Ep. 3277 - Weekend Workshop: The Sculptor Who Thrived on Disaster
Side Hustle School
Chris Guillebeau / Onward Project
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
This new segment is all about helping you learn the key steps to a new side hustle in 2025, one step or concept per week. It includes activities, examples, and more—and of course it’s all free. Today’s topic: a New York sculptor creates their own market in selling custom firebowls.
Side Hustle School features a new episode EVERY DAY, featuring detailed case studies of people who earn extra money without quitting their job. This year, the show includes free guided lessons and listener Q&A several days each week.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lemonada. |
| 0:02.7 | The sculptor who thrived on disaster. |
| 0:13.9 | That's today's topic, today's story. |
| 0:16.6 | What if getting held at gunpoint, losing your job, and having a building collapse on you could actually become the three best things that ever happened to your business. |
| 0:25.2 | I'm not making this up. |
| 0:26.1 | It's a true story. |
| 0:27.1 | This is exactly what sculptor Rachel K. Vargas discovered when a series of disasters transformed |
| 0:32.5 | her into one of America's most resilient entrepreneurs. |
| 0:35.8 | Welcome to Side Ussel School. |
| 0:55.0 | It's Chris Gillibow. This segment is known as Weekend Workshop. It's all about helping you learn the key steps to a new hustle, one step, or concept per week. We're using the book Side Hustle from Idea to Income in 27 days, available wherever books are sold. And for the first half of the year, we went through the 27 steps in the book. In the second half, we've been doing these detailed case studies. So you can understand |
| 0:58.4 | how people apply the framework. So let's talk about Rachel and just an important note here at the |
| 1:03.3 | top. Rachel K. Vargas was actually known as John T. Unger for 54 years. I actually got to know Rachel when she went by the name John T. Unger. |
| 1:14.4 | This was maybe 15 years ago that I met Rachel in the form of John. Rachel has since transitioned |
| 1:19.5 | and now operates her successful sculpture business from Hudson, New York. So going forward, |
| 1:25.1 | I'll refer to Rachel as Rachel, of course. Okay. So Rachel K. Bargis, |
| 1:29.0 | she was a sculpture artist working from a studio in Michigan when disaster struck in the most |
| 1:35.0 | literal way possible. There was a heavy snowstorm. She was on the studio roof, shoveling snow |
| 1:40.4 | when the entire structure collapsed beneath her. And the building was completely destroyed. |
| 1:46.0 | She spent the brutal Michigan winter alternating between shivering while she worked and warming |
| 1:49.8 | herself with an illegal, unvented kerosene heater. It was pretty much a nightmare scenario. |
| 1:56.3 | But something unexpected happened. When the bank came to assess the damage, they gave her a $10,000 commission, |
| 2:02.6 | like they were impressed enough with her business that they're like, hey, we want you to make some |
... |
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