Hustle Culture Is One of the Most Expensive Things You Can Buy Into
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → Quietly Disruptive Podcast
Hustle culture has a particular vibe to it. Push harder. Do more. Always be moving, always be grinding, always be on. There is a sort of sleep when you are dead energy to it that on the surface sounds like ambition but underneath is something far more exhausting and far more expensive than most founders realise. And the thing about hustle culture is that there is some logic in it, because working hard does get results. That part is true. But it only works when the effort is going in the right direction and when the approach is right for your business, and hustle culture never asks those questions. It just tells you to do more. It does not tell you to stop and think about whether the thing you are about to do more of is actually the right thing for you
The Same Action Done Two Different Ways Produces Completely Different Results
A good example of this is cold outreach, which I know probably made you shudder just reading the words. And that is part of what hustle culture has done, it has taken normal business activities and given them a very specific, aggressive definition. Cold outreach in the hustle version means send as many messages as you can because it is a numbers game. Optimise your open rate, perfect your hook, tell people what you do and move on to the next name on the spreadsheet.
But the action itself, reaching out to someone you do not know, is not the problem. The hustle version of it is the problem. I still do outreach but my version looks completely different. I take the time to read someone’s profile, think about their business, understand what they are doing, and when I reach out there is a genuine question behind it, a real curiosity, a want to know more rather than a pitch disguised as a hello. The action is the same. The intention behind it is completely different. And the results at the end are completely different too. That is the shift. It is not about whether you do the thing or not, it is about whether you do it in the way that is right for you and your business or in the way that everybody else tells you to do it.
From the Inside Hustle Feels Like Progress but It Is a Hamster Wheel
The sneakiest thing about hustle is that from the inside it genuinely feels like momentum. You are busy. You are working. You are ticking things off the list. You are moving. But when you finally step off the wheel and look around, you realise you have not actually gone anywhere, certainly not anywhere you wanted to go. I have tried both sides. When I was hustling, it was exhausting and the results were inconsistent and I could not see what was happening until I stopped, which is the catch because the hustle keeps you too busy to stop and look.
Working hard is not the problem. I want to be very clear about that. Working hard does get results. But working hard on the wrong things, in the wrong way, using the wrong approach for your business, that is where it goes wrong. And it starts with literally stopping to ask two questions before you do anything. Is this right for me? And is this the way I want to do it? If the answer to either of those is no, then that is your chance to do something different.
The Unseen Cost of Hustle
The reason I call hustle culture one of the most expensive things you can buy into is because the costs are not obvious until you stop and look back. It is not just the energy you burn through, although that alone is significant. It is the time spent going in the wrong direction. It is the momentum you lose going in circles rather than forward. It is the decisions you make when you are so exhausted that you just want to get out and get moving rather than making good decisions from a place of clarity and energy. And you do not always see those costs while you are in the middle of it. You see them afterwards, when you stop and think about how much further ahead you would be if you had done it differently from the beginning.
So here is the question I would like you to sit with. Is there any area in your business right now that feels a bit hustly? Something you are pushing hard on, a strategy you loathe but put up with because it sort of works but does not really work, an approach that drains you but feels like it is the only option? If so, take this as your moment to step off the wheel, look around and ask whether this is the way you would like to do it. And if the answer is no, the next post covers what the alternative actually looks like in practice.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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