8 Smart Tips to Becoming More Resilient, Beating Fatigue and Sticking to Your Side Hustle

How to keep going when you feel at an all time motivational low

Photo by Jeffery Erhunse on Unsplash

There is a tragic confusion in the world of side hustling: starting isn’t the hard part, sticking at something is.

When you start something new, the novelty carries you through. You lean into the dopamine kick off new experiences and get high off of the excitement it brings. Whilst it motivates you through the early months, nobody successful made it because they stuck around for months. It takes years to make it big. Just look at Seth Godin, his blog has over 7500 entries.

If you want to make it big you must learn how to stick around for the long haul.

1. Repeat after me, pain is part of the process

I learn this one from Mark Manson: you don’t avoid pain, you get good at feeling it.

Maybe it’s the human condition, maybe it’s the need to feel safe or maybe it’s the way we grew up but the pain feels bad. No one likes to feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. Nobody wants to feel uncertain about where they’re going. Nobody wants to feel out of control. But those are all the things you need to get used to if you are going to pursue the things that scare you. Here’s a simple truth:

• It hurts when you try and get nowhere.

• It hurts when your colleagues laugh at your attempts.

• It hurts when you feel like you’re going backwards.

But here’s the secret: that pain is a separation factor. The ones that stick around find ways to endure the pain and show up anyway.

2. Build yourself a runway the day before (for writing have stimulus)

Building something from nothing is hard. At times it’s excruciating.

You have no clue where to start, what to do next, who you should be talking to, which way is the right way to go. You’re constantly covering new ground with new questions trying to work out which step is the right one to take. Giving yourself a runway helps a tonne. A little bit like planning your route before taking a trip, you go through what you want to do and where you want to go the day before. So that you have a sense of direction so that you know the route so that you feel more comfortable with the uncomfortable.

For me, with writing, that looks like writing headlines out throughout the week. It looks like a list of bullet points of ideas I want to explore. It looks like writing out book titles in the evening.

It’s planning so that when it comes to sitting down and doing the work, I’ve already got a head start.

3. Laugh in the face of your negative thoughts

This one I got off of Mel Robbins.

In a recent podcast, Mel spoke of her failings in her life. There was one point at which she and her husband were $800,000 in debt and she had to work her way out of it. Talk about pressure. Some people would collapse with the prospect of that mountain to climb. Not Mel. She decided to change her life. Of course, it’s not as simple as that and often she’d get negative thoughts to swirl into her brain. Thoughts that told her she couldn’t do it, she wasn’t smart enough, talented enough, you know all the niceties your brain tends to swarm you with. So she builds a mechanism for this.

Negative thought = laughter.

There’s nothing that neutralises a negative thought like laughter. You laugh at it and it seems to de-arm the power of it.

4. Deconstruct your beliefs about ‘good work’ (work to quality, not to time)

It’s trickery to not work to time, I get it.

You have limited time in the day and you want to get as much as you can do. I hear you. But churning out the rubbish is the quickest way to feel like you’re working your butt off and getting nowhere fast. Then resentment will turn into bitterness and you’re on the fast track to giving up.

Instead, train your brain to work to quality, not to time. It’s far better to spend an hour building the header for your website than trying to get the whole website done in 3 hours for example. You’ll end up with a crappy website you’ll need to start again.

Get motivated by aiming to do one small thing really well.

5. Dip into your dream life

I do this a lot. More than I should.

I will fast forward to when I’ve achieved more of my dreams than I have today. When I’ve sold 100,000 copies of my book. When I write to a larger audience. When I write a few books a year and have confidence in my ability.

It’s incredibly motivating. I know the only way to get there is to put in the work. For me, that’s writing. It’s writing consistently. It’s convincing myself to not let myself get sidetracked by the distractions of the world and focus on doing the work.

Dipping into your dream grounds you in what you are aiming for.

6. Do some cleaning in between work sessions

Mixing physical tasks with menial tasks is a power play.

I don’t know why but it just works. If I’m getting stuck writing, I’ll go and clean the bathroom or put some washing in or mop the floors. It sounds weird and maybe it is but for me, it works incredibly well. I think it works for two reasons.

A) I am highly motivated by getting things done. I love ticking things off a to-do list and I’m a sucker for a before and after. Cleaning is brilliant for that. Going from dirty to clean is productivity 101.

B) It gets me away from my computer. I will sit for hours stuck trying to think of a different way to frame something or come up with new ideas. At a point that hits diminishing marginal returns. It’s much more productive to leave your seat and do something else. Cleaning gives me that.

If in doubt, get up and do some cleaning, it works for me.

7. Find evidence that someone has done what you want to do

The beauty of the internet is a double-edged sword.

For me, I use it as motivation. Whenever I come across a writer like James Clear, Austin Kleon, Atul Gawande, Seth Godin, Mark Manson, Elizabeth Gilbert, I go full internet stalker mode. All these folk are professionally, exactly where I want to be. So, I dig into their stories. I understand where they’ve come from, I find similarities between me and them. And then I take from them.

I calculate the hours of work they’ve put in, I understand their route to success, I build a worldview of how they got to where they are. That helps me context where I am. Often, I forget I’ve only been at this writing thing a few years. I think I need to be above my station because I’ve put in the hours. Then, when I look at these folk, I realise I’ve put in nowhere near the graft they have.

It kicks me into action.

8. Tell yourself that time is running out regardless

Time is running out.

Every day it’s running. It’s dwindling. Slowly the clock ticks and the time to live the life you want to is running out. It sounds dramatic, maybe it is. The biggest thing I see in people that aren’t living out the life they want to is they think they have bags of time. They don’t do things today because they know they’ve got tomorrow.

Those tomorrows add up until you have none left.

I tell myself that time is running out every day (I know, I must be fun at parties). I tell myself that I can’t spend my life telling myself that tomorrow is the day because I did that for 2 years and was miserable.

Time is going tick away regardless, it won’t wait for you.

Final thoughts

The dark days will come. You’ll feel like giving up and packing everything away to hide underneath your duvet and avoid the world. We’ve all been there. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. But there are some cornerstones to getting motivated to do more:

• Eat well

• Sleep well.

• Exercise.

• Get outside.

Some days there is no remedy. Some days the remedy is the duvet and Bridget Jones but most days there is a way out, you just need to push through the pain barrier. For me, these 8 tips have worked wonders over the years.

Don’t wait.

My debut book is now on sale for just £1.99. You can also get full access to my writing here.