The Nuances of Hustle: What People Get Wrong
00:00:00.000 | So many people that I told I was coming to chat with you associate you with hustle.
00:00:05.520 | What are they getting wrong when they make that assumption?
00:00:07.360 | The nuances of it, right? Like, yes, I believe in work ethic. I, you know, I think it's a variable.
00:00:15.200 | But I don't think it's as, you know, it's, it kind of reminds me of what's just kind of going
00:00:21.280 | on in the world, right? We're so into headline reading. I think there was a couple of viral
00:00:26.240 | posts on Medium written about me on hustle porn and that kind of like cemented a point of view
00:00:31.840 | that even the writer of that article three years later DM me to apologize because he spoke to the
00:00:38.560 | agenda he had at hand and realized he was making certain variables convenient to the story he was
00:00:44.080 | trying to tell. And I really appreciated that by the way. I think that takes a lot of
00:00:47.600 | humility and courage. And, and honestly, I, I, I really do love the idea of like
00:00:53.920 | understanding that work ethic is a variable, but there's so many other variables. Like, for example,
00:00:59.280 | from the first book I wrote, Crush It!, when I wrote it in 2008 and came out in '09,
00:01:03.440 | in that exact book, there's like, hey, if you work nine to five and you make $48,000 a year,
00:01:08.640 | you've won if you're thrilled, if you live within your means and you're super happy.
00:01:13.280 | And so I think, you know, what people get wrong is, you know, I'm excited and I enjoy what I do
00:01:18.560 | and I put in hours towards it, but, you know, it doesn't define me. I, I, I'm completely utterly
00:01:25.840 | detached from like financial success, from notoriety. I just love my game. Like, you know,
00:01:33.600 | the people that know me best know the same vigor I talk about, like, hey, you can have a career that
00:01:38.560 | you love. I bring that same vigor to 6 a.m. on a Saturday to go garage sailing because I love it,
00:01:44.320 | or competing in basketball or pickleball, or, you know, or watching a Jets game. I think
00:01:49.760 | what they get wrong is, unlike a lot of people who don't even use that word or even deploy that
00:01:56.000 | energy, I have tons of friends who are seemingly calm, speak all the right speak for acceptance,
00:02:03.920 | but are absolutely incredibly overly driven by money, by fame, and are detached to that. And,
00:02:12.560 | and I think that's why there's a lot of anxiety in the world. And so I think, you know, I think
00:02:15.920 | the nuances of how I think about it, plus I also spoke about that concept during an incredibly
00:02:22.640 | down market in the economy when the internet was hitting an incredible inflection point in 2008,
00:02:27.760 | 9, 10. So, you know, I think, I think just the nuance of it, the word, when I use the word
00:02:33.680 | hustle in 2008, 9, 10, the, the intent is like, hey, there's opportunity and you can go get it.
00:02:40.000 | I'm thrilled to change that word to tenacity or grit or work ethic. So I think, I think the
00:02:48.320 | semantics of it all. And, and I am a communicator that I, I'm incredibly self-aware that the way I
00:02:56.560 | communicate with the excitement level, with the, the energy, with the Jersey chat of it, you know,
00:03:02.800 | I, I'm very aware and under, and genuinely compassionate and understanding to why people
00:03:08.800 | may take the extreme take. And I also don't, I don't have the audacity. I deploy enormous humility
00:03:15.520 | when I'm about to say what I'm saying. I would never expect someone to spend five hours to double
00:03:19.760 | click into it and actually understand what I'm about and what I'm saying. And so, you know,
00:03:25.280 | I guess at the end of the day, what are they missing? They're not missing anything. If they're
00:03:29.760 | just doing a drive by and reading a headline, if they've spent two or three hours on me through
00:03:35.600 | content or interaction or people that really know me, I doubt they'd be missing anything.
00:03:40.880 | Cause I think they would contextualize it. Yeah. Do you think that work ethic,
00:03:44.400 | you have that grit, that tenacity is something that can be taught or learned,
00:03:48.880 | or is it just something that's part of your DNA? I think it's a combination of both. I think,
00:03:53.120 | I think it's clearly in people's DNA. You know, there's, there's many people that
00:03:57.440 | are either born with too little or too much that deploy it immediately to quote unquote,
00:04:02.880 | prove something or, or, or see an opportunity, especially for immigrants. You know, it's like
00:04:07.280 | so easy for me to go at it. My, my, I was born in the Soviet union. My parents lived their entire
00:04:14.000 | childhood and, you know, into their early twenties there. So I lived in a household that really
00:04:19.920 | understood like shit, man, like America's pretty epic. Like this is pretty cool. Like you don't go
00:04:25.200 | to jail for trying to make a better life for yourself in entrepreneurship. So it was just,
00:04:31.600 | you know, it was very easy for me on the flip side. I've seen a lot of people be affected by
00:04:36.640 | the osmosis of work ethic. You know, it's, it's kind of like what's going on with me in the gym.
00:04:41.840 | Like I, it became so not natural as natural as it comes to me to sell lemonade or sports cards or
00:04:49.280 | run businesses or be nice to people. It comes equally not natural to me to work in the gym,
00:04:54.800 | but you know, we've known each other a long time, somewhere around 38, I decided to put in the work
00:04:59.760 | because I wanted to live longer and just thought it would be better. And, you know, through osmosis
00:05:05.520 | practice, like I'm now someone who goes to the gym. I still don't love it, which is why I really
00:05:11.440 | do talk about how important passion is to actually get to that like state where like, it's so easy
00:05:18.960 | because you love it so much. You know, I really do wish for everyone that the job they had was
00:05:24.640 | similar to their favorite hobby. For everybody right now who's listening, they can take a step
00:05:28.320 | back and whether it's skiing or cooking or playing video games or sailing or garage sailing or
00:05:35.280 | watching movies or what have you, if they could do that 24 seven and sustain their life, a lot
00:05:41.120 | of people would be happier and would enjoy that. But on the flip side for a lot of us, just like
00:05:46.880 | me for the gym, you know, sometimes you have to put in that work. If you want to accomplish
00:05:51.920 | something that you think is good to me, I'm actually very focused on people living within
00:05:56.560 | their means versus creating, you know, frameworks that require them to work harder to make more
00:06:03.440 | money to live within the means that they think they need to live in. Like, I don't think you
00:06:07.840 | need a BMW. I don't think you need a six bedroom house. And I think that is where that conversation
00:06:14.160 | gets interesting. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think it is something that can be taught,
00:06:20.160 | but I don't think it's something that can be taught in this scenario. I've gotten better
00:06:24.880 | at basketball. Even the last year I put in more work. I'm not an NBA player. So I think there is
00:06:30.800 | a level of DNA that caps out everyone in every genre, but I think the capacity to get better in
00:06:37.360 | everything is quite high. Like I can't sing for a lick. I have a feeling if I got a voice coach
00:06:43.840 | and really put in the work and like worked on it for a decade, like I think I would be better at
00:06:48.640 | karaoke than I am now. And so that's interesting to me, the things you can control versus the
00:06:53.520 | things that you can't. So I'm guessing you don't want to sing, which is why you haven't done that,
00:06:57.680 | but you did want to, you did want to build. So I have a new song out with Snoop. Everyone go
00:07:01.920 | check out. This is not a joke. Go check out on Spotify. Please take a step back.
00:07:05.520 | Snoop Dogg and Gary Vee. 17 year old me is still freaking the fuck out.