the money job wasn't the only thing they did with their time. (Granted, that was a LOT of sourdough.)

A sidecar is a low-pressure, low stakes way of finding out the answer to what if...

What if you tried to sell some of your arts or eats? What if you took a course on EdX or Coursera to learn Mandarin or Italian? What if you take some tiny steps on that other path that seems interesting?

And what if it's awesome? Um... Awesome! And if it's not? At least now it'll stop nagging you.

But conventional wisdom would tell you that chasing a dream, walking two paths, or exploring the tools in your Swiss-Army knife brain is irresponsible, foolish , even dangerous 😱.

You may not be conventional, but you are wise—wiser than anyone who would tell you something's wrong with you for trying a tiny experiment on the side. Popping something in your sidecar and taking it for a spin. Exploring what else is possible for you besides the thing you either chose to study as a freaking teenager or took out of desperation.

The people telling you to pick one thing? They're not living your life.

Start small. Start today. Put something tiny in your sidecar and see where it takes you.

You already know what that something is.