“Go beyond your limits and keep going.”
“The only way is up.”
“Push harder.”
“Feel the fear and do it anyway.”
“The only path to success is hard work and sacrifice.”
This is the way of hustle.
Hustling is equated with status and success. Entrepreneurs are told the path to 6 or 7 figures is putting your nose to the grindstone and the path to authority is one long graft.
70-hour weeks are a must. Life can wait until you have the money to enjoy it. Your family will thank you for your sacrifice in the long run.
And if that’s not you, well then, you aren’t cut out for success really, are you?
Seriously???
The notion that businesses can grow exponentially off the back of unsustainable levels of input is frankly deranged.
The toll on your mental and physical health is extreme.
The lack of opportunity for emotional regulation is debilitating.
Missing out on life stunts your personal growth and depletes your emotional reserves.
And the sheer impossibility of time to rest leads to crippling creativity blocks.
Ultimately, hustle culture leads to atrophy in business, where the only way to create growth is to push harder with depleted resources. More efficiencies are sought, which adds to the pressure until eventually everything breaks.
It is a seriously messed-up model.
In the last few years, there has been a significant shift in the perception of workplace requirements. Led predominantly by the incoming working generation, it is filtering out to the wider workforce. The notion that sacrificing quality of life now for potential quality of life later is sliding, but corporate practices are not changing in step with this. It’s going to get messy while we recalibrate.
The working infrastructure of global business is vast. It’s not easy to change, but it will have to. We need a different model and different mentors to shift the norms.
Out in nature, it is possible to witness growth that works without harm. Across many timescales, we see the pattern again and again. Nature flows through rises and falls as life surges and drops back. It is one of nature’s laws.
A law we are not in a position to defy for any length of time without serious consequences.
In practice, this law is written into the rhythms of life. Though we might try to switch it off, we cannot stop day turning into night nor the young growing old. Every day we live through the rise and fall of light. Every year, we move through the rise of warmth and the coming of the cold. Across longer periods, there are cycles written into the weather, plant behaviour, ocean currents, sun spots and geomagnetic activity, to name a few.
A cycle is a going out and a return. Energy flows out into expression before turning back in. It is part of life. It’s a roadmap for healthy growth.
We can easily make it part of business by shifting how we think about the parts of the cycle that run against the hustle narrative.
There are four parts to the cycle that translate into any situation.
The first is the birth, the idea, the seedling.
The second is the learning, curiosity and expansion.
The third is becoming, the realisation and the blooming.
The fourth is the ageing, reflection and acceptance.
A seedling stretches out its leaves and takes up space. A flower blooms and then sets seed before the energy flows back in.
The sun rises over the horizon, wisps of warmth and light heralding daybreak. As the sun rises higher, the warmth increases and then diminishes until it dips below the horizon and darkness falls.
These phases relate to the stages of a day, week, year and lifetime.
Instead of leaning into hustle, we can lean into this natural rhythm. We need times when we push ourselves but we also need times when we slow down and go within. This is what feeds both entrepreneur and business.
Creativity – the lifeblood of any vital, growing business – is nurtured in the spaces in between. If we don’t provide those spaces, they will force themselves in. Burnout and breakdown come to visit when we don’t listen to our natural rhythms.
Being truly productive doesn’t require maximum effort 100% of the time; it requires periods of rest and renewal.
There are plenty of strategies you can implement inside your business to keep the wheels in motion and the income flowing when these phases come around. It doesn’t mean everything has to grind to a halt.
When the sun rises again, you can safely push yourself forward because that’s what is needed then. But as it begins to dip, it is imperative that you respond to the shift unless you want to be fighting yourself.
Learning to listen to the cues rather than to-do lists is a vital skill to develop. It can help you be gentler with yourself and foster longer-term, more sustainable success.
The business models we are moving beyond at this time are in no way gentle or sustainable. Instead, we can create new ones that listen and respond to the subtle, ever-present rhythm of life.
