5 Hustle Questions That Could Save Your Life

To be successful you’ve got to hustle right? I mean that what separates the truly dynamic and successful people in any industry, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gary V, Tim Ferris, etc., etc. they ALL HUSTLE.

So if you want to know if you’ve got what it takes to be successful answer the short 5 question quiz below

Are you more committed to working and making it happen than close relationships, rest, etc?
Do you take work to bed? Work on the weekends? Do you find time to hustle on vacation?
Do you prefer to talk about your hustle more than any other topic?
Do you get impatient with people who don’t get why you’re so focused on hustling?
Do you think about hustling while driving, conversing, falling asleep, or sleeping?

If you answered yes to most or all of these questions then you are truly aligned with hustle culture. But you might also be a workaholic.

That’s because these questions are actually adapted from the workaholic’s anonymous website. They’re 20 questions to help you see how you might be using work as a way to avoid your feelings, fill a vast and empty hole inside of you, and generally give you a sense of self or worth.

But Hustle culture isn’t all bad.

It’s based on a simple idea: Anything is possible with hard work and determination.

And this idea at its core is a good idea. Too many people believe that they can’t create the lives they want because they lack the education, connection, skills, or background to create what they want. This fundamentally isn’t true. In fact, it’s something that I work with clients on regularly.

But hustle culture also ignores the fact that being white, male, having a good education, and access to good credit or sources of funding all have an outsized effect on your ability to make hard work, work for you.

It also ignores the fact that overworking as a way to create identity is dangerous, because if your identity is all about hustling then you can never stop hustling even after you’ve achieved success.

The danger of endless work.

About 3 years ago I identified myself as a workaholic. Of the 20 questions on the WA website, I answered yes to 12-15 of them. It was a wake-up call; it helped me see that work had not only become problematic for my health and well-being, but it had also become the center of my identity.

I realized that life wasn’t supposed to be just about work for work’s sake. I also realized that my health, especially my mental health, wasn’t worth the rewards of overwork. Yes, I liked making good money as a coach, but I didn’t love the hours of stress, the outbursts of emotion, the fights with my cofounder, and the endless sense of anxiety and pressure I felt.

I realized that life isn’t worth overworking through. So I changed my business. I slowed down. I took more time off. I figured out how to be more effective while working fewer hours. And now I work 4 days a week and make the same amount of money.

I sometimes still feel left behind by hustle culture. I feel like I should be working harder, especially when my partner stays up till 7 pm finishing her own work, or when a friend of mine completes a big project after working long hours and nights… I wonder if I should go back.

But then I remember that it isn’t worth it.
YES, I need to work hard.
YES, I need to serve my clients.
YES, I need to be on purpose and generous with my time and efforts.

But that doesn’t mean I need to go back to hustling so much that I lose myself.

You can be successful by applying yourself, working hard, and being persistent as all get out. You do need discipline and endurance to be a successful entrepreneur.

What you don’t need is to be shamed for taking care of yourself. It’s why I always have a coach that pushes me to work harder when I slack off or I’m avoiding what needs to be done, but who also advises me to get rest when I push too hard.

So get supported, stay focused, and when the noise that you should be working harder enters your head, check to see where it might be right, and let the rest of it go.

 

3 Questions To Achieve Balance

With no office to go into and our dining room table serving triple duty, the concept of work-life balance may seem more elusive than ever.

Sure we’ve got child care to deal with and reports to finish. So we squeeze ten minutes of virtual yoga in a week, order take out to give ourselves a break, and never seem to be able to catch up with our endless personal and professional to-do lists. But that’s what being a top performer is about, right?

For years I thought being ‘successful’ in business meant sacrifice. I liked #hustle posts and worked 60 hour work weeks. But it was all ok because it was ‘just for now’ and ‘would lighten up soon.’ I thought once I scaled and leveraged I would have the time and space to do things I want (and maybe even take care of myself).

That day never arrived. Instead, I burnt out and was forced to choose something else.

That’s when I learned that the key to balance is less.

And here are the three questions that helped me find my way to the space that truly felt good.

1) Is my life enough? Can my life be enough?

For years I thought my life had to become something else. I had spent 10 years stoned and drifting from one job to the next. Yes, I had some cool stories, but I often looked around and felt behind. I’d never be a 30 under 30 or even a 40 under 40, (Was there a 50 under 50 category?)

So when I started my own business it felt like I was always trying to catch up, to prove something to someone, but no matter how much I achieved, (six figures in two years as a coach, clients paying my $20k+, a TEDx Talk) I was never satisfied.

Then I started asking myself, what if my life is enough right now? Can I be satisfied with it, even if nothing changes?

Slowly I began to relax. I didn’t stop working or creating (I actually wrote two books that year) but I felt differently about work. Instead of being fueled by a need to prove something I was filled by a desire to serve and to do work as an expression of my life. From this place I was able to see what was extra and slowly let it go.

2) Why am I scared of open space?

Often I have filled my life with things just to pass the time. I’ve signed up for classes, created chores, did extra work, answered stupid emails, and so much more. I began to realize I was scared of open space. And I began to wonder why?

So I cleared extra time in my week and I made space to just be. Sometimes I would putter around doing dishes or play guitar, sometimes I would read books and go for long walks. In that space my feelings emerged, loneliness, grief, but also joy and peace.

I saw that my fear of open space was a fear of feeling and of being with myself. Once I had faced this fear and felt the relief of allowing my heart to breathe, I was able to let go of the things I only did to fill my time or push away the anxiety underneath all the doing.

3) What could I do better if I was fully rested?

For a long time, I only slept 6.5 to 7 hours a night. I would wake up in the morning with a grip in my chest. I would stay up at night hoping another episode of the office would put my worries to bed. But instead of dealing with my anxiety and my lack of worth I simply floated through life half awake and half irritated.

When I finally cleared some space with myself I started sleeping more and better. Instead of the anxiety raiding my bedtime hours I was dealing with it during the day and that meant I had space to relax at night.

The better rested I felt the better I worked. The better I worked the more unwilling I became to work from tiredness. And all of this led me to see how working from a place of depletion only made it easier to be stressed out and overwhelmed.

This insight helped me become bolder in what I let go of and more disciplined in saying no and letting other people do their part. Slowly things that I was convinced I had to do just started disappearing, people around me stepped up to help me out, and I found that being fully rested made it more possible for me to be fully resourced as well.

That’s it, these three questions are the ones I come back to again and again. They remind me that balancing too much isn’t really balance, it’s simply a shell game where I shuffle my stress and anxiety to a different part of my life. Instead, if I find a way to make more space, do less, and trust myself slowly, balance doesn’t become this Olympic feat.

 

5 Reasons You Should Do Something To Change Your Life

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1.No One Can Start Your Life Change For You
We all have dreams that we will meet the perfect partner, a famous millionaire, a wise teacher, or fairy godmother that will make our dreams come true.

Some of these amazing things can happen, but the universe is waiting for you to take the first step. Or maybe even the 1000 steps. People can support your journey, but those people are on the path waiting for you.

2.A Small Variation Can Lead To Great Change-
Imagine you are on a spaceship headed to a far off galaxy. Early on in your voyage, you realize you’ve made a small navigation error. The error was a change in course of only a few inches, but over the course of your journey would have led you far, far off course.

Small changes have big effects over time. At first, when do something to change your life, even something small, you may not notice much of a difference. But over the long term the consequences are amazing. If you’ve started to drift off course, it’s much easier to make a small change now than wait and have to make huge changes later.

3. Taking a Risk On Yourself Creates Self Trust –
I read a study that found that people who lie about their GPA’s on a survey will actually improve their grades. The idea is simple if we claim we are doing something we make a subconscious decision to go for it.

When we take a risk and say we are going to do something we begin to move toward that reality. Success isn’t guaranteed, but it becomes much more likely if we set intentions with confidence.

4. Life Is Short
People always over predict how much time and money they will have in the future. We often plan with the idea that everything will work out perfectly. We think “If I shower in 10 mins and get dressed in 5 then I can make it there just on time.” But then we can’t find our keys, we get caught up in the glory of hot water, or there is traffic and we are late.

Life is the same way. Not everything on our journey is going to be straight and narrow. There may be dragons we need to contend with, the sooner we get started the less those dragons will slow us down.

5. Everything is More Scary From the Outside
When we imagine all the things that might happen if we change our lives our minds can become full of visions of failure and catastrophe. Sure all change implies risk, but so does not changing.

If you have ever stood on the edge of a forest at night you know that it can look daunting. But if you are in that same forest camping it’s not scary at all. The trees are soft and gentle. The environment holds you with its energy of life.

When we look at change from the outside it can be terrifying. But when you actually do something to change your life it’s not as scary as you imagined.

So Get Started
I’ve always been afraid of living an accordion life. Where the events of today could be duplicated until almost exactly until my death. I don’t want to wake up years from now and wonder where my life went.

So I try my best everyday to make myself and those around me better. I don’t always succeed and I won’t be an epic figure in the annals of history. But I know that I would prefer to live a life that embraces change and strives for excellence. I hope you will join me on my journey and I hope you will let me know if I can help on your.