Choose Wisely Before You Hustle
You don’t always get out what you put in.
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Hustle is a requirement of success, but it is not sufficient. Every person I know that has a normal life hustles on some level because even maintaining a normal middle-class life is a lot of work. I know people who drive trucks all night and come home just to work on landscaping businesses. I know people who spend 60+ hours per week driving for Uber. I know teachers who are stuck in a government payment system, but who put in just as much work as any CEO.
If you take the same level of effort and put that person into a lucrative job, Voila! They make more money. Now, I say all this not to belittle professions that make less money. I only say it to remind people that if more money is your goal, there are multiple conditions that must be satisfied.
Know the costs
Sometimes we hustle incredibly hard on an idea or an opportunity without taking in the costs associated with doing that thing, instead of something else.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” Abraham Lincoln
The same thing applies to our careers. The thinking of scarcity would lead you to believe that you have to start right away because you only have six hours. That first job, that first available choice, that’s the forced invisible hand of poverty or scarcity thinking that we often succumb to. There really are only six hours sometimes, but not always. Sometimes there’s more freedom of choice and it’s about being honest with yourself.
Pick your direction
Hustle always has to have a direction, and you have to pick that direction. If you hustle on something you don’t want, or in a non-lucrative direction, you’re going to cash out exactly what is innate to the opportunity you chose to work on.
Hustle is a taking force. It seeks out opportunities as it’s objects and tries to get something out of them. That’s why choosing such opportunities is so important.
Adopt opportunity realism
Opportunities have value innate to them. Let’s call it the Total Opportunity Value. (TOV) This is an analogous concept to TAM, SAM, and SOM which businesses use to model their market potential. That is, the opportunity has a certain amount of value you can capture and/or participate in.
This is highly critical to think about because you don’t get out what you put into an opportunity, as the cliche claims. If you take full advantage of an opportunity, you get out what the opportunity has to give you in the first place.
Invest Wisely
If you are seeking to maximize your money, you should think about your life like an investor. Where you put your time, what you choose to work on, who you choose to associate with, all have certain levels of utility.
Too often, we think of it in terms of obligation instead of in terms of choice. We say, “I have to take this job. I have to prove myself to this company. I have to put everything of myself into this opportunity.” The wealthiest of the world don’t think that way, one, because they have freedom, but two, because it’s non-optimal.
If you start to think about what in the world is worth to you. Then you start to see things in a different light. You start to negotiate. You start to make the world you want to live in.
Make the most of the time you have by choosing your direction in life. Don’t be trapped or bogged down by the conditions that the world seems to impose. Find bigger and better opportunities by judging opportunities for what they are, not what you hope or want them to be. Find yourself and what you want. It’s okay to take a step back and change direction.
