Love this brilliant note from Meg Draws, which I saw on Twitter. It says there’s two different types of hustle, good hustle and bad hustle.
Good Hustle
- If you think a thing should exist, build it.
- If you don’t how to do a thing, figure it out.
- Failed? No problem, Next Idea.
- “I want to”…
- Grabbing opportunities
- Can’t stop learning
VS.
Bad Hustle
- Sleeplessness as a badge of honor
- Health/Wellness put on hold
- Friends/ Family put on hold
- Deadline bullies
- “I had to”
- Sacrificed Hobbies/Interests
- Busy for the sake of busy.
This strikes home to me because I recently had a back and forth conversation with someone about hustle.
“Hustle allows you to create 1 more great piece of content while everyone else is sleeping & work on 5 hours of sleep instead of 6” @garyvee
— Tim Brown (@timbdesignmpls) March 13, 2016
@timbdesignmpls @garyvee Terrible advice, that’s not hustle, that’s bullshit.
— Bob Gillespie (@ThatBobbyG) March 13, 2016
I understand where Bob is coming from but what a twitter size message doesn’t allow me to do is to explain why…
When you’re enjoying it – hustle is an adventure.
When you’re doing it out of obligation, it can be all of the things we never wanted it to be. But that’s why you have to fight to make the things that you enjoy doing help you create your ideal career. You have to push to develop in the areas of your strengths. I never was good at menial jobs during college, they never excited me.. I didn’t excel.
Not until I broke into the things I was passionate about, the things I accidentally spent an extra 3 hours on because I was excited, did I hit my stride.
This is the kind of hustle I’m talking about, the kind you can’t help talking about because every day is an experiment.
Before I go too meta / too hypothetical
This image illustrates our ability to get either too focused on selling, too focused on just doing the work of the technician, or being a balanced person and getting our hands dirty as well as selling our work.
No matter who you are; designer, developer, social media ‘guru’, tapestry expert, or beet pickler we all are sales-women and salesmen in this day and age – even if we’re just selling our work, or an idea. So there’s an element of great execution that is selling key features to people that matter to make sure they go into production.
And once you’ve sold an idea, the ability to implement is just as crucial and can’t be understated. Hustling is the ability to care deeply and execute on our convictions. I’m convinced if we all take what Meg Draws calls Good Hustle out into the world today and leave the Bad Hustle at home we’ll be 10 times more likely to succeed.
Can “Drive” be a competitive advantage?
When I collaborate on projects with people, I find ambition as being one of those attributes that can’t be replaced with any other. In my school of graphic designers I was struck by the amount of people who simply threw their lots in to the wind, and followed orders from teachers. As a web marketer, or someone looking to represent a brand on the web, there simply isn’t time for “seeing how things end up.” There has to be experimentation and failure, and getting up and trying again.
“A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive.”
-Pearl Bailey
My web design, and web strategy is characterized by persistance, and intention. Every movement is deliberate. Nothing is left to chance. I was excited when I wrote this to be putting out advertisements in VitaMN magazine, a local magazine in Minneapolis, and continuing aggressively self-promoting through Social Media in Minneapolis. I not only am trying to garner new business, connections, and possible collaborators in the Twin Cities, I’m learning these skills in the process to apply them for clients that I will be helping market.
There really is no reason to shudder, or hide the ambition that is in each one of us as representatives of a brand. Besides being tactful, friendly, and helping others to find solutions to their problems, we can have fun communicating our excitement about the brands we represent. That Drive is a competitive advantage.
