Hustling Your Work as The Key of Success
Facts about hustle culture and its myths.
Nowadays people are competing to show their success and ability to something. The achievements obtained are the benchmarks for one’s success. Working at maximum capacity is one of the ways for people to get these achievements. Hustle culture is the societal standard that you can only succeed by exerting yourself at maximum capacity professionally (Impact Plus, 2020). To grind and exert ourselves, every day, at our full potential, and achieve our goals and aspirations at a lightning pace that suits the digital world we have created around us (Forbes, 2019).
The real gain from hustle culture is the almost certainty of success. Even after suffering mistakes, if you keep working hard, non-stop, eventually you can get to where you want to be. Persistence as well as learning from the failures are the secret to being good in something. The harder you practice, the easier you’re going to see results. The positive side is you can retire early and, in the long run, enjoy the life that you want, along with your life value. Some people are addicted to performance and the hustling lifestyle persists.
But do you get the satisfaction and enjoyment of what you are doing?
While working long hours normally results in attractive rewards, including deals and a wider roster of customers, many of us get so wrapped up in the hustle’s adrenaline rush that we lose sight of why we work so hard in the first place. Never mind skipping meals, sleep, and other big events. Taking a break is for the poor in the hustle of society. Your brain is conditioned to be busy at all times and to always pump out idea after idea after idea. The drive to work harder, stronger, and faster might feel productive at the moment, but not knowing and recognizing your physical and emotional limits can be dire to your wellbeing (Shondaland, 2020).
Most people have 2 or more jobs at the same time. Some people called it a side hustle, which refers to the ability to make money on the side. The difference between this and an old-fashioned second job is one key aspect that makes it so attractive to millennials: flexibility. When pursuing a side hustle, a person has the complete autonomy to decide when and how to work on it.
For some people, being in a hustle culture could give a promising future with extensive rewards. But it is a myth that hustling is the only way to be successful. There are negative sides to hustling that could stop us from reaching our goals.
Constantly feeling in a rush
Your career will extend over 40–50 years, depending on when you started working and when you expect to retire. That’s a long time to arrive early at work, leave late, not take enough sick time, and over-extend yourself. It can invest in the longevity of your ability to succeed at work by investing in your personal life. As your career progresses, allowing yourself to relax will keep you charged and steady while helping you prevent mistakes, remain creative, innovative, and contribute to your teams.
No time for ourselves
An individual who practices the balance between work and life sets boundaries between their work and their personal lives. They do their best at 5 pm to shut down their device and stop working for the rest of the day, enabling themselves to reflect on any matters relevant to their personal life. On the other hand, some people do the opposite. They strive to weave together their work and personal lives. This can sound like spending time in the evening to respond to emails to get ahead before the next day, sometimes leaving work early or arriving late because of family commitments or arranging meetings outside normal working hours. This might be stressful because there are no personal boundaries. Work-life balance is one of the solutions to avoid that.
Easily burned out
Burnout is characterized as a mental, emotional, and physical state of exhaustion induced by an excessive amount of stress. It can show up, among other aspects of your life, in the way you communicate with your colleagues, your level of focus at work, your sleep. Burnout happens when you are not attentive to your own needs before the needs of your company. It could also happen when you have too much information to process. Since hustle culture thrives on fighting to keep up in a fast-paced office and fighting to successfully juggle multiple jobs, it keeps your body steeped in stress hormones. The only way to overcome it is to take a step back and rest. Everybody has their way to rest so it could be different from one another.
Believing a rest time as neglecting work
When working continuously, our brains have become accustomed to working like that so that if you don’t do it, you will feel something odd. The same concept as habit formation that occurs in other activities. Over time, we will feel anxious if we don’t do something and go back to work.
Work-Life Balance
As discussed above, balancing your work and your life is one of the solutions to avoid burn out. You may have come across several tips and tricks on how to balance your work and your life. Many believed that you should create a specific time to do what you love, taking a break from your work. Allocating several hours of your day for work while others for your life such as making an interaction with your social group. Segmenting your work and personal life and not having them affect each other. This may be true, but this may also lead to worse burn out. Many people tend to do these things so they could try and achieve the perfect balance of life.
Balancing your life is even harder during this work-from-home time. How can you perfectly balance your life when you are working at your home where you are supposed to live your personal life? Well, numerous people have been doing remote-working before, but this pandemic is forcing people to work from home.
Rather than trying to achieve perfect equilibrium, there are several things that you should do instead to get more value out of your work and personal life. Fundamentally, you should re-evaluate your choices. Start to treat work as a part of your life and not the opposite of life and try to let go of perfectionism. On our last article about work-life balance, we have discussed thoroughly that there are three questions that you should ask yourself:
- Is my work (still) fulfilling enough?
- Have I set boundaries to protect the most important part of my life?
- Are my expectations too high across the board?
Success
Another work-related myth that we have discussed thoroughly is success. The definition of success may vary for each person, but there are numerous timeless universal principles that can lead you to success. These guidelines often involve setting out clear goals and vision, being determined, and many other factors. However, there are three specific pieces of advice that are actually great, backfires when put into practice.
The first piece of advice is, and you may have heard this a lot, to follow your passion and it will lead you to your success. It is believed that if you do what you really love and enjoy, you will naturally advance and have a higher chance of success. But, did you know that those who follow the fixed mindset of ‘following your passion’ are much more likely to give up when challenges arise? So, instead of trying to find and follow your passion, try developing it.
Knowledge is also an important thing to achieve success. Many believed that having an expensive education will boost your chances to succeed. The truth is, education may give you a competitive advantage, but absorbing knowledge and gaining real experience will give you more value. Also, success is not about “having it all”. Many believe that success is having the perfect life, a perfect job, perfect house, perfect everything. It is not that. We often measure our success by someone else’s definition. Success is composed of a great variety of life aspects and each person requires a different combination to feel the very best about themselves. And that is the true meaning of success.
Leadership
Leadership in today’s world requires new leadership values. Many people are always questioning how to be a good leader or how an ideal leader should be. There is a common view that an ideal leader is fierce, omnipotent, and extroverted. The truth is that this belief is too ‘categorical’ and that whether or not someone falls into a category depends on where that person is and who that person is with.
However, a good leader should have an understanding of their own limitations and a variety of vital things for the workings of a team. But how does one know what kind of leader they should be? You need to commit to exploring and developing yourself, to discover your authentic leadership. Self-exploration is done early by leaders to focus more on chasing goals and leave no room to do self-reflection.
Leadership style and values usually are shaped by the people around them and their experiences in their lives. It is important for us to define our personal story that shapes our leadership. Self-awareness is one of the keys to knowing our leadership style, as we also open to every possibility in order to find our authentic self. Believe in your story, and don’t be afraid to try new ways of carrying yourselves, communicating with others to make a difference in how effectively you lead.
Design Thinking
When we are thinking about design thinking, most people tend to see it as creating new products, not producing results, and only for creative people. While design thinking is an iterative process that we use to tackle problems and create innovative solutions. However, to date, design thinking has been applied to a wide variety of organizations and companies for various objectives across sectors.
Design thinking helps teams to have the freedom to generate ground-breaking solutions. Design thinking is not only for creative people, but it is a process of rediscovering yourself to unleash the creativity and self-confidence that we have. Design thinking requires an experimental, collaborative, and optimistic mindset. By applying it, your team can get behind hard-to-access insights and apply a collection of hands-on methods to help find innovative answers.
In the previous article, we already reviewed how the design thinking process falls into five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. To understand design thinking, we need to understand the process of how to start with resulting efficient outcomes. Design thinking will help you to understand the mindsets and needs of the people you are creating for. It is also applicable in every role or industry we are contributing to.
The Importance of Good Work Culture
To achieve our full potential, we often push ourselves too hard and create the mindset of hustle work. In addition, we still have work-life myths that haunt us and stop us from improving our potential self. Hustling too much can kill our productivity and focus. As this culture is not really great as it is made out to be. It can be dangerous both for individuals and the workplace environment in general. Moreover, it is important to work hard but sometimes it is better to take one step backwards so you can take two steps forward.
In Bright Indonesia, we always work in a strong moral and ethical work environment to satisfy our client’s needs. We believe that by establishing a good and professional relationship with clients, it can produce outcomes that are beneficial to both parties. If you are interested in expanding your business to Indonesia and Southeast Asia countries, Bright Indonesia can help you with many professional services by our experienced experts. Bright Indonesia can also help you establish your Indonesian team by recruiting Indonesian talents that are appropriate for you. Our company will use our broad network to derive a selection of high potential candidates for your company.
Co-written with Anneke Julianita and Ristya Sangaji
