Debunking the Hustle Myth

As a 6-figure business owner, there’s this mentality that in order to be successful you have to hustle and work long hours.

But I’m here to tell you that this isn’t true.

You don’t have to spend all this extra time and be stressed all the time trying to hustle to keep things rolling.

Today, we’re going to dive into where this hustle harder mentality comes from.

The Hustle Mentality

There’s this belief, especially in American culture, that the American dream is working hard to achieve your dreams. But working hard is a nebulous concept because we don’t actually know what working hard means.

So, we just attach a meaning to it because we were given this model that a workweek is 40 hours. We never really stopped to think is this really beneficial for us as entrepreneurs? Is it necessary to work 40 hours every week?

And on the other end of that, are we supposed to celebrate when we work double that? Why is that the goal?

As content creators, we started our businesses so that we could have more freedom in our life.

Freedom is how we spend our days. Making our own schedules. Working when we want to.

As 6-figure business owners, we get the hustle mentality from the corporate lifestyle and how many companies are set up across the United States, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to your business.

The Momentum in Your Business

As an entrepreneur, you have so much flexibility when it comes to your schedule and while this hustle mentality doesn’t need to be incorporated into your business, you do need to have momentum in your business.

To get things started, to keep them rolling, you need to have some fire under you.

But that doesn’t mean you need to be hustling. Hustling is going to burn you out.

Let’s think of your business in terms of the snowball effect.

When you start rolling a boulder up a hill, it’s hard. You want to stop. You have to take breaks, right?

But, during the process of rolling the boulder up a hill, you’re building your muscles and getting more strategic and thoughtful about how you roll the boulder.

The same goes for your business. When you start sharing your product or service and putting it out there, it’s hard but then you get more strategic about how you get more eyeballs on it, you start monetizing it, and more people see it.

Getting a Fresh Perspective

Now that you’ve spent so much time building up your business, it’s time to take a step back and get a fresh perspective on your business as a whole.

If you keep doing what you’re doing, what does the trajectory look like for your business? What’s going well? What’s not going as well? What are the things you want to stop doing and what are the things you want to start doing? What are you doing that could be hurting the growth of your business?

As a 6-figure business owner, you wear a lot of different hats and even if you have some support, you’re probably doing a majority of the work making it hard to take that step back but it’s so important so you don’t get stuck.

We can get stuck in this mentality of constantly moving forward, always continuing on, and pushing.

But when you push so hard, you’re digging deep ditches and you could be running yourself into a wall.

You don’t need to be hitting that wall.

Ask yourself:

How can we be better?
What are we doing well?

And once you’ve answered these questions, ask yourself what you can outsource.

Stepping Into the CEO Role

I think one of the biggest pitfalls of content creators is that there’s this fear around hiring and outsourcing.

I’ve been there.

I understand that it can be scary to spend the money on hiring/outsourcing. I understand that it can be scary to manage people.

But this is where you need to change your mindset. By stepping into that CEO role and stopping hustling all the time, you’re able to grow your business.

When you’re able to hand off pieces of your business to a team member, you can take a step back so you’re not constantly hustling and getting burnt out trying to push out all this content.

There are so many TikTokers and YouTubers that are cranking out three videos a day and are constantly trying to maintain this level of content and you know what? It’s not sustainable.

At some point, you need to pull yourself out of the ditch and see how you can be more strategic in your business and utilize your team so you can start seeing the growth you’ve been working towards.

Leverage Resources Strategically

You don’t need to be constantly hustling in order to be successful as a content creator. It’s not healthy and it’s not maintainable.

Instead, think strategically and leverage resources (we have tons at Kate Waldo + Co.!), step into that CEO role and really rethink the hustle because it’s not here forever.

Always cheering you on,

Kate

Creator of the Smarter Not Harder: 3-Day Workweeks for Millennial Entrepreneurs©  Program

Owner + Founder, Kate Waldo + Co. 

P.S. Curious how you can grow your 6-figure business while slashing your workweek in half? Click here to learn about the Smarter Not Harder© program!