"Hiro, this season it's this one." I heard that for 15 years.

Do you remember when you chose the method you're using now?

Probably somebody said it was the thing growing fastest at that moment. There were numbers. There were people actually getting results with it. So you started — I'd guess it went something like that.

After a while, you start to feel it isn't moving as much as you expected. And right around then, a different approach catches your eye. This time, its numbers look better. You switch. A little later, the same thing happens again.

I did that too. Except in my case, it was the job. For fifteen years.

What follows is the story of those fifteen years. If you hit a part where you think "that's me," that part is probably the same shape as the mistake I spent fifteen years making.

Same brand, and yet the view changed completely from country to country

From 2000 to 2015, I wholesaled bags for an Italian heritage leather brand. Standing on the floor of a Japanese department store, taking meetings with wholesalers in Milan, flying out to accounts in New York. That was my fifteen years.

(I wrote earlier in these insights about importing a single bag from the United States. This one is longer, and for me it stings more.)

On the shop floor in Japan, customers would come up holding a photo of a new model. "Is this one in yet?"

The warehouses of our Italian accounts were nothing like that. From the back of a dusty shelf, a classic — the kind of bag someone's grandmother would have carried — kept quietly moving.

Customers in the US, and customers in Italy, were still choosing the same shapes their mothers and grandmothers had owned, decades on. More of them had a "this is the only one I use" bag than a bag of the season.

Same brand. Same product. I was surprised again and again by how different the view could be from one country to the next.

"Hiro, this season it's this one"

In meetings with the wholesalers, the line was always the same.

The people in Milan and the people in New York would say more or less the same thing.

And then they'd show me the numbers.

And sure enough, that season's new models were moving. Once you'd been shown those figures, which one to buy wasn't even a question worth thinking about.

Written out like this, it probably reads as a story about an idiot who fell for a sales pitch. But that isn't it. They were showing me, honestly, what they were seeing. Nothing about the numbers was doctored.

So I bought the new models, and I was satisfied with the call. I don't think you can fault that decision on the information I had at the time. I still think so.

Six months later, that new model was in the corner of the warehouse

Six months later.

That new model was in the corner of the warehouse. Under dust.

And something else was being pushed instead. "Hiro, this season it's this one."

That was the loop.

Not once or twice. Every time the season turned, the same thing happened, and every time I made the same call. The name of what had been recommended six months earlier wouldn't come up six months later. A new name would. And I'd buy that one too.

Meanwhile, in the back of the warehouse, the classics kept moving quietly. They almost never came up in the meetings.

Strange thing: the harder I chased what was trending, the more I felt I was drifting away from where I wanted to end up. I just couldn't put that feeling into words. It stopped at "something's off."

It took me a surprisingly long time to work out what that unease actually was.

The numbers weren't lying

At some point it finally landed. The numbers they'd been showing me were real. Not fabricated, not inflated.

What was wrong was the way I read them.

I was reading "this is moving now" as "this will keep moving." The figures only said the first thing, and I was helping myself to the second.

In the US and in Italy, using a classic for a long time was simply more of a given. Japanese consumers respond strongly to the newest model. Same brand, same product, different shape of demand. That difference wasn't written anywhere on the sheets I was handed.

Even after nearly twenty years abroad, the gap between how I read things and how they actually felt on the ground was much wider than I'd assumed.

So I changed how I bought. I stopped chasing new models on recommendation and deliberately narrowed down to the classics.

People around me gave me the look you give someone who isn't being aggressive enough. I knew it was an unexciting call. I knew that perfectly well myself.

The result: as I remember it, sales grew to roughly four or five times what they had been.

So I don't think the point is that continuing has value in itself. Maybe what mattered more, in the end, was simply being able to not get yanked around by whatever was trending.

The numbers around side hustles are probably the same shape

For a long time I assumed this was a story about my own business. My reading had been sloppy, and that was all there was to it.

Then I was looking at public statistics around side hustles, and I found something the same shape.

So "the number you can see right now" is not settled reality. It moves afterwards. Same nature as the thing I spent fifteen years treating as settled reality.

There's one more.

Both are genuine public data. Nobody is lying. And yet the conclusion comes out the opposite way depending on which table you open.

I think it's the same structure as the numbers the wholesalers showed me.

When you're on your third method, then your fourth

Sometimes people who've started a side hustle or affiliate work move on to a third method, then a fourth. Watching that, I have no urge whatsoever to blame them. They're probably just doing what I was doing when I re-bought a whole new lineup every season.

When people switch, there's usually a reason. Someone really is getting results with that method, and there are numbers. It isn't a lie.

But what those numbers say might only go as far as "this is moving now." That it will keep moving isn't written there. And I spent fifteen years unable to tell the two apart.

The hardest part is that those are exactly the stretches when it feels like you're doing the work. Researching a new method, setting it up, testing it. You're busy. And when you're busy, it feels like you're moving forward.

So what should you look at?

What I did when I narrowed down to the classics was less "picking the good thing" and closer to "looking at fewer things." With fewer things to chase, I could finally look properly at the one in front of me.

I think you can do the same with the numbers in a side hustle.

Narrow down to one metric

Back when I was chasing every new model each season, I was in the same state as someone checking every number every single day. Impressions, clicks, sign-ups, commissions. Watch all of them and all of them move a little, and your mood moves with each one. When your mood moves, you want to change methods.

What you can control, and what you can't

I'm not going to tell you this produces results. But at the very least, I think it makes it easier to climb out of the "jump on the new models every season" state. In my case, climbing out took a very long time.

A checklist for not misreading a number

For fifteen years, my answer to that last one was "because it was trending."

The method you're using right now — why did you choose it? Because it was trending? Or because you tested it with your own hands?

Author

Hiro Hiraki

Editor-in-chief, Kingfin JP. An FX affiliate specialist with 15+ years in financial and FinTech translation. Trilingual in Japanese, English and Thai.