4 Side-Hustle to Sustainable Career Stories to Inspire You in 2022 - MEDIUM

It’s January which means many of us are making resolutions and aims for the new year, but also looking back at our progress, or feeling a bit deflated as we don’t see as much progress as we had hoped. I get that!

But to make sure you start this year with some positive inspiration, I’d like to share these four great examples of outliers who beat the odds and followed their passion into a successful full-time career. I find these stories so inspiring, so I hope it will also help motivate you to keep going.

Courtney Boyd Meyer — Akua Kelp Burger CEO

From Silicon Valley to founding Akua Kelp Burger, Courtney Boyd Meyer took a huge risk to launch a climate-change tackling passion project. She worked hard at the beginning of launching her company to produce a lot of content on Instagram. The social media interaction was tiring but it was a great way to communicate her passion to a wider audience.

I’m a community-builder at heart– that community building drive has followed me throughout my life no matter what career I do.

The company started with crowdfunding on kickstarter and then moved onto equity crowdfunding to get a community to invest in the company itself. She learned a lot since launching her first product, the kelp jerky. The community investment in her and her passion has been key to her success.

Now Courtney’s business is doing well and she is on-target as an influencer as well as producer of great products that support healthy eating and a sustainable lifestyle.

Courtney’s story is a great example of how you can follow through from concept to activation successfully by being open to improvements and building a strong community through clear communication.

Joe Scott– Answers with Joe

Another great example is Joe Scott of the Answers with Joe show on YouTube. Joe has a great story of taking that leap of faith to take his YouTube side-hustle of weekly YouTube videos to taking a huge pay-cut and a risk to go full-time.

ibers in his first episode of: 2022

"If you could go back 5 years but only had enough energy in the time portal machine to shout a single statement at yourself through the time tunnel, what would you say?

You know what, honestly, I would just say, “Keep making videos, it works out!” Five years ago was a very interesting time for me because I’d been doing weekly videos on this channel for about 2 years and was just over 10,000 subscribers. "

It’s amazing to see that now 5 years later, Joe Scott has 1.33 million subscribers on YouTube, great corporate sponsors and he has kept on-target with his initial philosophy and mission to share facts and science in fun and entertaining ways.

Joe shared his career backstory in this seriously heavy episode about issues of water scarcity. But this is typical of his shows and a great example of how he takes a tough and scary subject, and breaks it down with researched science, data and innovation as well as finds ways to lighten each episode with empathy, humor and personal stories.

Kahi Paccaro– Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii

I first came across Hawaii born Kahi Paccaro when he was interviewed by the Ocean Impact Organization about his career. Kahi left Hawaii to go to university in San Diego and first started in real-estate. Once he started surfing more, he became more aware of the plastic pollution on Hawaiian beaches and aimed to tackle ocean plastics by co-founding the non-profit Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii. Even though he spent a few years running the non-profit without making a salary, he realizes he was lucky realizing he could only have done that because of his savings from his first career.

"I couldn’t have done it without first succeeding in the corporate world."

Kahi credits his education, corporate experience, and also his travels around the world and influence of sustainability-focused friends for his success. He is now working with Parley continuing to find ways to help not only cleanup ocean plastics, but also to help companies make better choices.

Kahi continues to work with Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii to motivate and educate other local people in Hawaii to be more aware of the ocean plastics problems as well as to get more involved in being part of the solution.

"It’s important to change and keep getting better."

Jordy and Julia Kay– Great Wrap

Australians Jordy and Julia Kay are the founders of Great Wrap. They both come from seemingly unrelated careers of winemaking and architecture where they were making more sustainable wines and building designs, but both realized their were huge problems in their industry with wrapping things in plastic for safe shipping. This led to following their passion to create a compostable solution to plastic-wrap that can be used by industries like their as well as for home use.

Jordy explains that moving beyond biodegradable food wrap is important as many of the biodegradable types leave microplastics in our environment and are sourced from fossil fuels.

The Great Wrap solution is to make a plastic-like food wrap completely from food waste that can be put in the compost bin after use. This is a revolutionary way to help tackle plastic pollution.

Like Courtney, Joe and Kahi, Jordy and Julia Kay were able to take their insights from established careers to inform how to make a successful business that was in line with their passion.

They built Great Wrap by using their business know-how, but also depended on and collaborated with people in their networks to make their new business a success.

Jordy and Julia talk about the benefits of using food waste to start at a more competitive price-point,

"To make our new product price competitive we are lucky that food waste is cheap, if not free, that helps us compete with well-established brands. Jordy Kay."

Key takeaways from these stories:

1) Communicate your message clearly to your network, social media and community to collaborate and grow your support.

2) Keep a look-out for those opportunities to level-up

3) Fill a need in the existing markets

4) Learn from your work experiences and travels to inform how you run your new business.

Hope you found some inspiration here and I’d love to hear which story you found most interesting– please add a comment below.