There are two sides to every side project
Starting a side project in lockdown was damn near as popular as banana bread at one point. But once the glamour of the ‘hustle’ has worn off, what are you left with?
Hustle culture is a fairly recent trend, Celinne Da Costa defines in Forbes as “The collective urge we currently seem to feel as a society to work harder, stronger, faster. To grind and exert ourselves at our maximum capacity, every day, and accomplish our goals and dreams at a lightning speed that matches the digital world we’ve built around ourselves.”
We’ve heard it loud and clear from the creative community. “Do I need to have a side project?”, “Will I succeed in life without a side project?”, “Is having a side project the only way to stand out?” and the truth is, it’s entirely dependent on your passions and your career path.
But to put it into perspective, we put our heads together and weighed in on the ups and downs we’ve experienced off the back of our side project - The Arena.
A side project can:
Support a cause you’re passionate about
For us, this was the creative community and building a platform that made the transition from education to industry, just a little bit easier. As we talked about in ‘How to keep up your side project momentum’, a side project and a passion project are often labelled as different things. But in reality, for either one to be successful, you should be truly passionate about its purpose. Making and selling tote bags just for a bit of extra cash is all well and good, but if you don’t really care about why you’re making those tote bags, or how you’re making them, it’ll quickly drain all your energy and enthusiasm.
Push you outside of your comfort zone
Prior to launching The Arena, none of us had ever interviewed anyone. We didn’t really do networking. We definitely didn’t share our advice or opinion on the internet. But all of those things in turn have pushed us out of our comfort zones and the impact that has had on our confidence, people skills and creative process, has been huge.
Be a great way to collaborate and make connections
This is potentially one of the biggest benefits we’ve experienced through The Arena. The swarms of incredible, talented people we’ve met or connected with has been crazy. We’ll dive into this in more detail a few points down, but collaboration in particular with creatives outside of our direct disciplines has been amazing.
Give you the space to experiment and learn new things
We’re all flexing creative muscles we didn’t know we had this time last year. Whether that be social media strategy, building a website or hosting an interview, we almost certainly wouldn’t have had those tools to add to our toolkit without our side project.
Highlight your personality and proactivity to potential employers
As we talked about in ‘How to show your personality in your portfolio’ it’s all well and good saying you’re “passionate about helping people” or “a great team player” but backing up those claims with tangible examples is where it’s at! In Lauren’s case specifically, she recently found that The Arena was not only a great talking point for job interviews, but actually set her apart from the competition, demonstrating her ability to manage her time and build relationships.
Act as a creative escape from less fulfilling day jobs
Now, ‘less fulfilling’ might actually sound quite harsh here, but what we really mean, is creating the opportunity to flex those new creative muscles we talked about earlier. To learn something new that would never have been possible within your 9-5 or introduce you to people with a totally different way of thinking, or approach to a problem. For Dom and Ben in particular, cross-discipline collaboration has been a massive source of happiness for them via The Arena. Within their branding agency day jobs, the opportunities to share experiences, meet and collaborate with so many diverse creatives are hard to come by.
Now that’s a pretty hefty list of great things about side projects, right? Well, it wouldn’t be a balanced discussion or honest reflection of our experiences, if we didn’t share the less than pretty realities of spinning these plates all at once.
A side project can also:
Take the enjoyment out of something you previously found comfort in
Once you establish an environment of pressure to create, or cut a deadline too tight, something that may have previously been a creative outlet suddenly has a whole load of stress now attached to it. Our best advice for this situation? Always maintain some sort of hobby, or distraction that is totally unrelated to your day job and side project.
Distract your focus and leave you spinning too many plates
It happens. We all drop the ball (or smash a plate). You’re up until midnight creating content for the next day and you forget about your friend’s birthday. Or miss a typo on an important presentation. But have we become a bloody talented circus of jugglers? Hell yeah.
Consume your every waking moment
Fairly self-explanatory. But not necessarily a bad thing. If you are as passionate about your passion project as you think you are, you will have ideas popping into your head 24/7. But it’s how you manage those ideas and distractions that matters. If every waking moment is consumed by stress or anxieties, then clearly something has gone wrong somewhere down the line. We’re happy to say though, that’s not the case for us.
Put a strain on your relationships
Also pleased to say that this one is not 100% literal in our scenario either. The three of us are closer now than we’ve ever been before. There are however, lots of times when social (virtual) gatherings have been missed and other friends distanced, because we are all so focused on this project. But we’ve acknowledged that to ‘work hard’, you can’t actually exclude everything that brings you happiness in life. We are, after all, social animals.
Expose you to imposter syndrome
There have been countless times where we’ve not felt experienced enough, successful enough or talented enough to have the voice and platform that we have. Just recently we’ve been invited to universities and colleges to speak about our experiences with graduating, internships and side projects. And although those are all things we have 100% experienced, there’s still a little voice saying “You don’t know what you’re on about!”. This is where being a team of three is great, because all we need is the confidence from one of us to drag the other two along. And we’ve never regretted a single opportunity like that we’ve taken.
And those are both sides of the side project! The aim of this story wasn’t to put you off side projects, we’re advocates for it, but we’d be lying if we said it was easy.
The point really is - don’t let social media convince you that you need a side project to succeed. Working crazy hours for a cause you don’t 100% believe in, won’t make you happy.
However, if you land on a project you’re truly passionate about... every late-night will be worth it.
