Becoming a successful entrepreneur is more than just having useful skills and stumbling into the right opportunities that give you the chance to demonstrate those abilities.
It’s about more than having a passion for what you do every day.
These are both great goals to aspire to and are essential to successfully run any business, whether it's your side hustle or main business.
The true meaning of success in business should be measured by how much you’re able to use your skills and strengths to help others.
If you’re not completely sure of what you’re good at, or where you should start strengthening the skills you want to build, it’s a challenge to truly help large numbers of people.
This is the first post in my Side Hustle Series, where I break down the steps to help you start your own side hustle business.
Finding Your Why
To begin this process of starting your side hustle business, you need to find your why and understand the deeper motivation behind your reason to start.
Knowing this will drive your efforts for the weeks and months ahead, and it all begins with identifying your skills.
I've prepared a worksheet that will help you determine the motivation (your purpose, your why) for starting a side hustle business.
Understanding your Skills
When it comes to skills, it’s important to understand the differences between Soft skills and Hard skills.
- Soft skills are the personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. In short, these are the skills you possess, that you can’t necessarily quantify. Your EQ (Emotional Intelligence), not your IQ (Intellectual Intelligence).
- Hard skills are what most people think of when they think about skills. Hard skills are specific, teachable abilities that can be defined and measured, like Coding, writing content, financial modeling, app development etc.
The worksheet I've prepared will also help you clarify your soft skills, combine them with your hard skills and identify a side hustle business idea where you'll be able to utilize your skills for good.
Next Steps
After completing the worksheet, you’ve gone through the process of identifying your strongest soft skills and hard skills.
What you do with this information is completely up to you.
If your goal is to launch a meaningful self-employed career by starting a side hustle business, the journey has really just begun.
It’s time to take action.
Now that you know which soft skills and hard skills are going to get you the furthest, it’s time to combine those with your areas of interest and start working towards a possible side hustle business idea that’ll be the right fit for you.
Choosing a winning idea and validating that idea is the next step in starting your side hustle business.
I set out a three-step process to help you find an idea, choose a business format, and set a meaningful validation goal in this next post of the Side Hustle Series.