My brother-in-law texted me on a Thursday night with a new one. Something about reselling pallets. I was eating leftover Chinese takeout at my desk, half-watching a compile run, and I read the message twice before I typed back: "How much did the last guy make?" He said he'd send me the link. He always says he'll send me the link. I went back to my noodles.

The thing is, I've been keeping a rough count. Not a spreadsheet — more like the mental scar tissue you build up after you've tried enough things and paid for the education in hours and gas and that specific kind of tired you get at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday when you're doing math in a parking lot. I've started and stopped more hustles than I've finished. Most of them taught me something. Almost none of them paid me what I thought they would. A few of them I'm still running, mostly out of stubbornness.

So here's the ledger. Not a highlight reel. The whole thing, including the parts where I was clearly wrong and kept going anyway.

How a Guy Who Should Know Better Ends Up With This Many Tabs Open

I'm a software engineer. Remote, distributed team, people in four time zones. The job is good. It pays. It has never once crossed my mind to quit it for any of the things on this list — and if you've read why I've never quit to do this full time, you already know how I feel about that particular fantasy. The day job is the floor. Everything else is furniture I'm rearranging on top of it.

But the bills are real, and kids cost money in ways that keep surprising me even though I've been doing this for years. So I look for the gap — the hour between standup and the school pickup, the Friday night that doesn't have a plan yet, the Sunday afternoon when I've already mowed the grass and there's nothing on TV I care about. I fill those gaps with things I've found on forums, or heard from John, or half-watched in a YouTube rabbit hole at midnight. Some of them stick. Most don't.

What I've never been good at is keeping an honest tab. I'd start something, run it for a few weeks, and tell myself it was "pretty decent" without ever sitting down and counting the hours against the dollars. Then one night I did count, and the number was so unflattering I almost didn't write it down. Almost.

Going Line by Line on Things I Told Myself Were "Worth It"

Uber. I drove in Atlanta for a stretch. Financially, it was the worst thing on this entire list. I knew that going in and I did it anyway, which tells you something about how optimism works at eleven at night when you need grocery money. The margins disappear the second you price in gas, wear on the car, and the psychic cost of strangers in your back seat. I'm not a people person at midnight. I learned that about myself. I kept the app installed for about a year after I stopped driving because I thought I might go back. I did not go back.

The one exception — the single asterisk on the whole Uber column — is that I once picked up a guy named Victor in Buckhead. We talked for forty minutes. He laughed at my dad jokes, I laughed at his stories, we swapped numbers. That ride paid me something like eleven dollars. What came out of the friendship is not something I can put on a ledger. The joke is that the worst hustle I ever ran produced the best outcome I've ever gotten from a hustle. I don't know what to do with that.

DoorDash. Still running it. Still the dependable one. A Friday night on the road can cover the week's groceries if I'm willing to trade the evening for it. The margin is real but thin — doing deliveries the night before a nine a.m. standup is a lifestyle choice I've made more times than I'd like to admit, and the gas math is always closer than the app makes it look. I keep doing it because it's honest work that pays in the same week. Everything else on this list has a longer lag.

Paid surveys and beta testing. I do these while something is compiling. That's the only framing under which they make sense. Sitting down to do surveys as a primary activity would be a sad way to spend an evening. Doing them while I'm waiting on a build to finish is fine — it's just filling dead air. Occasionally one pays out something real and I feel like I found a twenty in an old jacket. Mostly it's a few dollars over a few weeks. I'm not complaining. I'm not bragging either.

Roblox with the kids. Almost no revenue. My oldest asked me once, maybe eight months in,

"Dad, do you think anybody's actually going to play this?"

Short-form content. I've posted Reels from the car. One did something — I still don't know why that one and not the others. Most go nowhere. I've watched enough hustle content skip the boring parts to know the algorithm explanation I'd get from a YouTube guru would not actually explain my specific video's specific failure. I've stopped trying to reverse-engineer it and started just posting when I have something to say.

Weird little AI tools. I build them constantly, ship them rarely. Two have users. One of those users is John, which I find both flattering and slightly concerning. The others live in a GitHub repo I look at sometimes and think: almost.

Deal stacking. The only line on this list with a reliable margin, which is either the funniest or the most depressing thing I've ever written. I've said before that deal hunting quietly beats most of what I've tried, and I stand by it. I do not stand by it proudly. I stand by it the way you stand by a piece of furniture that's ugly but hasn't broken yet.

The Part the Videos Leave Out, Counted as Honestly as I Can Stand

The real cost of most of these isn't money. It's the hour. The specific Tuesday night hour that you could have used for sleep or for your kids or for doing nothing, which is also a valid use of an hour. I've traded a lot of those hours for outcomes that, when I wrote them down, looked like: forty-three dollars for five and a half hours. I kept going because the math in my head was always more optimistic than the math on the page.

Gas is real. Wear on the car is real. The mental overhead of tracking what's working is real — and I'm bad at it, which means I've probably been running some of these at a loss longer than I should have. I'm not the guy who has a clean system for this. I have a notepad file from 2010 and a general feeling.

The thing I underpriced every single time was the cost of starting over. Each new hustle has a ramp — you're slow, you're learning the platform, you're making the dumb mistakes that cost you your first few runs. That ramp is unpaid. It doesn't show up in anyone's income screenshots. It showed up in mine as a lot of evenings where I made nothing and felt like I was falling behind even faster than before I started.

What's Still Running, What I Quietly Buried, and What I Can't Explain

DoorDash is still running. The surveys are still running. The Roblox thing is still running, mostly because my kids would notice if I stopped. The AI tools get built in bursts when I have an idea I can't let go of. The content gets posted when something happens that feels worth saying.

Uber is done. I know it's done because I feel relieved every time I don't open the app. That's the test I use now — if the thought of not doing it feels like relief instead of loss, it's already over and I'm just waiting to admit it.

The pallet reselling thing from my brother-in-law: he sent the link. I read it. I did not respond. He'll have another one in a few weeks. I'll hear him out, because I always do, and because occasionally — very occasionally — one of his things is actually interesting. That's the whole dynamic and I'm not changing it.

What I can't explain is why I keep going. The honest answer is probably that the alternative — sitting still and hoping the day job is always enough — makes me more anxious than a bad Tuesday night in a parking lot doing delivery math. The day job is enough, most of the time. I know that. But most of the time is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I've never been able to fully trust it.

The brother-in-law did send the link. It was a Facebook group for pallet resellers in the Birmingham area, last post from eight months ago. I screenshot it and sent it to John. He said it looked like a front for something. I said probably not. He said probably yes. We're both still thinking about it.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.