MBA2437 Hustle Culture & Why It's Not So Bad

Summary

Summary of Episode MBA2437: "Hustle Culture & Why It's Not So Bad" by Omar Zenhom

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Introduction In episode MBA2437 of The $100 MBA Show, released on March 4, 2024, host Omar Zenhom tackles the contentious topic of hustle culture. Commonly criticized as a relentless pursuit of work at the expense of personal well-being, hustle culture is dissected to understand its true impact on entrepreneurship and business success. Drawing from over two decades of entrepreneurial experience, Omar offers a balanced perspective on why hustle culture might not be as detrimental as it's often portrayed.

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Defining Hustle Culture Omar begins by defining hustle culture as the ideology that relentless work is the sole path to business success. He acknowledges the growing skepticism around this concept, with terms like "toxic resilience" highlighting the potential negative effects of excessive work without adequate rest ([00:38]).

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Personal Journey: From 9-to-5 to Entrepreneurship Omar shares his personal transition from a traditional 9-to-5 job to becoming a full-time entrepreneur. He emphasizes the prolonged effort required to make this shift, stating, "It took me about 13 years to transition from a full time job into entrepreneurship and side hustles for a very long time." ([06:10]). This lengthy transition underscores the significant dedication and perseverance needed to replace a steady paycheck with an independent income.

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The Reality of Starting a Business Delving deeper, Omar dispels the myth that entrepreneurship requires merely passion without hard work. He asserts, "Extraordinary results require extraordinary actions," emphasizing that building a successful business demands more effort than most conventional jobs ([03:00]). Unlike traditional employment, where responsibilities are divided among various departments, entrepreneurs must juggle all roles, from operations to marketing, which inherently requires a more intensive workload.

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Building Resilience and Managing Burnout Acknowledging the risks of burnout, Omar draws parallels between entrepreneurship and elite athletics. He explains that just as athletes train to build endurance, entrepreneurs must develop resilience to withstand the pressures of building a business. Omar recounts working through illnesses and personal hardships, highlighting the necessity of pushing through tough times to maintain business momentum.

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Practical Strategies to Embrace Hustle Without Burning Out Omar offers actionable advice to manage the demanding nature of entrepreneurship without succumbing to burnout:

1. Gradual Ramp-Up: Start by dedicating a manageable amount of time to your business while maintaining your day job. Gradually increase your commitment as the business gains traction.

2. Set Clear Goals: Establish a clear vision and end goal to stay motivated. Omar likens this to having a "North Star" that guides your efforts ([12:41]).

3. Prioritize Mental Health: Recognize the signs of burnout and take necessary breaks. Omar stresses the importance of recharging to sustain long-term productivity.

4. Consistent Effort: Maintain a steady and sustained effort rather than sporadic bursts of work. Consistency is key to building and maintaining business momentum.

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Earning Market Value A crucial point Omar makes is the relationship between effort and market value. He explains, "Entrepreneurs understand how the world works. They understand how the market works. You get paid based on how valuable you are." ([13:44]). As entrepreneurs build their skills and enhance their business’s value, their market worth increases, allowing for higher earnings and the ability to reinvest in the business. This reinvestment can lead to delegating tasks, thereby reducing personal workload while scaling the business.

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The Rewards of Entrepreneurship Despite the challenges, Omar highlights the intrinsic rewards of entrepreneurship. Building something meaningful and leaving a legacy provides a sense of fulfillment that goes beyond financial success. He describes the initial years as the most exciting and energizing, where the passion for creating something new outweighs the exhaustion from intense work ([17:50]).

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "Extraordinary results require extraordinary actions." – Omar Zenhom ([03:00])
• "Entrepreneurs understand how the world works. They understand how the market works. You get paid based on how valuable you are." – Omar Zenhom ([13:44])
• "It's not about how hard you can hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." – Omar Zenhom ([17:50])

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Conclusion Omar concludes that while hustle culture involves significant sacrifice and relentless effort, it is not inherently negative. Instead, it is a necessary component of achieving entrepreneurial success. He encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to embrace the hustle with a balanced approach, ensuring they remain motivated by their vision while safeguarding their well-being. Omar reinforces the idea that perseverance, coupled with strategic effort, can lead to extraordinary business outcomes.

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Final Thoughts Omar emphasizes the importance of self-motivation and maintaining a clear vision throughout the entrepreneurial journey. Drawing inspiration from Rocky Balboa’s resilience, he underscores that success lies in the ability to persevere through setbacks and continue moving forward. He leaves listeners with a motivational message to stay committed to their goals, despite the inherent challenges of building a business.

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Supporting Advertisements Skipped Throughout the transcript, several advertisements for US Cellular Prepaid and Hometap were present. As per instructions, these non-content sections have been omitted from the summary to maintain focus on the episode's core discussions.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Powerful business lessons you can count on. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about hustle culture and why it's not so bad. In the last few years, hustle culture has really been a negative term. It's the concept of work at all costs. Work, work, work on your business. Don't rest. That's the only way to achieve success with no balance. Terms like toxic resilience have been used to say, hey, working through tough times is not always healthy. But is this all true? Does this actually apply to somebody who's trying to start a business or be an entrepreneur? That's what we're going to discuss in today's episode. My own experience when it comes to starting a business, going from a 9 to 5, working for my paycheck and transitioning into a full time entrepreneur, what does it actually take? How much work does it take? Does it require me to really work to the bone and sacrifice? Or can I do it in a steady fashion? Can I do it in a comfortable way? Is hustle culture really a bad thing? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to break it down. I personally don't really think it's all bad or there are some elements we gotta be careful of. But generally speaking, you're gonna need to work incredibly hard to start a business. Harder than what people think is normal. That's why most people do not do it, because it seems a little bit crazy, it seems a little bit extreme. But extraordinary results require extraordinary actions. And that's just the truth of it. We're gonna get into all the nitty gritty details and talk about, how do you do this without burning out? How do you actually work hard and make your dreams a reality without just totally becoming toast? So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to preface this episode by saying something that might sound obvious, but I still need to say it. I am not A medical professional. I am not a doctor. I'm not a mental health expert. I can only share my own experiences. I can only share what worked for me, what didn't work for me. And I can only make my own conclusions based on my own experiences. And I'll share them with you. That's what I offer today. Now remember, everybody's different. Everybody has a different background, upbringing, a different set of tools that they're working with. On a personal level, I recognize that. But I also recognize how hard it actually is to replace your income in a 9 to 5 job and become a full time entrepreneur. How hard is it? Well, it took me about 13 years to transition from a full time job into entrepreneurship and side hustles for a very long time. It's not easy and it requires an incredible amount of effort. Here's the bottom line. You have to work at your job so you can get a paycheck, but you also have to work on your business. There's not enough hours in the day for you to work on your business full time as well as your job full time if you actually ate and slept and had a normal life. So that means you're gonna be working part time on your business and part time efforts get you part time results. That's just the bottom line. You, you can't expect to put in two, three, four hours in your business a week and compete with people that are doing 40, 50, 60 hours a week. It just doesn't make sense. You can work as smart as you like. At some point you're gonna have diminishing returns. At some point you're just not going to compete. You're gonna have to work harder, you're gonna have to put more time in. You're gonna have to sacrifice, you're gonna have to make a trade off, you're gonna have to make a decision. And this is what a lot of people don't understand. And I think this is where hustle culture gets a bad rep. People think that hustle culture is like, work your brains out. Do not rest, work for work's sake. No, that's not what I believe you should do as a person who's an entrepreneur, somebody who's actually trying to grow their business or get to the point where the business can be self fulfilling, it can have a flywheel effect where they're getting business automatically. To get that kind of momentum, it takes a lot of effort in the beginning to push that boulder down the hill. So it has that momentum, but it's not gonna happen by itself. It takes an initial push and that push could be six months, a year, two years. It depends on your business and your situation. But the point here is it requires some major effort. There's just no way around this, which means you will work harder than you ever worked before. I can tell you from experience that this is just the absolute truth. This is what I love about entrepreneurship, by the way. It actually tests the limits, okay? It actually realigns your expectations, what you can do and not do. I'm telling you right now because I've experienced this myself. When you're working at a job and you're working hard and you're putting hours. I was a educator at an institution. I was a department manager. I would go into work at 6:00 in the morning, okay. And I wouldn't leave until 7pm, sometimes 8pm, sometimes 12, 13 hour shifts. I was working a lot, okay? I was working hard. It doesn't even come close to how hard I worked in, in those first few years in my business as a full time entrepreneur. It's a joke if I look at it. I'm being completely honest here. I look back at those 12 hours I was working in the office and yes, I was working. But the amount of mental capacity and amount of work and no play and break and concentrated effort that is required to get your business off the ground is nowhere near of what we believe hard work means in a day job. I'm just going to tell you the facts here. Why? Because you're not ultimately responsible for everything in a day job. You have a job, a job in a business, in a company, in an institution, you are one part of the puzzle. You are not the whole puzzle. In a business, you got to take care of everything. I remember my first few years in business, people just asked me, what is it like to be a full time entrepreneur. I used to tell them, hey, do you know how you go to work and you have an office and you have a desk. Yeah. And you got a phone. Right. And they give you business cards. Yep. And then they tell you exactly what to do, what phone calls to make and what job you have to do and what your KPIs are and what the rules are and how to succeed in your business. And they're like, yep. And then you do that and you fulfill your obligations to the company, they're happy with you, they give you a paycheck, they send the paycheck in your bank. Yep, I got that. Yeah. And then they also carve out your schedule and your time off and they take care of your medical and all that kind of stuff. Yep. And I say, okay. Entrepreneurship is similar to that where you're doing a job, you're working on that. It's. Except you have to build everything else around it. You have to find the desk, you have to find the office, you have to find the business cards. You have to figure it out, you have to make the payroll happen. You gotta make sure that the KPIs align with your goals as a business owner. You have to set those KPIs, you have to do the work, and that's just one job in the company. You have to do all the jobs in the beginning. So this is a good illustration of how much work is needed when you're starting a business. So I actually don't love this hate on hustle. You have to hustle. You have to work hard, really hard in the beginning of a business because you have to get the thing going. Once you have it going and you're starting to make money and you're starting to make some progress, and you're making some hires and you can offload some work, and now you're seeing a return on investment on those hires. And now you can reinvest in your business. And then soon enough, you can start, you know, having a little bit more ease in your day. And then you get back to the point where you just have one job, which is to manage your team. But in the beginning, that's not reality. And anybody who tells you that you don't have to work hard and you don't have to exert yourself in order to start a business and be successful is lying to you. Okay? They're just setting you up for failure. It'd be easy just for me to tell you, oh, this is easy. And business is easy and starting is easy, and you don't have to work hard. Everything will be great. And I can paint this beautiful picture, but that's just not the truth. I'm not doing you a service by telling you what's not the reality. I want to set you up for success so you know what to expect so you can go in full force. Now, the beauty of owning your own business and starting your own thing is that you're doing something that you love. You're contributing to your future. You're making a legacy for yourself. This is actually energizing. It's energy giving. It's kind of like a blessing because your first few years in business are the hardest, but they're also the most exciting. You're so Motivated to get out of bed and get working on your business. It's new, it's fresh, it's. It's fun. So, yes, you're working hard, and yes, it's tiring, and yes, you're doing more hours than you've ever done, but it's also rewarding. And in a lot of ways, it sometimes doesn't feel like work. It feels like you're building something, you're creating something. Now, am I saying that burnout doesn't exist and it's not a thing? No, of course not. Burnout is a thing. Okay? You have to be aware of your mental health and your stamina. Just like a marathon in a race, you have to pace yourself, but you have to put in the work. You can't stop running. You got to keep running in the marathon. You're going to have to find ways to recharge, relax, even if it's just a few hours so you can go back at it. And the whole point of today's lesson is you have to get yourself in business shape. What does this mean? That means everybody's resilience, everybody's ability to endure hard work is not the same. Some people have very weak resilience muscles and some people have very strong ones. And it doesn't happen by accident. It happens because they're used to it. Just like somebody who's used to running 2, 3, 4 miles a day, if they go for a jog, they're not going to be phased. It's not going to feel like anything. It's going to be easy for them. If somebody who's never done any physical exercise starts going for a jog, they're going to be huffing and puffing and feeling like they're going to have a heart attack. They're going to feel physically burnt out. You're going to have to start ramping yourself up. Even if you're in a job right now, you're going to have to start putting in more time, more effort into your business. Ramp. Ramping yourself up. So one of the things I would recommend and have recommended on the show several times is try to get yourself up to the point where you're doing 20 hours of business work, working on your business while you're in a job, this is a ramp up. So maybe it's five hours and then six and then 10 and then 15 and then 20. What I used to do is I used to do 10 hours on the weekend. Like one day I would just do my business and then two hours every evening during the weekday I'd have one day off. And that worked for me. I was on a mission. I was trying to build something incredible. I was trying to build something amazing. I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I knew what I was doing. When I say that, I mean I knew what I was going for. I knew what I was shooting for. And that was just my North Star. And I was trying to make it happen. So I was willing to put in that time. I ramped up to that. In the beginning, I was doing maybe like three hours on the weekend and an hour at night. But after about a month or two, I ramped up to that 20 hour mark. And then, you guessed it, I moved it even past that. I was doing like 30 hours a week. At that point I'm like, okay, I need to make a decision. I have to have a trade off here. Like, I'm going to have to quit my job so that I can put in more time into the business. And that's when I transitioned to full time entrepreneurship. Now, this is after I had some traction and I was able to, you know, earn and make some money with my business. Being an entrepreneur, being a business owner is like being in an elite athlete. You have to be elite at working smart, hard, efficiently, and having that strong resilience to keep on going through tough times, through difficult moments in life. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I had to work through being ill, being sick, not feeling well. I wish I could just take a sick day, but I couldn't because my business relied on me. And it was the early days. I just had to just work. Do I regret that? I don't, Because I know that was required. And yes, of course, the business wouldn't have collapsed if I took a day off when I was sick, but it would definitely slow down my progress. And I was trying to get to my finish line being an independent entrepreneur as fast as possible. And that's my experience. That's what I wanted. So what I want to communicate today is, is that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, if you want to make a full time living on your independent business, it's going to take more work than you can imagine. I'm not saying this to scare you, I'm saying this to excite you. Because that's the reality. That is what you're going to have to do. You're going to pour in as much as you can. Listen, if it wasn't hard, everybody would do it, right? If it wasn't hard, it wouldn't be valuable. And let's talk about what I mean.

[C]

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[A]

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[B]

Entrepreneurs understand how the world works. They understand how the market works. You get paid based on how valuable you are. If you're more valuable to the marketplace, you get paid more. If you're less valuable to the marketplace, you get paid less. That's just how it is. It has nothing to do with who you are personally. It has something to do with your value in the marketplace. So in the beginning, you are new to this business thing. You are not very valuable. You are very weak when it comes to your skills as a business person, as an entrepreneur, as a negotiator, as a sales person, as a team leader, all that stuff, Right? So as you start ramping up and working hard and learning these things and trying new things and getting the experience you need, you become more and more valuable. And therefore you can make more and more money. As you make more money, you can reinvest in your business and do a little bit less work, a little bit less work as you make more money. On and on and on. But in the beginning you don't have a lot of value. And you have to earn your stripes by learning and growing and becoming valuable to the marketplace. Whether that is creating a more valuable product, a more valuable service, a better written book, a better delivered course, whatever it is. If I look back at the stuff I created 20 years ago, it's cringeworthy. I can't believe that was me who created it. It's horrible, but I had to start somewhere and that means there's progress. And that doesn't happen by just doing the same Level of effort as what you're doing right now. The level effort you're making right now is getting you a certain result, a certain level of result. If you're happy with that result, just continue to do what you're doing. If you want more, you're gonna need to work harder. You're gonna need to work more, smarter, grow, learn, ready, improve. That's just how it is. I wish it was easier than that. All right, we have great tools now. We have AI. We have all these great tools on the Internet that make things easier. But you have to put the work in. You have to put it all together. You have to make something valuable for your customers and offer it. And that takes effort. That takes hustle. Now to wrap up, I will admit, it was very hard. Very, very hard. My first few years as an entrepreneur. You're making a lot of effort. You're spinning your wheels, and you're not making a lot of progress. It's like two steps forward, one step back, sometimes even two steps back. Okay? And it's easy to get demotivated. It's easy to get burnt out and feel tired and feel emotionally drained. But that's why it's so important to have a vision. That's why it's so important for you to remind yourself why you're doing this. What is this going to get you? What's the end goal look like? Keep that in the front of your brain, the front of your face, even with a vision board or whatever it might be a screensaver so you don't forget. You need to do that. You're the only person that's going to cheer yourself on. No one's going to just randomly give you some motivated speech and push you to keep going and, you know, and give you a round of applause. No, you have to push yourself. Be mindful that, you know, of course, we don't have unlimited willpower. You might need some breaks along the way. But the honest truth is, is that becoming a business owner, it's a journey of sacrifice. It's a journey of hard work. It's a journey of growth. And growth is tiring. Growth is difficult. Growth is uncomfortable. But you can do it. Many, many, many, many, many people I know have done it. And if you want it bad enough, it can happen. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love it here, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify. Hit follow right now so you get our next episode automatically. Please go ahead and do that. It's the best way you can support the show. Guys, before I go, I want to leave you with this. I hope I was not too tough on you today. Too much tough love maybe. I don't know. But the point I try to make here on the Hundred dollar via the My goal is to be honest with you, is to tell you like it is in my own experience, because I think a lot of people like to put a lot of window dressing on things and label things and don't really know what they're saying. I don't doubt that there are people that get burnt out and get tired, and that's okay. By the way, if you get burnt out and you need a break, take a break, but get back up and keep going. This is why Rocky is my favorite movie, because the guy gets knocked down over and over and over and over and keeps getting up. And that's why in the story he's a champion. Eventually, like Rocky says himself, it's not about how hard you can hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

[A]

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