The word “Hustle” has become the latest fashion these days. Everyone wants to hustle to get something. The idea of the hustle, came I’m sure, from admirable and genuine intentions. Ideas like working hard to achieve your Goals. These are all great sentiments, but sadly the term hustle seems to have been hijacked. Nowadays the word “Hustle” almost fills in as an alternative to success. People say, well, we don’t have any success, but we’re really hustling! Results are the ultimate indicator of success, not how hard you work.
Today there are plenty of people, (I won’t mention any names), who have become self-styled hustle-gurus. They preach that you have to hustle, hustle, hustle or you won’t get anywhere in life. For the hustle-gurus and their disciples, it’s all about work, work, work and more work. Sacrificing everything for the sake of the hustle.
It’s a vicious circle. Here’s how it works. People work too hard because they believe they have to hustle to be successful. As a result of the hustle, they get worn out, fatigued, and ultimately, they burn out.
When they burn out, they can’t achieve their Goals because they have no energy. They become disillusioned by not achieving their Goals, and they believe the only way to achieve your Goals is to hustle, hustle, hustle.
It never occurs to them that they’re not achieving their Goals because they’re already working TOO HARD. They think instead, that they must not be working hard enough! So, you guessed it, they wrongly assume that they’re not successful because they don’t hustle enough. So, you guessed it, they start to hustle more, work harder. Guess what, it makes the situation worse, they get further away from their Dreams because they’re so burned out, until inevitably they decide their lack of results must mean that they’re not working hard enough so they start to hustle more and the cycle continues!
Deliberate Daily Action.
I’ve always strongly believed that hustle is not the answer. Actually, I find the opposite to be true. What I want to talk about today is the opposite of hustle, which is taking Deliberate Daily Action. Some people think, they opposite of hustle is to do nothing and be lazy. Well, that’s kind of like saying that the opposite of over eating would be starvation. Both over eating and starvation are unhealthy. They’re both the same in that regard. The opposite of doing something unhealthy, cannot be to do something else unhealthy! The opposite of doing something unhealthy is to do something healthy, like eating a balanced diet.
Likewise, the opposite of hustle (where you will inevitably burn out and be very unproductive) isn’t to do nothing, where you will ALSO be unproductive. The opposite of being unproductive isn’t to find another way of being unproductive. The opposite of being unproductive (which you will be if you continually hustle) is to be PRODUCTIVE!
How do you become productive? By taking deliberate daily action! Start small. The important thing is not how big your action is, but that you commit to doing it on a daily basis. The smaller the action to start with, the bigger the result will be in the long run. Likewise, often the bigger the action you take to start with, the smaller your results will be long term.
Let me give you an example, take two people who are both out of shape and decide that they want to get in shape and lose weight. They both have terrible diets and no exercise. One makes a commitment to go on a diet and commit to 1 hour per day in the gym. The other makes no commitment to diet, but commits to walking for 15 minutes per day. Come back at the end of 90 days. Which one has lost the most weight and is in better health?
Well, in an ideal world, where they both stick religiously to their commitments, nothing more, nothing less. The one who changed his diet and spent an hour per day in the gym would be the healthiest. But we do not live in an ideal world, we live in a place called the REAL world. So, what has happened in the real world? The one who committed to walking 15 minutes per day is by far the healthiest and has lost the most weight. Why? Because the one who made the MASSIVE commitment to change his diet and everything, started strong but then quickly lost focus because they were making such massive changes. They convinced themselves it was all too hard right now, and they’d try again another time.
The one who walked for 15 minutes per day was easily able to keep their commitment. After a few weeks they felt so much better they started walking 20 minutes per day, then 30, then an hour, then they joined a gym and started working out, they felt so much better doing that, they also decided to change their diet. They started small but after 90 days, they produced massive results because they did it all in bite sized chunks.
I once heard about a guy who won The Boston Marathon. He started running, not by running a couple of kilometers each day, he started by running from the front of his house to the nearest light pole. The next day he ran to the next pole. The day after, he ran to the pole after that and so on. By starting small he was able making small additions to his deliberate daily action, and in the end, he produced a result so massive, he was able to win The Boston Marathon.
John Maxwell says we underestimate what we can achieve in a day and overestimate what we can achieve in a week. Today seems small, so we assume we can’t achieve very much. The week seems long, so we think disproportionately that there’s so much time we can do anything. But the week is made up of days. Take deliberate daily action and the week takes care of itself.
It becomes exponential as well. The more we do daily, the more empowered we feel and the more we feel that we can accomplish. As we start doing more, we think of more things that we could be doing, that we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. As we start to take deliberate daily action, we progress exponentially.
Here’s your homework. Pick one thing that you’d like to improve on that you can take deliberate daily action on each day. Then every day, take those tiny steps that are going to propel you exponentially towards your Goal. Leave me a note in comments to let me know how you’re going with this.