The basic guide to Hustle, even when you don’t have a start-up
Unlike in the 1800s, being a hustler today is hip.
Hustle is used to describe so many things today; being busy (hustling; as a verb) or an entrepreneur (hustler; as a noun). It is used in company values (Uber’s values code includes “Always be hustlin”) and a subject of numerous essays on Medium, like this one; to Harvard Business Review, like this one.
There’s also a mini ‘Hustle economy’, from HustleCon which happens every year in Vegas to numerous trade mark’s that get filed every year like ‘YogaHustle’ (a clothing company) and ‘Hustle Tea’ (quite ironically).
In the start-up world; we’re addicted to hustle like sugar.
But this article isn’t just for us (in the start-up scene) but for all of us.
Hard-working professionals in regular jobs, executives at multi-nationals, business heads at Small-Medium Businesses; well everyone who finds the start-up lexicon daunting yet intriguing.
So what is Hustle? While working in a more organized set-up, how can you use the new-age hustle to your advantage? Is it even possible to hustle at your big corporate job when you have a million meetings and a trillion unread emails?
But first, why should you care?
I find inter-disciplinary learning fascinating. The mere act of taking one thing from one discipline or context and using it another has solved our greatest challenges. Some of mankind's brightest ideas come from this context-swapping.
In physics; taking what we know about motion dynamics (velocity, acceleration) and using the same principles in electromagnetism helps us better understand currents and voltage. In hip-hop music; some of the most groundbreaking music has come from sampling; simply using a portion of a song in another song.
Context-swapping across disciplines or even in the same discipline can lead to path-breaking ideas & efficiencies. I am going to attempt context-swapping for ‘hustle’ from the start-up world to the corporate world.
I wasn’t always hustling. Before I started my current company 5By7; I was logging corporate hours in one of the big-four and pretending to be busy, sometimes I was. While I learned structure and the value of processes in a large company; I really improved my work ethic only after I started up.
Running a company was/is a very different experience.
After doing this for a decade, I can tell you the one main difference between a corporate job and being a founder is that a start-up won’t grow if you won’t. When times were tough and I didn’t have answers; first I tried to take the weekend off and forget about the problem. The problems continued when I came back to work; but they vanished when I looked hard for answers by reading, learning and improving myself.
In a more formal corporate set-up, we can reach out to our peers or a boss to solve our problems. While this is much less stressful and faster, it limits our learning and hence our potential.
So, here’s my first rule of hustle; map problem-solving to your learning.
If you are unable to solve a problem; focus on learning and growing yourself first; it will be harder, more frustrating but oh-man will you come out of this like a polished diamond!
You know what else I found frustrating during my MNC days? Goal-setting. This process seemed like a formality and impersonal/apathetic. The goals were set annually; for some financial reasons I understand annual goal setting, but certain goals should be dependent on learning ability more than market cycle.
In a start-up, we have daunting goals that need to be achieved not because it’s nice to get there, but because our survival depends on it. Yes we have annual goals, but more importantly, we track metrics every day, we are obsessed every week and have numerous coffee conversations on what more can we do.
This gets me to my second rule of hustle; fierce goal chasing.
Obsess about getting to your defined goals; every day, every week like your survival depends on it. Having large company resources should help you get to your goals not make you complacent. Fierce goal chasing can lead to several fold performance difference.
There’s one 90s fad that is failing. Irrespective of the size of the company you work at; multi-tasking is no longer seen as an efficiency booster (I hope ‘Open-offices’ follow this demise soon), rather than an efficiency killer. In his book ‘Deep work’, Cal Newport suggests working on a single subject with undivided attention for a stretch of 2 hours before taking a break.
I am a big fan of Cal’s work and insights. And while ‘deep work’ can lead to mastery in your work, it's very hard to do on a regular workday when crap is flying from all places. Instead, I’d like to practice Sync-task (yep, made this up).
This is the third rule of hustle; ’Sync-Task not multi-task’.
When you’re multi-tasking; you’re juggling many different things together without fully focussing on any one problem. This leads to half-attention in all different things so you adapt to this by putting your brain on auto-pilot; you’re not really adding value to the tasks.
Sync-task on the other hand; involves doing a series of different tasks towards one main goal. When I am trying to figure out how to improve the people function at 5By7 for example; I am going through some resumes of potential candidates taking a break from that and moving onto really putting down what kind of work culture I would give new joiners; moving onto what kind of HR tech platform I should use and so on.
You see all these tasks make me more aware of the problem my HR function is having, and I look at this from different perspectives while still moving multiple tasks forward.
Sync-tasking is the Deep Work and Multi-tasking hybrid we need.
Saying that start-up folks alone are die-hard problem solvers isn’t accurate. Problem-solving happens across verticals and company sizes.
There’s one thing that entrepreneurs definitely do better than others; low resource problem solving; my last rule of hustle.
Mere problem solving isn’t enough anymore, most business problems have several potential solutions, all those solutions come with further challenges. The bigger the company you operate in, the more complex the web of solutions & challenges can be.
Ignore the first solution that comes to your mind. According to the noble prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his book ’Thinking fast and slow’; our brain is wired to come up an easy solution; in fact the smarter you are the more chances of you having a decision bias.
The more resource-intensive your solution is, the more dependencies it will have internally. Using low resource, high leverage problem solving ensures a faster resolution. It also means not settling for the first solution that comes to you and digging deeper to find a better, lighter solution.
To Summarise
Here are the 4 key rules of hustling in any size or structure of the organization you are in :
- Map Problem-solving to your learning
- Practice fierce goal chasing
- Sync-task not multi-task
- Low resource problem solving
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