What’s the impact that a Side Project has on your primary work function?
Product Prompt #6 on Product Disrupt Blog
As I believe, there are 2 ways to discover what you love. Either you already know what you love and start pursuing relevant steps or you start with something, try a few things and finally end up doing what you love. Sadly, there’s a third kind as well, who never gather the courage to do what they love and just get used to what they do but don’t like.
Side Projects are Self-discovery.
Side projects are a great way to discover one’s true passion for something at a minimal risk. You don’t really have to quit your day-job to pursue a side project.
Fortunately for me, I realised my passion for product design in my early years of engineering. I learned engineering at college and taught myself product design from the internet and developed this profound feeling of responsibility of returning it back to the internet in whatever limited ways I can. That’s when I made Product Disrupt and that’s how this blog came into existence.
The point being, side projects have always helped me grow as an individual and drastically improved my approach towards my primary work function, which is designing digital products that impact the way we communicate with technology.
I was very delighted to see the response I received for Product Disrupt’s launch. It went on to be the #1 product of the day on Product Hunt with more than 1200+ upvotes. Huge hugs to Ahmet Sülek for hunting it there.
For something that took around 1.5 weeks to conceptualise, design, develop and launch, this was a huge milestone.
Not just that, Product Disrupt’s growing popularity on Product Hunt and elsewhere also brought me a couple of freelance projects, plenty of job offers and a speaking engagement.
I’m writing this from Dubai, and as you might’ve already guessed, it’s also owing to my side project.
That’s the impact a side project have had on my primary work function.
And by the way, it isn’t just me who has benefited from working on a side project, look at our favorite designers and makers and their thoughts on the impact of side projects.
The best way to learn and grow as a designer is to build side projects. If you have an idea, there’s nothing stopping you to go build it and try monetise it.
Looking back in retrospective, I believe the experiences that has excelled me forward as a designer is my entrepreneurial background. During my teenage years and early twenties, I designed, built and launched countless ventures. I took an idea, into design, build and launched it. With every venture, I would set a goal on how much it had to make before I would move onto the next.
By 21 I had sold $300,000 worth of affiliate marketing campaigns and websites. I learnt everything from design, code, viral marketing and the fundamentals of business. The best way to learn, is to do it.
To this day, I’m still working on side hustles every day.
The most important thing about side projects is that you’re doing something you truly enjoy. Side projects work best when they live at the interaction of “Things you enjoy” and “Things that help you practice a marketable skill.” In Venn Diagram form, here’s how that looks:
So, if your side project isn’t something you actually really enjoy doing, you might as well spend your time on your actual job. You’ll struggle to stay motivated, and you won’t pour any real passion into the side project.
If your side project isn’t something that helps you practice a marketable skill, then you’re just having fun :-) Which is fine as well, but let’s be honest about its purpose.
My first piece of advice is to just fucking do it. When someone tells me I can’t do something, I say, ‘Thank you, now I’m definitely going to do it.’
When you’re working on a side project, you have the time and the choice to invest in learning new things. You can also be choosier about the feedback you take. When you do take it, it’s because you truly want to get better at something.
A lot of people face negative feedback in their jobs, whether it’s judgment from managers or co-workers or the anxiety of running out of time. If you adopt a ‘side project’ mindset, you can turn this into constructive energy.
Think about it. If you love your side project, even if someone says that it’s shit, you still love it. So take the feedback, figure out how it can make you stronger, and go with that.
Side projects are great because you don’t need to know anything. You get to be a beginner because no one is watching you and there are no expectations.
If you don’t have an idea, don’t stress about it, just go do something else. It’s this attitude that it doesn’t matter that allows us to be inspired and to work on only the things we truly want to work on.
