As you probably know, I recently stepped down from my full-time teaching position to do writing full-time. The bulk of my time is now spent working on projects for clients, since I’m a ghostwriter. But I also spend about a day and a half each week working on this podcast, writing my own material, and also leading the Daily Writer Community.  

I’ll do an episode pretty soon about the details of why I quit my teaching job, but for now, I wanted to mention this to set the context for this post. One of the most fascinating aspects of making this announcement recently is that a lot of people have congratulated me on making this leap to doing my business full-time. And many people have expressed something like, “It’s so great to be chasing your dream!” 

While I definitely appreciated these kind words, they also bothered me quite a bit. Here’s why: I don’t understand why it should be considered rare or unusual for someone to chase their dreams or be able to arrange the kind of life they want. I don’t feel I have done anything all that spectacular or brave. I simply made a decision a few years ago to start building my business toward this direction, and then stuck with it. That’s pretty much it. 

However, as I have spent some time reflecting on this major change in my life, it occurred to me that I’ve followed a very simple principle as I have transitioned into several different roles in my work life over the last 25 years. And I want to share that with you today, along with how you can put it into practice to build your writing business, or whatever other ventures you might eventually want to pursue. 

It’s simply called “The Overlap Principle.” In this post, I want to share what that is and also share my story of overlapping careers a few times to arrive at my current business. Then, on next week’s Sunday post, I’ll share some specific tips for overlapping in your own writing business. 

What is The Overlap Principle? 

The Overlap Principle is essentially the idea that you don’t just quit one thing and then start something new. Instead, you overlap the two things. You have your main job or gig, which is paying the bills, and then on the side, you start building your new things. This is also commonly known as a “side hustle.” 

This principle is definitely not original with me. In fact, to be totally honest with you, I never knowingly set out to use the Overlap Principle, so to speak. But since my late 20’s, I have always had a side gig of some kind going. I’ve always been thinking of the new thing I want to do or build, and then I’ve started doing it—in a very small way at first—but then gradually built it big enough that I could transition totally into that new direction. 

People have been doing side hustles probably since the beginning of time, but with the advent of online business, they have taken a huge new turn. It’s far easier now to build a business on the side or pursue whatever other interests you have, because we are all connected. 

All that said, I first became aware of this specific framing of the side hustle idea called “Overlap” a few years ago when I read an excellent book by entrepreneur Sean McCabe. His book is fittingly called Overlap, and you can get it here. If you want the print book, it’s only available in hardcover, and it’s $39. I know that’s expensive, and I wish he had it in paperback, but even still, it’s worth every penny and then some. If you’re interested in building a side hustle, it’s an essential book. 

In this book, Sean teaches you the specifics of how to overlap your day job with your side hustle. I’ll let him speak for himself, but in this post, I want to share with you my story of how I have been overlapping careers for a long time, and how you can get started.  

My Story of Overlapping Careers 

I’m 46 now, and I entered the full-time workforce when I was 21. In reflecting back on my work life, I have noticed a distinct pattern over the last 25 years. 

The general pattern is this: I do something for a few years, get pretty good at it, then get bored and start something on the side that is adjacent but distinct from the first area, and eventually I move into that new area. Then the pattern repeats itself. 

Here’s the story of how I went from being a worship pastor to a ghostwriter. 

In 1992, I went to college to be a preaching pastor. I felt a distinct spiritual calling to go in this direction, but truth be told, I wasn’t that excited about preaching. I was decent at it, but what really got me excited was music. So even though my college degree was in preaching, right after graduation I got married and we moved to a church in northern Illinois, where I was the worship pastor. 

This was a fantastic church and we had a great ministry there. However, after about 5 years of doing this, I became restless and a little bored, so I started working with interns and even taught a course for the college where I had graduated from. I found that I really liked teaching and training. I was overlapping my worship ministry job with teaching. 

Success in the teaching area led to a full-time position with my college. When I was 29, we moved back to the same school, St. Louis Christian (where I just left). I led the music and worship program, which involved overseeing several adjunct instructors, teaching a bunch of courses, and coordinating our Chapel services, which happened twice a week.  

To be honest with you, it was exhausting. It was exciting for the first few years, because I still had a lot of energy and was willing to go above and beyond to make things really worked for students. Plus, our college was really growing during that time, so we had a lot of students—at least by our standards.  

But there came a time in my later 30’s when I just hit a wall. It was literally like someone flipped a switch and I wanted to immediately get out of worship and music ministry altogether. At that time, I had been heavily involved in it for 20 years—since I was a teenager in high school. I had basically lived and breathed worship music and worship services since that time.  

By the way, just as a side note, there is a reason that you very rarely see worship leaders older than 35 or at the maximum, 40, in growing churches that use modern music. The reason is that it’s emotionally exhausting to produce those creative and excellent services week after week for years on end. But I digress… 

Now, I have to stop here and give massive credit to my college. I expressed my desire to our Academic Dean that I wanted to try some new courses related to storytelling, film, writing, and media. So slowly, over a period of a few years, these were approved and integrated into my teaching rotation, and I absolutely loved doing them. Students also responded really well to those courses because I made them fun, and I was personally excited about them.  

So for 3-4 years, I was gradually decreasing my involvement in our worship and music program, while gradually increasing the courses in communications. Eventually, the college hired a new worship professor and I was able to fully step into a newly-created role of Professor of Communication Arts.  

I have to tell you, it was a really fun day when my Academic Dean asked what I wanted my new title to be. I was going to go with “Professor of Communications” but that title “Communications” is traditionally used to refer to programs that focus on journalism and related areas. That’s not really what I was doing, so I just made up the term “Communication Arts” and we went with it. 

Now let me share a couple of side notes and then I’ll get back to the main story. It’s true that I was bored in my old role as a professor of worship and music. But there was another reason I wanted to diversify the kinds of courses I was teaching: I wanted to make myself more valuable to the organization. My thinking was that it was better to be a generalist who could teach a bunch of different courses than a specialist who only focused on one area. That proved to be a very wise decision, especially at a small college like ours where the budget was always tight and you never totally knew if your contract would be renewed from year to year. So, I thought of this as a way to help ensure my value to the college. 

The other thing I did, and you’ve probably noticed, was that I was actively creating and proposing these new courses. I also recruited students for these courses. At least for my college, it’s very rare for professors to recruit students for courses. Normally students just signed up for whatever they wanted—with advising, of course. Teachers rarely marketed their courses to students, so to speak. But I took it upon myself to talk to students about the courses and why they should take them. This helped boost the enrollment for those courses, which only made me seem more valuable to the organization. 

OK, back to the main story. So, it was around 2015, and I was shifting into this new role of Professor of Communication Arts at my school. I definitely enjoyed it. However, my salary was very close to what it was 10-11 years earlier, which was obviously a big concern. It was very rare for us to get raises, and the only way to make extra money as a professor was to teach extra courses or take on a side job or side ministry of some kind.  

Most of our professors had some kind of side ministry, and I did this a few times, as well. You could definitely make extra money, sometimes pretty decent money. But the major problem with this arrangement was that it took you away on Sundays from your family, unless they joined you. You sometimes also had to travel quite a ways to preach or lead worship at a different church where you might have a part-time ministry. 

That was an option, but I always hated doing this because it tied up your weekends. For those of you who aren’t familiar with ministry culture, this was kind of the attitude: “We’re doing this for the Lord, and we should be willing to basically put everything else second so we can do ministry and not be compensated very much in the process.” It was very much a lifestyle where ministry was your life—it was a higher calling type of thing, and not just a job. 

Now, I don’t want to argue the finer points of spiritual calling and all that. That’s not my point here. But I want to say that I’m independent enough that I really disliked this whole way of thinking. Especially after being in this system for over ten years and working at a church for eight years before that, I was pretty tired of feeling like I was locked into someone else’s schedule and priorities. In my early 40’s—just a few years ago—my whole attitude was, “I still want to serve God with my gifts, but why can’t I do it on my own schedule and get paid decently for it?” 

I remember around this time, I was in a local convenience store and I saw a sign where they were hiring assistant managers. The starting salary was slightly above my contract amount at the college. I had this light bulb moment where I realized things were not going to be better for me and my family financially, and I had to start making some changes. I was grateful for where I’d come from, but I needed to start charting a new direction, especially since our enrollment was declining year by year. 

So, in 2016, I started doing freelance work. I was fortunate because I had already published a couple of books, and the courses I was teaching also coordinated with communication skills. However, that honestly had very little to do with getting started in client work. The real thing that got me going was that I hung out in an entrepreneur community online, and I connected with a podcast producer who knew I was also a writer. He had a client who needed podcast show notes.  

I started doing more and more client work the next few years, in addition to producing my own podcast. It continued to grow, and a couple of years ago, I got into ghostwriting books, which is a higher level of compensation than typical freelance writing. It grew to the point where my side business was making more than my day job, at which point I could make a transition. 

I also want to add that since 2014 or so, I’ve also had a side hustle of creating my own content through books and podcasting. So, I’ve essentially had two side hustles the last few years: my own content and client work.  

Last November, I decided to start my Daily Writer Community in addition to doing the podcast on a daily basis. In essence, I was doing a double side hustle for probably six months and made income from both things. I don’t necessarily recommend that, but, in my case, there was a lot of cross-pollination between the things I was doing for the college, my clients, and myself. It all involved content and writing.  

When it came down to it, there was no future in what I was doing at the college, but there was a very bright future in what I was doing for clients and my own content with the Daily Writer. It was a very simple decision in that regard. At that point, the only issue was just putting money in the bank as a buffer when I made the leap, and also ensuring that my client work was steady enough to realistically continue to support my family. 

So, that’s my story of overlapping a few different times, all the way from my college years, through being a worship pastor, then a worship professor, then a communications professor, then a freelance writer, and now, a ghostwriter with a side hustle of the Daily Writer, which involves my own content, podcast, and community. 

I’m also just now beginning to dip my toes into the waters of product development for clients and for the Daily Writer. I’m talking with some manufacturers and distributors about things like card decks, calendars, journals, planners, and other kinds of products. This is all a very new world for me, but I feel like a kid in a candy store because you are only limited by your imagination. 

Well, that’s my story of using the Overlap Principle. That gives you some context for how this principle plays out in an actual setting. Next week, I’m excited to share ten tips for overlapping as you develop your own writing business.