Do the Hustle and Thrive
November 12th, 2008 Posted in Betsy MacKinnon, Humor, Other Interesting Sites
I was just reading Mark Cuban’s blog and he has some sage-like advice. He’s made a ton of money, dedicated to speaking his mind and ticking people off. Plus he’s smart. So I take note.
His latest piece on the economy resonated me like tin drum. He gives a broad list of scary facts about the U.S. economy (and I won’t go into it but just say, you should read it)– the end result is… with respect to the economy, no one knows squat. No one knows where it’s going: up, down, sideways. And these are the experts, the pundits, the people in charge. With mounting stress, your average U.S. citizen that holds a job, pays into a 401K, saves for their kids college and holds a mortgage is like a deer in the headlights. We are at an economic psycho-social paralytic standstill. What do we do?
We all need to find our inner Hustler. We need to start doin’ the Hustle.
Before you click off, think about it. The real definition of a “Hustler” is less 70’s Pimp, Disco and dirty magazines and more about attitude. So where one might see visions of Starsky and Hutches’ friend (and Snoop Dogg Doppelgänger) Huggy Bear, I see the people, and more importantly, personalities that will not only survive life’s rotten episodes but thrive. Classic examples? Rhett Butler AND Scarlett O’Hara, The Wright Brothers, The Greatest Generation (who survived Depression AND won WWII AND brought the atomic age…,) Oprah, Post-WWII Japan, Martin Luther King, Estée Lauder, Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela,Thomas Edison, James Bond,The Founding Fathers, MacGyver, Tina Turner, Madonna, and the list goes on and on…
The one thing all these people (real or fictional) had is that they refused to be hindered. Their progress (professional, personal, economic, political) was not going to be halted by anything. Not the economy. Not politics. Not tragedy. They looked at the issue from the perspective of “there is success to be made and the path to it might be different than expected.” So they got creative, they rewrote the rules, they re-invented themselves/their company/their country, and they SOUGHT OUT NEW WAYS of doing things. The new opportunity is always out there, you just have to seek it.
So how does this apply to you? We are in tough and uncertain times, no arguments there. It is time for you to tap your inner “Hustler” and “hustle” for new ways to do business. Your business. New products and services that can affect your company’s bottom line by either saving you money or helping you make money faster or (even better) DO BOTH. The old way of doing things is exactly what everyone else is doing, and that doesn’t make it right, it only means you’ll all be (sinking) in the same boat. Seth Godin, in his new book Tribes (read it if you haven’t yet) subscribes that playing it safe isn’t exactly safe. He believes the world is ever-changing and new rules apply. The Hustler learns how to play them. Or else get played.
And just because, under the you-know-you-thinking-about-it file:
I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work
This reminds me of a conversation I recently had with several associates, which centered on the book, “A Sense of Urgency” by John Kotter (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5938.html).
Kotter contends that despite our back-to-back meetings, exploding e-mail inbox, ever-longer working day and almost permanent jet lag, what so many of us really lack is a sense of urgency.
What most of us think of as urgency, as busy-ness, is not actually making things any better. This false urgency is stressful, exhausting and unproductive.
True urgency may sometimes involve moving fast. But the most important aspects of true urgency are relentlessness, steadiness and the purposeful pursuit of a goal while “continuously purging irrelevant activities to provide time for the important and to prevent burn-out,” says Kotter.
Put another way, this is about operating on a higher level — the “relentlessness, steadiness and the purposeful pursuit of a goal”.