Most people think of hustle as incessant activity, looking and acting busy, being on your feet all the time, being everywhere all at once, creating extingent emergencies to feel important, pulling all-nighters because work wasn’t planned in advance.
On my morning run the other day, I came across a co-working space. I didn’t go inside and check it (it was 6.30 am in the morning) but what caught my attention was the name:
Hustle hub
The word ‘hustle’ has become commonplace, a part of start-up parlance. You will see it being used on #hashtags, in anything that has something to do with ‘start-up’ (another abused term). But the thing is — I don’t think people know what the word actually means.
Hustle has many synonyms but it basically means to do something quickly.
‘I have unexpected guests so I need to hustle-up something in the kitchen’ tells someone that you’re preparing something quickly. You don’t hustle up an elaborate meal. That requires time and effort and patience and love.
Over time, the meaning of the word seems to have taken on the sentiment of a war cry, a statement of unshakeable work ethic and passion.
Most people think of hustle as incessant activity, looking and acting busy, being on your feet all the time, being everywhere all at once, creating extingent emergencies to feel important, pulling all-nighters because work wasn’t planned in advance.
Now, let’s push this concept of hustle to areas outside of the start-up and work world.
In the US Open final, Rafael Nadal and Daniil Medvedev lasted 4 hours and 50 minutes. That’s 4 hours and 50 minutes of intense and near-ceaseless activity.
Heads of State regularly criss-cross countries and time-zones in a single week.
Actual rocket scientists spend days and nights buried in work, trying to get a rocket lander to land on the moon.
Surgeons perform complex surgeries for 36 hours straight.
But we don’t use the word hustle to describe their way of life.
The report in the papers doesn’t say ‘Rafael Nadal hustled his way to a historic win’ or ‘the Prime Minister hustled and signed some historic treaties.’
If anything, most of them are getting a lot more done than people donning the hustler’s hat.
Imagine a new parent posting a photo with their newborn with the following caption:
‘Long day at work followed by business dinner. Came home and couldn’t sleep as baby wasn’t feeling fell. No sleep for 36 hours. #hustlin #thegrind #parentgoals #sleepless #needcaffeine #norestforthehustler
Something out of place there you think?
We Work, a company that provides shared working spaces, has been in the news for its overstated valuation. People have written about some of the messages that it spouts in its workspaces. Sample these:
‘Hustle harder’
‘Do what you love’
Just like how we’re so used to constant upgrades on most of the products that we use, even good old fashioned hard work needed an upgrade and found one in the #hashtag friendly word hustle. ‘I’m a hustler’ sounds infinitely more cool than ‘I’m a hard worker’. But it wasn’t just a change in semantics.
This hustle culture sometimes leads to what comedian Bill Maher wonderfully termed ‘Reverse Improvement’.
He argues that many products and services engage in a needless game of trying to make improvements that don’t really add any value or make things better. Sure, there is always room for improvement (another platitude for hustlers) but there is a distinction between improving something and engaging in a game of ‘let’s just change something to make it look like it’s improved’.
This quest for forward motion, even when it doesn’t exist or isn’t required, lays the ground for the hustle warriors.
Hustle doesn’t have anything to do with managing your time or how many hours you work. If you’re launching a new granola bar, you need to get the packaging right, plus get your sales channels right, plus take customer feedback, and see how you can improve. All of these require work and long hours. The important thing to note is that none of these are unnecessary. They are essential if you want to launch your product and try to make it a success. At the end of the day, you’re satisfied because you did something to move your business forward. This is a far cry from needless overwork brought about to feel important, the category into which most ‘hustle’ falls.
The side-effects of needless hustle are burnout, over-valuations, and bad decisions. When Uber made news for its toxic, take no prisoners work culture, that resulted in the resignation of its CEO Travis Kalanick, many of its employees spoke out against its ‘hustle-oriented culture.’
To all those people who spend long hours in office twiddling and curating their social media accounts, waiting in vain because no one is willing to take a decision on what to do next — you’re not hustling, you’re just sitting in the office. Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s the truth. I get ideas all the time but I don’t write for 18 hours a day. I would lose my sanity if I did.
The antidote to hustling isn’t work-life balance, it’s the side-hustle.
A side hustle involves creating something in a limited amount of free time, especially after work or on weekends. It needn’t necessarily involve creating a side-business or something that makes money, but it does involve doing more than binge-watching Netflix until you fall asleep on your chair. I have become more enamored by this idea as I have been trying to find better ways to spend time and pick up new skills. It’s still a work in progress but I definitely find it more enthralling than hustling all day and not knowing where the time went.
Much like We Work’s overblown valuation, hustling, as it is understood by many people, is overblown.
Something tells me the world will be a much better place if we had more side-hustlers than people who walk around thinking they are hustling their way to success.
