Because your employer doesn’t approve of side hustles

A few rare employers genuinely want you to find your true work. If that means exploring a side hustle, they’ll encourage you to do so. If it means leaving to pursue your side hustle full time, they’ll support you in doing that, too.

Most employers talk about finding your true work, but they’re only talking about finding your true work within their employment. They don’t approve of side hustles. They think you should be fully committed to your true work for them.

Your employer is positively hostile to side hustles. There’s a clause in your employment contract with them that says that anything you do in your life, whatever it is, whenever you do it, whether before, during or after your employment with them, belongs irrevocably to them. If you so much as set up a 50¢ lemonade stand at the weekend, they’ll claim the intellectual property in your lemonade recipe.

Even if your employer hadn’t declared their aggressively litigious intentions in that clause in your employment contract, you still wouldn’t risk starting a side project only to have it stolen from you by the very organization whose suffocating embrace you’d been trying to escape.

The only safe way to pursue a side hustle is to quit your job before you begin.