It started with a side quest.

It started with a side quest. Working in finance for ten years, I was constantly in growth mode…and I loved it. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my job, and I was doing better than ever.

01 Zero expectations¶

Zero expectations, I decided to make a video on a topic that I knew little about (looking back… very little about). The NFL Draft.

Richard Thaler’s work had always stood out to me, a chapter in Misbehaving that seemingly proved teams consistently overvalue early picks via their trading patterns. This was especially true with quarterbacks. This was also common knowledge in the NFL analytics circles…so…why were teams still doing it?

02 The first drop¶

I wrote the video over a few weeks, doing my best to shoestring data together and build a narrative, then dropped it to a likely bot-filled audience of about 400 subscribers.

A few hours later and a few hundred views…a week later…a few hundred thousand. A year later I started making money, and a year after that I realized I could make a career out of creating. A career out of side quests, from testing ancient spears to playing with 40,000 marbles in an empty black box theatre (…pretty scary at 1:00am).

Of course, a side quest doesn’t start by thinking about money. Thus emerges the key difference between side quests and side hustles. Our hobbies don’t need to become work.

03 Side quest, not side hustle¶

Unfortunately, there’s a growing sentiment that a hobby is pointless if it is not a side hustle. What’s a woodshop without an Etsy shop? Why are you baking if you aren’t posting your cupcakes? What’s a podcast if you aren’t monetizing?

This leads to more thinking fast…less thinking slow.

04 Welcome Questys¶

My goal is to highlight the slow: build a community not of 180 characters, but of side quests.

Welcome Questys.

Continue the Side Quest