Chapter 3 The Rise Of The Multi-Hyphenate

“You are not only one person! But dozens, hundreds of personalities! But boy you might never meet all of them! We try so hard to ﬁt into boxes, that we end up suppressing some of what we are and end up living the wrong lives.”

—FREDDIE HARREL, global fashion entrepreneur

The Multi-Hyphen Life is about being a happier and more fulfilled person at work and otherwise. It’s about breaking out of a predetermined deﬁnition of success that may no longer be viable. But it also doesn’t necessarily involve leaving your day job. This isn’t a “quit your job”-type book. It’s also not about labeling yourself a “freelancer” and telling you to go it completely alone. The Multi-Hyphen Life for you could mean nurturing an outside-of-work hobby—or hyphen— that complements your interests and adds to your skills. A side project doesn’t have to mean world domination or a global business plan.

The Multi-Hyphen Life is the straight-up refusal to be pigeonholed or afraid to add another strand to your career bio. It is rebelling against being (a) deﬁned by what generation you fall into and (b) mindlessly following someone else’s path. You are not your job title and instead should feel confident enough to move between different jobs if necessary, relying on your strategic personal branding to funnel, organize, monetize, and schedule your work yourself. This is not abouthaving ﬁfteen jobs, juggling to make ends meet, tearing your hair out at night. It is an active choice to have more than one job, a career with multiple strands that suits you.

We shouldn’t assume that freelance ﬂexibility and multiple career strands mean exploitative “gigging.” Flexibility is far more preferable—the happy medium between a single full-time nine-to- ﬁve and unsupported gigging. There is a vast and varied spectrum of options in between these two extremes. According to the Ofﬁce for National Statistics in the United Kingdom, at the beginning of 2016, the self-employed accounted for 15 percent of their population. That’s 4.6 million people who could do with more advice, tools, resources, direction, and opportunities for work. With institutions notoriously slow to evolve, we have to take charge of our own career paths. The Multi-Hyphen Life is about taking that control: harnessing multiple skills and housing them under one career roof.

THE MULTI-HYPHENATE LIFESTYLE IS ABOUT . . .

» allowing yourself space to breathe

» allowing yourself to not be deﬁned by a box that having one job—with a title chosen by someone else—can put you in

» having the courage and tools to make big moves on the side, without risking ﬁnancial stability

» giving yourself the conﬁdence to not be deﬁned by one thing

» letting go of thinking your job is your life, your identity, and your worth

» letting yourself add other names and titles to your bio as you go

» letting your hobbies and outside interests make you better at your job

» having two simultaneous careers or more—whatever ratio works for you

» allowing technology to help you live a happier, more creative lifestyle

» getting rid of obsolete traditions of the past

Your hyphens don’t even have to be work related to make a difference. Your hyphen could be “parent” or “caregiver” or “poker champion” or “chief knitter” or “ﬂash mobber.” Your hyphen doesn’t have to make you money. It can be an enjoyable bonus and outlet alongside your job. Of course, additional income is amazing and can be a welcome by-product of having multiple projects, but it all starts with incentive, intention, enjoyment, and curiosity. This is a new age of employment. You manage your own training, create and maintain your job security, and build your own online ecosystem. You are running your own business—the business of you—with a mixture of skills to offer.

**YOU CAN BE A MULTI-HYPHENATE AND . . .**

» have totally different interdisciplinary careers. They can look dissimilar on the surface but complement each other in interesting ways.

» still be an expert in one or more areas even if you have multiple interests or hyphens to your job title

» not be overly ambitious! Having a multi-hyphenate career isn’t always about being the best or being the hardest hustler. It is about having a cocktail of projects and work that makes you feel satisﬁed and driven.

» still maintain a successful day job or part-time job, with career strands added on the side. The beauty of this lifestyle is you don’t have to pick just one way of working.

It’s Time to Be Unapologetic

I used to apologize for everything. I would just be sorry all the time. I would apologize if someone spilled their coffee on me. I would apologize for taking up any space, breathing air. And I always felt the need to apologize for my lifestyle and career choices. For years I have apologized for how I work and when I work. I used to run my side projects from home in the evenings and was met with judgment from colleagues and acquaintances (perhaps because I looked like I was a crazy person, trying to build a moonlight side business on no sleep). I asked my employer whether I could have Wednesday afternoons off so that I could ﬁnish writing my ﬁrst book. It felt like a momentous ask, because it wasn’t really the norm. I’d leave the ofﬁce on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. and write from when I got home at 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. Four solid hours of side hustle time. But before leaving the ofﬁce every week I would apologize guiltily, make an awkward joke, and sneak out while everyone else was tapping away. The thing is I’d asked for and been given the ﬂexibility I wanted. So why did it feel like I was committing a weird crime? Why did I feel like some of my other colleagues were side-eyeing me? Why did I feel guilty that I wasn’t using this flexibility for a more “acceptable” reason, for example, for childcare? Whatever my guilt surrounding my decision, those four hours a week dedicated to my side project ended up sparking my career trajectory and added nicely to my ﬁnances.

Sometimes we have to take risks and be unapologetic for the things we want. It can feel awkward at the time, but later you’ll be glad you pushed through. Do you have something you wish you had more time to do? Even the smallest amount of time to see whether it’s feasible? Do you think it’s time to ask your employer for the ﬂexibility to try it out?

In June 2016, I was selected to act in a national TV commercial for Microsoft. It played in theaters and in the breaks of shows like Britain’s Got Talent. In the thirty-second clip, I say: “Millennials will have more than ﬁve jobs in their lifetime, and I think it’s very exciting.” This sentence was born out of the Chase Jarvis quote: “If our parents had one job, we’ll have ﬁve, and the next generation will have ﬁve at the same time.” Many viewers perhaps didn’t fully get it. How can you get a complicated premise about the future of work across in just thirty seconds? I love the commercial and the conversations it sparked, but I knew I wanted to discuss this in more detail.

I was selected to be in this commercial because I am a technology- obsessed and self-deﬁned multi-hyphenate in the workplace. I have always been someone who could never put herself in a box, and for years this made me feel insecure. But when a huge technology brand wanted to showcase my career story on a national platform (TV, theaters, all over the Internet), perhaps it was the validation I needed to realize that this way of working is something to be taken seriously.

This idea of what is now safe is interesting to me in this changing world of work. Can any job really be that safe these days? The job- for-life scenario with a great deal of career and retirement security that many of our parents and grandparents had no longer exists for us. But we all want and deserve to feel secure in our jobs. People ask me these questions a lot: Don’t you feel unstable? Don’t you miss your monthly salary? My answers: One, I felt more unstable working for a company that I didn’t believe could keep up with the technology revolution (I thought some of my old workplaces were likely to fold, and some eventually did). And, two, I do make a salary, just in a different sort of way. I feel much more secure and conﬁdent knowing that by having multiple skills, I have a diverse digital résumé, and I’m more employable. The future looks unpredictable, so how can we pretend that sitting at a nine-to-ﬁve desk is stable or secure?

We are all entrepreneurs now. The very meaning and idea of what an entrepreneur is have changed (it’s not just start-up founders in Silicon Valley; it’s you, it’s me, it’s anyone sitting at their kitchen table with an idea), and the playing ﬁeld has been leveled. In my head the idea of an entrepreneur was always someone in a suit, pitching in a board meeting. Rid yourself of the idea of what you think an entrepreneur looks or sounds like. Those old ideas are fading fast. If you have a smartphone or a laptop and an idea, you can be entrepreneurial. You can start an online marketplace, launch an Instagram page, sell tickets, make a podcast, or grow an attractive online portfolio. As Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize– winning microﬁnance pioneer, pointed out: “All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed . . . ﬁnding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became ‘labor’ because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”

We are told that some of us have an entrepreneurial mind-set and some of us don’t, but I don’t believe that’s true, just as I don’t believe that only some of us are creative. We are all creative. We are all entrepreneurial. You just have to decide whether to put it into practice or not.

It’s OK to have different things going on. The common denominator is you. You are the person who stitches it all together. Juggle, grow, explore, and then whatever happens to our working world or whatever technology is next invented or whatever the new trends are, you will have everything you need to adapt and pivot. This is about giving yourself the permission to have more control of your choices and future.

It’s Time to Start a Side Hustle—for Your Bank Account or Just for Yourself

A side hustle has been defined as “a low-risk project, meaning it shouldn’t take a lot of start-up capital.” Essentially, it’s something that encourages you to learn new skills or enjoy a passion project that doesn’t take a lot of up-front investment in time or money. It isn’t strictly work or play but something in between. Technology has broken down the traditional barriers to creating a viable side hustle— giving more people access to tools and resources than ever before.

It’s important to stay curious about the future of tech and keep our technical knowledge as up-to-date as we can so that we don’t end up with a huge imbalance of skills. Feminist author Caitlin Moran has discussed the gender imbalance that already exists: “If you look at the stats on coding, it’s still crackers isn’t it? [The latest research says 92 percent of software engineers are men.] . . . That’s like if the global language was going to be Chinese, and women weren’t learning Chinese. The future is tech, the future is coding, this is how we build the world, this is how we understand ourselves.”

Side hustling is not just a trendy turn of phrase; it is a genuine add-on to many workers’ lifestyles. According to research by GoDaddy, 48 percent of Britons who start up a side business do so to make money from a passion or a hobby, with some entrepreneurs reportedly earning between £500 and £5,000 on top of the salary from their day job. In the United States, according to Bankrate, one in four millennials have a side hustle, with 61 percent of millennials working a side hustle once a week or more, 96 percent at least once a month, and 25 percent earning $500 a month or more from their side hustles.

It’s clear we want to shake things up a bit. In the United States, as many as 81 percent of traditional workers surveyed said they would “be willing to do additional work outside of [their] primary job if it was available and enabled [them] to make more money.” That’s a huge number of people who would be willing to have multiple jobs.

There are reasons to start small with your side hustle—you can gauge interest, assess whether it might be worth growing, and avoid burnout. Starting with a small amount of your time (like one hour a week) is a low-risk way you can put your creative energy into something outside of your day job and experiment with ways you might monetize your idea. Using your time wisely means you can grow things on the side without risking your primary employment.

My ﬁrst side hustle came about because I hated my job. I was miserable. The work culture was toxic, disguised by perks that only made you feel like you had to stay longer at work, and the backstabbing and competitive environment was making me physically ill. My boyfriend reminded me that I cried literally all the time (I think I’ve blocked out those memories). I got UTIs from being too afraid to nip to the bathroom in between conference calls (I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy).

So my savior—my only savior during these low moments at work—was going home and working on a project that I could do on my own laptop, from my own bed or couch, during TV commercial breaks or random free moments. It was heaven to be able to explore something different. The side hustle for me was something I enjoyed doing anyway, but I could faintly see a glimpse of opportunity in the future if I carried on doing it. Side hustles don’t have to be ﬁnancially orientated; in fact, it’s better if they’re not initially. That’s why they are called side hustles: because your main hustle is what pays you for the most hours in the day.

A seesaw side hustle is something that allows you to stop and start a particular project. It doesn’t take up all your time, and it can be resurrected as and when you need it. You might want to have a bunch of side projects going that can ebb and ﬂow depending on how much work they are accumulating and how much time you have to give to them at that particular time.

PROS OF THE MULTI-HYPHEN LIFE

» Variety makes us happier and less bored. We are all more multifaceted than we think.

» Intense periods of energy on projects result in higher-quality work. It is exciting to work on something and give it everything you have with an end date in mind.

» Your overall brand of you is the umbrella for your multiple projects. An investment in your personal brand will make you stand out in the workplace.

» Productivity levels increase when you have some element of control over when you work.

» You can earn more money in a concentrated time period.

» You can embrace the idea of a nonlinear career (aka not climbing a premade ladder created by someone else).

» You are not labeled. You are not boxed in. You are not defined by one career.

» You are open to exploring your potential in multiple areas.

» You are more employable in future years because you have

a variety of skills. You’re less likely to be phased out. You are adaptable.

» You are future-proofing yourself. You are learning to twist and turn as you go.

» You can move quickly. In a big corporation, something as simple as designing a logo can take weeks; when you’re a small business or by yourself, it can be done in a matter of hours.

Getting time back is important, and being nimble is one of the most important things companies need to focus on right now.