How Having Side Hustles Can Increase Your Fluid Intelligence

Side Hustles

There has been a lot of talk lately in the physician blogging community about side hustles.

Millionaire Doc featured a guest post by Side Hustle Scrubs listing 10 reasons every physician should side hustle. Meanwhile, Doc G of DiverseFI recently discussed three different types of side hustles and the case against them. The Physician Philosopher entered the mix as he talked about the importance of having a side hustle for asset protection. Of course you can’t count out Passive Income MD, who wrote about his med school side hustles (although, with his entrepreneurial spirit, I wouldn’t be surprised if he started side hustlin’ since he was two years old!).

All are articles written by physician bloggers within the past two weeks.

The term “side hustle” seems to be the new “it” buzzword these days. But the concept of having side hustles isn’t a new idea. It just seems like it in the physician community.

Sure, side hustles are likely to generate very little income compared to a physician’s high income salary. But with decreasing compensation and increasing burnout rates (among many other factors), it’s easy to see why side hustles are becoming more and more attractive to physicians.

 

The Benefits of Side Hustles

There are many benefits to having side hustles. The benefits most often touted are:

• Increasing income returns. And if you’re good (or lucky) enough, this can even come in the form of a scalable passive income. (By the way, the last three words in the previous sentence are also “it” buzzwords in case you didn’t know.)
• Decreasing risks by not having to rely solely on your day job for your livelihood. Wouldn’t it be great to reduce your clinical hours and work duties because your side hustles are providing substantial income streams?
• Increasing your happiness by making your side hustles into passion projects or vice versa. Why not get paid for something you enjoy doing?

Another benefit of having side hustles (especially blogging and other entrepreneurial pursuits) is that it can also increase your fluid intelligence.

Before we dig deeper, let’s talk about what fluid intelligence is.

 

Intelligence

In the 1960’s, psychologist Raymond Cattell identified two distinct types of intelligence: crystallized and fluid. Both make up our overall general intelligence.

Crystallized Intelligence

Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience. It often relies on accessing information from long-term memory.

In general, physicians have excellent crystallized intelligence. We learn a ton of information in medical school and try force feed this information into our brains until some of it becomes part of our long-term memory. During residency, we begin to apply this knowledge to perform specific tasks related to our chosen specialty, whether it be diagnosing a myocardial infarction or surgically repairing an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Our knowledge bank helps us solve current problems. This form of intelligence is even further fine tuned as we gain more experience and hone our skills as attendings. As physicians, we are good at using our skills, knowledge, and experience.

Crystallized intelligence is relatively easy to improve. All you have to do is attain more knowledge (keeping up with the latest medical journals) and/or gain more experience (doing more surgeries).

Fluid Intelligence

Fluid intelligence is very different. It’s the capacity to reason and solve novel problems, independent of any knowledge from the past. It involves the ability to think abstractly, reason with logic, identify patterns, solve problems, and discern relationships.

Whereas crystallized memory relies on long-term memory, fluid intelligence relies on a working memory to learn new information, retain it, then use that new knowledge as a foundation to solve the next problem or learn a new skill. It involves abstract reasoning and out-of-the-box thinking to solve complex problems.

When you encounter an entirely new problem that cannot be solved with your existing knowledge, you must rely on fluid intelligence to solve it. People with high fluid intelligence can sift through new problems and create logical solutions by identifying the patterns and relationships that are the root cause of such problems.

While all physicians are highly trained and educated (which tends to enhance crystallized intelligence), there is no such training in medical school to improve a physician’s fluid intelligence.

 

Increasing Fluid Intelligence

It was long thought that fluid intelligence is inherent, cannot be improved, and gradually declines as we age.

However, a recent study by Jeaggi et al. found that it is possible to improve fluid intelligence with brain training that focuses on working memory. The relevant take home points of this study include:

• Fluid intelligence is trainable
• Improvements and gains in fluid intelligence are dose-dependent (the more your train, the more you gain)
• Anyone can increase their cognitive ability (and thus fluid intelligence) no matter what your starting point is
• Skills attained through improved fluid intelligence are transferable to other domains. Thus training in one area of working memory resulted in gains in other cognitive skills that were unrelated to the training tasks.

Andrea Kuszewski, a Behavior Therapist who trains the brains of children with autism, wrote an article highlighting five principles that can increase fluid intelligence. These principles are:

1. Seek Novelty
2. Challenge Yourself
3. Think Creatively
4. Do Things The Hard Way
5. Network

Coincidentally, these principles are hallmarks of side hustles!

 

Seek Novelty

Seeking novelty simply means learning something new.

By definition, a side hustle is work performed for income outside of one’s primary job. While we receive extensive training for our main hustle, a side hustle often involves on-the-job learning completely unrelated to our primary job. Starting a side hustle motivates us to try something novel and learn a new skill. Once you master one side hustle, move on to the next. The brain loves learning new things!

When we learn something new, we create new synaptic connections among the multitude of neurons in our brain. This in turn increases our neuronal plasticity which affects all subsequent connections, how long-lasting they are, and how it changes our brain for optimal performance.

By seeking novelty and trying new things, we prime our brain for learning. This is because novelty triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that increases motivation and desire. You know that rush when you’re doing something new for the first time? That’s dopamine.

Not only does dopamine increase motivation, it also stimulates the formation of even more neurons. Therefore, trying something new creates more neurons while increasing the strength of the connection between all of these neurons. Novelty turns our brain into an amazing learning machine!

 

Challenge Yourself

It’s not enough to just try something new. In addition to novelty, the brain loves challenges. So don’t let your brain waste away by being lazy. Get off your butt and start some side hustles!

Starting a side hustle can be a challenge in and of itself. However, once you start, you gotta keep going. Never give up. Challenge yourself to learn as much as you can. Master the skills necessary to maximize your side hustle.

And once you reach the point of mastery, move on to the next side hustle. Constantly moving on to new challenges creates even more neurons, further strengthens their connections, and allows for greater cognitive growth.

 

Think Creatively

Building successful side hustles often takes a lot of creative thinking.

What exactly is creative thinking? As Kuszewski describes, it involves making remote associations between a wide range of ideas, switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking, and generating original ideas that are applicable to the activity you are doing.

In essence, creative thinking entails thinking outside the box to provide a fresh perspective on performing a particular task or solving a specific problem.

For example, you might try to turn your side hustle into a wildly succesful business by placing yourself in the customers’ perspective  to imagine their wants and needs. This is exactly what Airbnb’s Brian Chesky did as he used creative thinking to design an imaginary 11-star experience in order to create a magical experience for Airbnb guests.

Think big and think creatively. As your brain grows so will your side hustles!

 

Do Things The Hard Way

Nobody said that creating a successful side hustle is easy. In many cases, side hustles can be a lot of hard work. Embrace it!

Success doesn’t happen overnight. A lot of hard work, energy, and front-loaded sacrifice is necessary to build a side hustle into a successful business. Persistence and grit pay off!

It can be tempting to take the easy way out, take short cuts, or flat out give up. After all, many people (especially physicians) are likely going to make a lot more money in their primary jobs compared to any income generated from their side hustles. But this shouldn’t discourage you. There is plenty of value in hard work and doing things the hard way. It challenges us to use more of our brain power to accomplish things. And it allows us to think even more critically to simplify and solve complex problems.

If you want to increase your intelligence, don’t look for the easy way out. Do things the hard way.

 

Network

It comes as no surprise that networking is beneficial for both your side hustle and your brain.

In order to build a successful side hustle, you need to network to market your ideas and sell your products and/or services. If people (and potential customers) don’t know about your side hustle, how do you expect it to grow and be successful?

Networking also exposes you to new ideas, environments, challenges, and opportunities. All of this is great for cognitive growth.

Furthermore, meeting new people forces you to use your working memory (and thus your fluid intelligence) to remember names, birthdays, what a person likes or what they did last weekend, and all the little facts necessary to build a solid personal connection.

When you engage in people from different walks of life, you are likely to gain additional insight by seeing things from a whole new perspective. This is important for creative thinking.

Networking is key to growing your brain and side hustle.

 

Summary and Final Thoughts

Side hustles can help grow income, decrease risks, and increase happiness. But another benefit that isn’t often mentioned is that side hustles can increase fluid intelligence.

These are few of the reasons why side hustles are becoming so popular.

Some of the hallmarks of building a side hustle (novelty, challenge, creative thinking, hard work, and networking) are also important factors for growing brain power.

Even if your side hustles aren’t wildly successful, at least you become a better and smarter person for at least trying. (Maybe that’s why my wife is so smart!)

So what’s holding you back? Get smart and start some side hustles! 🙂