How to Have a Happy Hustle

The Complete Guide to Making Your Ideas Happen

Bec Evans

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781785784859
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785784866
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship

**WINNER OF THE STARTUP INSPIRATION CATEGORY OF THE 2020 BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS**'It's impossible to read this book without being inspired and energised... Essential reading for any start-up or entrepreneur, at any stage of the journey.' - Alison Jones, Host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast and author of This Book Means Business 'Genuinely fresh and jargon-free' - Financial Times How to Have a Happy Hustle shares the secrets of innovation experts and startup founders to help you make your ideas happen. If you're looking for fulfilment outside the day job, have an idea but don't know where to start, or are held back by a lack of confidence, experience, time or money, Bec Evans will help you get off the starting blocks with this complete guide to making your ideas happen. There's no getting away from it - hustling is hard work - but with practical tools, inspiring stories, science-backed research and guidance every step of the way, you'll find what makes you happy as you build your side hustle.

1 Having ideas

CHAPTER ONE

Problems

It all started, much like every other day, with Jo Caley getting dressed. That fateful morning, she put her foot through the knee of her favourite pair of jeans, ripping them beyond repair. Her jeans were wrecked but she was about to discover her big idea – and it all began with her hatred of shopping.

‘I was gutted,’ she says. ‘I’d have to spend hours traipsing around the shops feeling inadequate, that nothing fits me, and I can’t afford anything that I like.’

To avoid the misery of the high street, Caley decided to buy her jeans online, but the more websites she searched the more confusing it got.

To understand why she hates shopping, take a peek inside her wardrobe. Open the doors and you’ll find clothes ranging in size from a UK 6 to 14. Perhaps she’s got an issue with her weight, perhaps she’s a yo-yo dieter? No, her weight and figure have been consistent for years. Caley’s real problem is that in one shop she’s petite but when she goes to another shop she’s pushing large. Each retailer uses a different set of measurements to clothe her same-sized body. And it’s not just interpretation of sizing standards, there are a whole bunch of alternative systems including UK, US and European sizes; small, medium and large options; waist measurement and leg lengths; and then there are shops with their own unique numbering systems.

But, in the midst of her jeans shopping nightmare, her despair turned into curiosity. ‘I realised my problem, and then I thought, this is quite interesting. This must be really annoying for everybody, not just me.’

Caley was right. She realised she was part of a much wider trend. Nearly 60 per cent of British women struggle to find the right size clothes.3 Caley had encountered ‘vanity sizing’, a problem that millions of women face.

‘Poor bloody women,’ she tells me. ‘Who has time to find a pair of jeans that not only fits them, but fits their budget, that they like the look of, and does everything else that they want a pair of jeans to do?’

She was determined to help. But before we hear about her solution, let’s spend a bit more time with her as she stands half dressed, holding her torn jeans, feeling annoyed and upset.

WHY PROBLEMS?

Caley was in the right place to have an idea.

Before you fling off your clothes and wait for inspiration in your underpants, let’s find out what that means.

Y Combinator is the largest and most successful startup accelerator in the world. It has helped thousands of people turn their ideas into fast-growing technology businesses worth millions, and its investment portfolio includes big names like Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox and Stripe. Its co-founder Paul Graham has simple advice for generating ideas:

‘The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.’4

Caley had a problem. She found out other people shared it, and she got super interested in solving it. She did all of that before spending any time generating ideas or finding solutions.

The best way to have an idea is to start with a problem. The best way to find problems is to get curious.

Throughout this book, you will meet people with inspiring side hustles, founders who turned dilemmas into successful startups, professionals who problem-solve for clients every day, and idea-makers who help people to design and create solutions. Together, we’ll crush the myth of the lone inventor – because no one plucks fully formed ideas from some mysterious place in the sky. Instead, you’ll get a team of advisers with expertise and advice to turn you into an ideas machine.

BE CURIOUS

Have a problem? Don’t fret. Be curious instead.

Curiosity will help you hunt down problems and keep you interested as you explore them and decide which one to focus on. Once you’ve found a problem, you’ll generate solutions that people want, need and will pay for.

So, let’s get problematic. Over the coming chapter, you’ll:

• Stop waiting for inspiration.
• Become a problem seeker and find what’s bugging you.
• Choose the most exciting problem.
• Finish up with a problem statement.

DON’T WAIT FOR APPLES TO FALL

Archimedes had a burst of inspiration – a world-changing, knowledge-creating, scientific breakthrough, an idea so fantastic and urgent he leapt out of the bath and ran naked down the street, shouting ‘Eureka!’ – the ancient Greek for ‘I have found it!’ Archimedes hadn’t found inspiration in the bath tub, but a solution to a problem he’d been desperate to solve.

History is packed full of neat inspiration stories like Archimedes’ Eureka moment – take Sir Isaac Newton and his apple-inspired gravity discovery. Beware these myths of invention.

‘Don’t wait for the proverbial apple to fall on your head. Go out in the world and proactively seek experiences that will spark creative thinking. Interact with experts, immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments, and role play customer scenarios. Inspiration is fuelled by a deliberate planned course of action.’5

So say David and Tom Kelley, two brothers on a mission to democratise creativity. They trash the myth of a lone creative genius and instead build people’s confidence to seek inspiration through an active approach. They have made the process of invention their lives’ work, championing human-centred design. David founded D-School at Stanford which, alongside his other founding organisation, the design agency IDEO where his brother Tom also works, has trained a generation of designers around the world to solve problems big and small. Anyone, they believe, can be a creative problem-solver, you just need to start.

Most people talk themselves out of having ideas. They dissuade themselves from starting side hustles. They stop themselves from building businesses. They tell themselves they aren’t that sort of person, they don’t have the right skills or experience.

You are the right person. You have the right skills. What you’re interested in is important, and that puts you in the perfect position to make things happen. I’m going to make sure you have the best advice to get started.

I asked Jenn Maer, who works with the Kelley brothers as senior design director at IDEO, how we can begin. ‘It’s not so much a process as much as it is a way of looking at the world,’ Maer says. ‘Keeping an open, creative and optimistic mindset is incredibly important if you want to create change. You have to believe that something can be different before you can actually make it different.’

The creative mindset is a curious one, that wants to see, try, do and learn something new. We all know the advice about taking time away from our screens to take a walk, talk to people, go to an art gallery, or read a magazine or book. So far, so vanilla. I asked Maer what she recommends.

‘Look at some weird shit,’ she says. This means explore things that challenge you, stimulate your thinking and make you happy. Don’t have an agenda – because having an agenda is what kills you.

Agendas are everywhere, in our daily routines and habits. Here’s a simple exercise to squash agendas and trigger new experiences: change your morning routine.6 You could, for example, shake up your work commute by changing transport and cycling instead of getting the train, getting off the bus a stop earlier and walking, driving a different route, or listening to a different podcast or playlist. A small change to your routine can make you see things differently; it will put you in a position of curiosity because you won’t be able to rely on your habitual way of engaging with the world.

Getting out of your comfort zone can lead to new discoveries. The research backs this up. Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that:

‘interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t.’7

Take Jo Caley. Her interaction with her jeans was certainly messy and inefficient – she stumbled serendipitously in her jeans and ripped her way to an interest. Vanity sizing wasn’t something she knew about, or cared about; if you had asked her about it before her jeans incident she might have said she didn’t want or need to solve the problem, but once she had experienced the problem, started digging into it, she was hooked.

You can’t predict how or when you will find a problem that interests you, but you can open yourself up to spot them. Here’s how to be a problem seeker.

WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?

Life is full of annoyances.

You get up, burn your toast at breakfast, and wait to board a late-running, overcrowded commuter train whose route is beset by Wi-Fi blackspots; the lack of signal drives you to read the free daily paper over the shoulder of a seated passenger, in which you discover reports of climate collapse, dwindling natural resources and the extinction of species.

Our world is full of flaws. Embrace that imperfection – it will be fuel for your ideas. Tap into your frustration to find problems you care about and want to solve.

Start with what’s bugging you now. Problems hit us like a meteor, or we stumble over them regularly – like that ste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Vikas Shah
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: HAVING IDEAS
• SECTION 2: HONING IDEAS
• SECTION 3: MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN
• Conclusion: Happy The support to keep going
• Tools and Top Tips Index
• Illustration Index
• Story Index
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright