Dangers of hustle culture

Have you ever heard the following quotes?

While you're sleeping, I'm working. - Gary Vee

If you're not putting in the work 18 hours a day, someone else is. - Gary Vee

Sleep is for people who are broke. - Grant Cardone

Don't waste time on things that don't make you money. - Dan Peña

These are some famous quotes said by internet personalities who openly talk about hard work and the hustle culture. These quotes are taken out of context and should NOT be taken as they are said in the blog post.

On surface level, these quotes sound true and authentic. But there is a silent agenda behind these loud and rude quotes. The word "rude" itself is a very lenient description for these horrible quotes.

I won't go deep into these personalities themselves but I am here to give you all a small perspective on how these people have built their businesses and created a name for themselves among people across the world.

There are countless other influencers or finfluencers who openly talk about hustling, hard work, grinding, 10X your life, discipline, motivation, top 1%, elite, mentorship, and sooooo many more.

Don't get me wrong. I work hard too. At times I remember staying up till 3am working on projects to earn money. Doing multiple gigs simultaneously. After I too once fell into this hustle culture. It is not all wrong after all.

But did you know there are different types of hard work?

Yes, you read that right, different types of hard work.

1. Borrowed Hard Work
2. Built Hard Work

These are two different types I came up with to explain my POV with you all.

Borrowed Hard Work

This is the kind of effort that doesn't come from within you, it is borrowed from every online guru, influencer, or grinding YouTube video that crosses your feed. You adopt their mantra. Waking up at 4 a.m, buy my "secret blueprint course", etc. It feels amazing at first, like you're part of something bigger, sharing your hustles for all to see. But because it isn't rooted in your own values or goals, it changes with the trends. One week you're all in on NFTs, the next you're buried into dropshipping tutorials. Then comes the KDP trend. The result is often burnout, frustration, and the nagging sense that you're running on a hamster wheel rather than moving forward.

At its core, Borrowed Hard Work is about chasing instant results-quick money, overnight success, shortcuts to wealth. The worst part is that you believe that there is some secret website or platform where you can list some products and sales will start coming.

Built Hard Work

This is the quiet work that is the result from your own ambitions and your core values. You are in love with the pain it brings you. It's boring, difficult and repetitive. Yet you do it everyday. You don't post your 2 a.m. coding session or your 1000th guitar practice on instagram or X, but you do it, day after day, because it matters to you. You know there is no immediate reward if any at all. You learn from every setback, and accumulate the small wins that compound into real expertise. It's less flashy, but far more sustainable and infinitely more fulfilling.

The best part about Built Hard Work is that it is the work YOU chose for yourself. This was solely your choice.

There is an ideology -

Sell the lifestyle, then offer the product as the path to get there.

Most famous protocol followed by these so called influencers. First they show you a lifestyle that includes flashy accessories, expensive cars, holidays, watches, mansions, etc. Then they hand you a "path" to reach all those things you probably never needed in the first place. And then they attack you by saying you don't work hard enough else you'd have it too just like them.

What they don't tell you is, they earned all of that by selling that pathway in the form of one-on-one consulting session worth $25,000

Yes, twenty five freaking thousand dollars.

I will not specifically name the person who does that but it's not rocket science to find who does it.

It is common sense. If these people know so much about business and brand building then why don't they use the same to build multi billion dollar empires for themselves? Why do they use these tactics to sell insanely expensive courses that only offer surface level knowledge?

The answer is very simple.

These people might be good businessmen but they reached the natural limit of their business and knew that the business of fear is the best business and selling their knowledge by creating a course once and reselling it on a mass scale is a hundred times more profitable than their original business.

It's like Andrew Tate selling the hustlers academy course after knowing that the kick boxing career isn't very feasible for the long term.

And who cares if you as their customer fails to replicate what they teach you? They can just blame you for not working hard enough to not succeed, or better even sell you a higher more exclusive deal. Something that include more buzz words like "inner circle" or "war room" or "circle of trust".

I talk about something similar in one of my previous blogs "The Upskilling Trap". It covers the dark side of upskilling trend that is going on in the world right now.

Solution

So what is the solution? Will you never be successful? Should you just stop working?

The answer is a little complicated but bear with me please. These influencers don't provide all false knowledge. Infact a lot of the free videos they post on their social media is true, just twisted to make you feel angry on yourself for not working hard.

In reality, people are just a little lost. They believe everything on the internet is true at the face value. News Flash, it's not. People manipulate you to get what they want from you. And you need to see through that BS. You need to learn the ability to see through it.

How do you learn this ability?

I found my answer for this question by watching videos of various influencers and noticing some pattern which is common among every single influencer. I already told you about this pattern, it is the business of creating fear among you. It gives off a same message in different words. And often the message is "do this or you'll regret", "you go through X because you didn't do Y", etc.

I noticed that it's often that these influencers isolate you against the entire world, as if the world is coming to get you and bring you down and ruin your life. And in order to win, you must follow their specific rules which are again behind a paywall.

Now I do realise not everyone is blessed enough to see through these games. But I am a programmer and I am often good at recognising patterns in the digital world. And somehow this ability helps me understand things in the real world as well.

You can build it too. Just like any other muscle in your body, this can also be trained by practice. Humans are very good at pattern recognition. It may be a dormant trait you have waiting to be activated.

I am not telling you to stop watching these people. I often play their videos, podcasts while I'm on my evening walk and I have a good mental laugh in seeing through their tactics to fool gullible people.

You can do the same, just DO NOT GIVE any money to them. Unless you have Fu*k you money to spend without worrying about going broke.