In keeping with my previous article “discussion” regarding the possible outdated labels defining direct selling… another thought to challenge our thinking!
Do we need a new term for how we earn a living?
For generations, we have largely organized working life around two words: job and career.
A job is what you do to earn money. A career suggests something bigger … a progression, a profession, perhaps even an identity. You get a job. You build a career.
But what happens when neither word adequately describes how a growing number of people actually earn a living?
Consider someone who works three days a week for an employer, consults for two clients, sells products through a direct selling company and earns additional income from an online audience. Does that person have four jobs? One career? A side hustle? A business?
Our vocabulary starts to break down.
The working world got bigger. Our language didn't.
The traditional career model was relatively easy to understand: education, employment, advancement, retirement. Even when people changed employers, the basic structure remained intact.
Today's earning landscape is far more fluid.
People move between employment and entrepreneurship.
They build businesses while maintaining salaried positions. They freelance, consult, sell, create, teach and invest … sometimes simultaneously. A corporate executive may become a fractional leader. A stay-at-home parent may build a substantial direct selling business. A creator may earn from sponsorships, affiliate relationships, subscriptions and consulting without ever holding what previous generations would have called a conventional job.
We often throw all of this into the increasingly inadequate category of "side hustle."
When does a side hustle stop being a side hustle?
When it produces 20% of someone's income? Fifty percent? When it becomes the income source they enjoy most? When it gives them greater flexibility than their primary employment?
Perhaps the problem isn't the work.
Perhaps it's the language.
From Career Path to Earning Portfolio
Maybe the better metaphor isn't a career ladder at all.
It may be an earning portfolio.
Just as an investment portfolio can contain different assets, an individual's earning portfolio can contain different forms of work and income: employment, consulting, entrepreneurship, direct selling, affiliate income, project work, intellectual property or other ventures.
Some components may be highly stable. Others may carry more risk but greater upside. Some may last decades; others only a few years.
That framing also changes an important question:
Instead of asking young people, "What do you want to do for a living?" perhaps we should be asking: "How do you want to build your living?"
That is a remarkably different conversation.
Direct Selling Should Pay Attention
For direct selling executives, this isn't simply a discussion about semantics.
Our channel sits directly inside this transformation.
Direct selling has long offered something that didn't fit comfortably into the traditional job-versus-career framework. A distributor may participate casually for supplemental income, build a significant independent business, develop leadership skills, create a community or move between those levels at different stages of life.
Yet the industry has often tried to explain that opportunity using terminology inherited from the traditional employment economy, or terminology carrying decades of baggage from within our own channel.
Perhaps neither serves us particularly well anymore.
If consumers increasingly think of earning as a portfolio rather than a position, direct selling suddenly belongs in a much broader conversation about how people construct economic lives.
That may be especially important as younger generations encounter an expanding menu of earning choices: creator platforms, affiliate marketing, gig marketplaces, social commerce, freelancing, fractional employment and entrepreneurship.
Direct selling isn't competing only with another direct selling company for someone's attention.
It is competing for a place in someone's earning portfolio.
Maybe We Need Fresh Terminology
"Job" isn't enough.
"Career" isn't always accurate.
"Side hustle" can diminish something that may be economically significant.
And "entrepreneur" doesn't describe everyone earning outside traditional employment.
So perhaps there is a word—or a concept—we haven't fully embraced yet.
Earning portfolio. Work portfolio. Income ecosystem. Independent earning. Portfolio livelihood.
None may be perfect.
But asking the question matters. Because the way people earn a living has changed dramatically. The language we use to describe it hasn't kept pace.
For direct selling, that creates an interesting challenge, and perhaps an even bigger opportunity. If we could stop trying to convince people that direct selling is a job or a career, how would we describe the place it can occupy in the way they build their living?
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