I didn’t grow up thinking much about jobs or careers. I grew up on a dairy farm in Victoria, and cows don’t care what day it is. They need milking Monday, they need milking Christmas Day, they need milking on your birthday. There’s no such thing as “waiting for Friday” when you’re up at four in the morning with frost on the paddock and a herd that doesn’t understand weekends.
So when I finally left the farm and started working other jobs, one thing hit me straight away. Almost everybody around me was counting down to Friday like it was some kind of finish line.
🚗 Car Yards, Labs, Building Sites and Aged Care—Different Uniforms, Same Sigh
Over the years I’ve had a proper mixed bag of jobs. Sold cars on a yard where the boss cared more about numbers on a whiteboard than the bloke standing in front of him trying to buy a ute for his tradie business. Worked in a lab, wearing a coat and gloves, doing careful, precise work that mattered but paid about as much as stacking shelves. Spent time on construction sites lugging gear in the heat, where your body clocks off well before your shift does. And I did a good long stretch in aged care nursing, which will teach you more about life and death and everything in between than any self-help book ever could.
Four completely different worlds. Different clothes, different bosses, different smells—honestly. But every single one of them had the same undercurrent running through it.
Everyone was waiting for Friday.
You could feel it in the tea room. You could hear it in the way people talked about “the weekend” like it was some far-off holiday destination. Monday morning had a heaviness to it. Friday afternoon had a lightness. And in between, most folks were just doing time.
⏰ Waiting for Friday Is a Sign, Not a Personality Trait
Here’s the thing I eventually cottoned on to. Waiting for Friday isn’t just some harmless little habit. It’s a symptom. It means your week is built around escaping your days, not living them.
I’m not saying every job has to feel like your calling. Some work is just work. You turn up, you do it properly, you get paid, you go home. Nothing wrong with that. I’ve done plenty of shifts that were exactly that, and I don’t regret a single one of them because they paid the bills and taught me things.
But when the only good part of your week is the two days you’re not there, that’s worth paying attention to. That’s your gut telling you something. Maybe it’s the job. Maybe it’s the pace. Maybe it’s just that you’ve got nothing else going on outside those forty hours to look forward to.
For me, it was that last one for a long time. I had jobs I could tolerate, but I didn’t have anything of my own on the side. No project, no little income stream, nothing that was mine. So of course Friday felt like the only good bit. It was the only bit that wasn’t spoken for by someone else’s business.
💰 Why I Started Mucking Around With Side Hustles
That’s roughly when I started dabbling in other things. Bit of stock trading here, learning what I could and losing a bit of money doing it, which is a lesson in itself. Buying and selling scrap gold for a while, which sounds dodgier than it is, it’s really just jewelers’ offcuts and old chains nobody wants. A bit of small-scale investing when I had a few dollars spare.
None of it made me rich overnight. Anyone who tells you a side hustle is going to flip your life around in a month is either selling you something or lying to themselves. But what it did do was give me something that was mine. Something outside the job that I controlled. And funnily enough, once I had that, work itself got a bit easier to stomach. I wasn’t just clocking hours waiting for the weekend anymore. I had something ticking along in the background, even if it was small.
That’s really the whole reason SideHustleQuest.com exists. I built it for people who are exactly where I was. Working a job, maybe a decent one, maybe not, but wanting a bit more breathing room. Wanting something on the side that’s theirs. Not hype, not “quit your job tomorrow” nonsense. Just honest ideas from someone who’s actually done the work, in a lab coat, on a car yard, on a scaffold, and beside a hospital bed.
📘 A Few Things That Might Help, If You’re in That Boat
If you’re one of those people ticking off the days until Friday and thinking there has to be more to it, I’ve put together a few things that might genuinely help.
📗 Free e-book: 101 Side Hustle Ideas. No fluff, just a solid list of real options you can actually look into, whether you’ve got five hours a week or twenty.
🤖 Custom GPT Side Hustle Matchmaker Tool. I built this so you can chat with it about your skills, your time, and your goals, and it’ll help point you toward hustles that actually suit your life instead of some generic list.
📊 3-Step Side Hustle Matchmaker Report and GPT Assistant. This walks you through figuring out what’s realistic for you specifically, step by step, no guesswork.
🎁 3 free bonuses worth over $260 combined, which come along with the matchmaker tools to help you get moving without spending a cent to start.
You’ll find all of it over on SideHustleQuest.com. I’m not trying to sell you a dream. I’m trying to hand you a few tools that took me years of trial and error to figure out on my own, so you don’t have to waste the same time I did.
🧭 The Point Isn’t to Hate Your Job, It’s to Stop Needing an Escape From It
I still work. I still have weeks where Friday feels like a relief. That’s normal, that’s life. But the difference now is that Monday doesn’t feel like a sentence, because I’ve got things going on that are mine, that I built, that don’t depend on someone else’s roster or someone else’s business.
If you’re stuck in that cycle of dragging yourself through five days just to get to two, it might be worth asking yourself what you’d need to change that. Maybe it’s a new job. Maybe it’s a side hustle. Maybe it’s just picking one small thing and giving it a proper go for three months instead of talking about it for three years.
Cows don’t care what day it is, and honestly, neither should your bank balance. Go grab the free e-book, have a chat with the matchmaker tool, and see what fits. Worst case, you’ve lost nothing but a bit of time on your phone. Best case, you build yourself a Friday feeling that doesn’t only show up once a week.
