Today’s episode of Creating The Path is about the very core of this podcast’s mission. I’m talking about the hustle culture, working hard, and how that can be beneficial, or extremely harmful to you, your mindset, your mental health, and ultimately, your business.
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Topics discussed in this episode:
[01:10] Defining the words “hustle” and “success”
[03:14] Hustling is not necessary to obtain success
[04:28] What happens when you hustle to the point of burnout
[05:21] The alternative to hustling and working too hard (and eventually burning out)
[06:02] Why I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted in my business even though I was hustling and working hard
[08:00] Doing less by focusing on the important work
[09:50] A question for you
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Noteworthy Quotes:
“Success could be defined simply as achieving a goal. But what makes it different for each of us is that each of us has different goals. So success will look different for everyone.”
“Hustling, i.e working to excess, is not necessary in order to succeed at whatever goals you decide to set for yourself.”
“Hustling can prevent you from succeeding.”
“I believe that doing less is a more effective and faster way to achieve your goals.”
“I was spending way too much time doing things that didn’t matter, and those things were actually keeping me from doing the work that would move me forward.”
Summary of the Podcast:
Creating the Path is a podcast that challenges multi-passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their goals by working less and eliminating overwhelm, so they can create their own unique pathway to a life they love.
My mission is to transform hustle culture and assist others to shift away from living life on auto-pilot to living intentionally and following your own path to a life you love instead.
Host Bio:
Heather Grace Hanson is a certified positive psychology-based coach and creator of the Intentional Energy Framework, a system that empowers you to create a life and business you love without burning out.
Heather is obsessed with all things personal development, running and walking in the park, interior design, salsa dancing and most importantly, spending time with her pup, Barclay.
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Creating the Path, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to create their own unique pathway to success and happiness. I’m your host, Heather Grace Hanson, and each week I’ll be sharing tips and strategies to help you create the path to a life you love. Let’s dive in.
Hello and thank you for listening today! I’m really excited about today’s topic because it hits on the core of my mission with this podcast, which is to shift our mindset away from believing that the only way to succeed is to hustle and work really hard.
Now, to start off this conversation, we first need to define the words hustle and success. Everyone can have their own slightly different definitions of words like these so I want to make sure we’re on the same page for what we’re discussing here.
Let’s talk about hustling first. When I say that we all might have slightly different definitions of this word, it’s because you can view hustling as a positive thing or a negative thing. And, each of us might have our own idea of how much work we need to be doing in order to say that we’re hustling.
What I consider to be hustling might be a slow day for Gary Vaynerchuk. And actually, let’s change the word might, to probably, right?
So it exists on a spectrum, because we’re talking about how much work we’re doing and how many hours a day that we’re working, and each of us will fall in different places on that spectrum and we all have different levels of tolerance for the amount of work we’re doing.
You might view the fact that you’re hustling as a good thing, or exciting, depending on what you’re working on. Maybe it’s a project you’re excited to finish as soon as possible.
Or you can view hustling as a bad thing if you’re just cranking through work you don’t enjoy and getting burned out in the process. Right?
For the purposes of this conversation though, I’m defining hustling as working to excess, or working past your limits. In those situations where hustling is burning you out.
So now let’s talk about the definition of success. It could be defined simply as achieving a goal, but what makes it different for each of us is that each of us has different goals. So success will look different for everyone.
What gets tricky is, how do you know when you’ve succeeded? This is where success can fall on a spectrum. It depends on where you decide to set the bar for success and if you’ve made your goal clear enough so that you’ll know when you get there. You can also set little mini goals along the way to a bigger goal and achieve all those little successes, or not. It all depends on how you decide to structure your goal setting and how you decide to view things.
So to recap all of that, today we’re talking about the fact that hustling, ie working to excess, is not necessary in order to succeed at whatever goals you decide to set for yourself.
And I’m not saying that you can’t succeed by hustling, just that it’s not necessary. And I think the key thing to remember is that hustling is on a spectrum. If you’re hustling for a specific period of time to finish a certain project, that may help you finish on time, and as long as you give yourself time to rest and recover afterwards so that you don’t burn out, it doesn’t have to become a bad thing.
However, if you tip over that point and hustle to the point where you burn yourself out, that can actually prevent you from succeeding because when you’re burned out, you aren’t able to perform at your best and you don’t have as much energy available because you’ve depleted all of it. You might be able to push through and keep working despite your exhaustion, but the results likely won’t be very good and it’s also detrimental to your physical and mental health.
So in this case, hustling can eventually become the thing that causes you to not succeed or even if you succeed in finishing something, you might still feel like you failed because the quality of your work wasn’t as good as you want it to be.
So what’s the alternative? The opposite of hustling and working too hard would be doing less, and working less, right?
I really believe that doing less, is a more effective and faster way to achieve your goals, but I realize this is a difficult thing to believe. Because it took me a really long time to get to a place where I truly believed this. And honestly, I didn’t fully believe it until I actually implemented this in my own life and started experiencing the results.
Before though, I could never imagine this. When I was working really hard and doing all the things, and still not making a lot of progress towards my most important goals, it seemed like the only reason could be that I wasn’t doing enough.
The problem though, was that I was filling most of my time doing all the little tasks that either weren’t important, didn’t actually need to be done, or that weren’t the right things to move me in the direction I wanted to go.
They all felt like urgent tasks or like they were necessary, but when I spent the time to take a deeper look and really get serious with myself about what was truly most important to me, and really be honest with myself about what would happen if I didn’t do certain things, then I realized that I was spending way too much time doing things that didn’t matter, and that those things were actually keeping me from doing the work that would really move me forward.
So for me, what making this shift looked like, was to remove all of those unnecessary tasks off of my to do list and leaving behind or adding in only the tasks that were going to directly move me forward towards my top 3 most important goals.
When I made this shift, I realized that before, I was all over the place. I was working towards too many goals at a time, and in addition to that, I was doing tons of little tasks that didn’t actually need to be done, leaving no time to work on the projects that were most important.
And I know I’m not the only one who has a tendency to do this. It takes more mental energy to work on the important stuff, so our brain first decides to take on the little, easier tasks. The problem there, is that there will never be an end to how many little tasks we can find to do.
I will admit, it’s not always easy to resist the urge to procrastinate on the important work and do the little tasks instead. But I can tell you, since I’ve been doing this in my own life. The mental effort it takes upfront to do the planning and clearing all that little work off my plate is so worth it. Because I eliminate all the work that used to burn me out, and then my schedule is wide open to work on the stuff that’s actually important.
So now, I’m doing less work, but since I’m doing the important work that I use to keep pushing off to the next day and the next. I’m actually making better progress than I used to towards the things that matter to me.
Now, in future episodes, I’m going to talk more about how to actually implement this in your own life, because, believe me, I know it’s difficult to even imagine how you could eliminate things from your to do list and your schedule.
And I did talk about this a bit already in episode #1 of the podcast.I went through my 3-phase Intentional Energy framework that helps you get clear on your goals and what your ideal life looks like to help you clear everything else out that doesn’t support that dream. So if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, definitely go back and listen to that one.
And I would also love to hear from you. What feels most difficult for you when you think of actually doing this in your own life? Or what questions are coming up for you right now? Let me know, because as I plan out future episodes, I’d love to address the issues that are top of mind for you right now. You can send me a DM on Instagram or leave a comment on Youtube. All the links are in the show notes below.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Creating the Path as much as I did. Send me a DM on Instagram, @heathergracehanson to let me know what you think. But before you go, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. New episodes drop every Tuesday. I’ll see you then.