I have a bit of a controversial thought to share: Hustling isn't a good thing. Allow me to explain why I say that. Hustling is all about working harder than everyone else and doing everything imaginable to get the job or gig or project or whatever. It's about sacrificing everything else on the altar of getting ahead. Hustling is what the "starving artist" mindset is all about, and you all know that I despise that mindset. Yes, as creative entrepreneurs, we do absolutely need to work hard. But working hard ALL THE TIME -- aka hustling -- is the opposite of helpful. Frankly, I hate hustling. Our best creative ideas come to us when we're allowing our mind the freedom to rest and be still. Creativity doesn't thrive when you're stressed and tired and frazzled and ... well ... starving. Yes, work hard, but work hard with balance and calm and intention. Work smarter, not harder. Today, we’re going to discuss how you can say no to the hustle.

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Hello, and welcome to episode 31 of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I’m your host, actor and creative entrepreneurship coach Jennifer Jill Araya, and I am so very glad you’re here with me today.

Before we dive into my takedown of hustle culture, I want to make sure you know that the summer cohort of my Taming the Muse Group Workshop is getting underway super soon, on July 19, 2023, just over a week after this episode is airing. I am so excited about working with this fabulous group of creatives! The Taming the Muse Group Workshop is focused on helping artists figure out what they need from their business, learning how they can build a business that fulfills them holistically – personally, creatively, financially – and giving them the strategy and the support they need to make that uniquely fulfilling business a reality. Every time I work through this curriculum with a new group of creatives, I am blown away by the results. I cannot wait for this next session to get underway. A couple spots are still available in this summer session, so it’s not too late to register. You can find all of the details on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. 

And if, by contrast, if you’re listening to this episode way in the future and this summer cohort of the Taming the Muse Group Workshop is long past, then I still encourage you to check out my website. It will always be kept up to date with the latest events, seminars, workshops, and courses I have available. Who knows, exactly the resource you’ve been looking for might be available for you there!

Now that we’ve got that little announcement tidbit out of the way, it’s time to turn to the main topic of today’s episode: saying no to the hustle. Our modern world sometimes seems consumed by the mentality of the hustle culture, the push to work all the time and forego everything in the pursuit of success. The push to hustle is everywhere.

One of the business coaches I follow recently sent out a link to a YouTube video that he suggested we watch. In the first 30 seconds of the video, viewers were told that we need to "work harder," that "to get ahead you have to hustle," and that you should "maximize every second." I could barely watch 30 seconds of this video before it made me so angry that I had turn it off and then open up my podcast episode notes to start writing my preliminary thoughts for this episode in reaction to it. (And no, I'm not going to link the video in the show notes. It's not worth watching.)

After I cooled off a bit, I wanted to doublecheck my reaction. I know that there are plenty of ways that I still need to work on my own mindset, after all, and I thought maybe my reaction was out of proportion. I talked to a friend about it, and her reaction was much more muted. She told me that she didn’t have a negative view of hustling, like I did. Maybe it was time to check my instinctive reaction and grow in my understanding. Is hustling really as bad as I thought it was? Or is the zeitgeist right, and hustling is actually good?

So, I started where I often start when I’m trying to learn more about something: the dictionary. If you’ve been around this podcast long, you know that my primary creative work is as an audiobook narrator, and in audiobooks, the exact definitions of words matter. Merriam-Webster is your friend!

According to Merriam-Webster, to hustle means “to crowd or push roughly, to convey forcibly or hurriedly, to urge forward precipitately, to obtain by energetic energy, to sell something by energetic and especially underhanded activity, to sell or promote energetically and aggressively.”

I don’t know about you, but of the descriptors included in that very long definition, the only one I even remotely relate to is “energetic.” I am ok thinking of my creative work as energetic. Energy, if used well, can be a very good thing. The other descriptors? “Roughly, forcibly, hurriedly, precipitately, underhanded, aggressively.” Not so much. I don’t want my creative work or my creative business to be characterized by any of those things. I’d even go so far as to say that I want my creative work and my creative business to be characterized by the opposite of those things. Nothing about the definition of hustle in any way relates to what I want for myself or my creative process. So, from my first look into what hustling means, my initial reaction was confirmed. Hard pass!

I then thought maybe I should look up articles about hustling in your work and in your business. Maybe hustling in business has different cultural connotations than it does just from the dictionary definition. When I searched for “hustling in work,” the top results were pretty conclusively against hustling. “What Hustle Culture Is and 5 Ways to Prevent It.” “Hustle Culture: The Toxic Impact on Mental Health.” “Why Hustle Culture can do more harm than good.”

Within a work context, the hustle culture refers to an overall mindset that prioritizes work over everything else in your life. Hustling doesn’t leave time for downtime or personal time or relationship time – no time for anything other than work. Hustle culture doesn’t take breaks, doesn’t sleep, and never stops. Hustling tells you that you must maximize every second of every day, and that you don’t stop when you’re tired; you stop when you’re done. One of the articles I read about hustle culture (and this one was actually an article in favor of hustling) actually stated, “Who needs free time when you’re building a successful business?” And no, I’m not going to link that article, because it doesn’t have anything good to stay.

Essentially, hustle culture within the workplace environment values humans for what they can produce and for their ability to work and complete tasks, rather than for their humanity. Again, there is nothing in that mindset that I want to give any place in my creative life. Yes, my art is a representation of the very best of me, and I pour my heart and soul into my creative work, but the art that I create is not the sum total of who and what I am. I am so much more than my work. I am a mother, a friend, a wife, a daughter. I am an ever-evolving human being who can’t be pinned down and defined by the single label of what I do for work, even though I am deeply passionate about what I do for work. I am an artist in the deepest level of my soul, but that is not all that I am. I am an artist, but I am also more than an artist.

The same is true for you. Your creative work springs out of the very deepest truths of who you are, but your art does not define you. You are so much more than what you create. You have value as a human being that goes far beyond your single role as an artist. You are more.

Hustle culture seeks to define you by your work and only your work. My response is that every human contains multitudes, and I refuse to be defined by only one facet of who I am. I say no to the hustle.

In all of my searching about what hustling and hustle culture are, I found only one thing that I could agree with: hustle culture tells us that we should work hard. Yes, as creative entrepreneurs, we do need to work hard. In fact, I work much harder right now, as an artist business owner, than I ever did during the few years when I worked in an office for someone else. Working hard is absolutely a necessity to have a thriving creative business. But it’s the nature of how you do that hard work that I take issue with. Hustle culture says we need to work hard ALL. THE. TIME. And that if something isn’t working, then you just push harder and dig in deeper. You hustle.

That kind of working harder and harder and harder is the opposite of helpful. No one can be truly creative and innovative under that kind of pressure. Creativity requires space and time for deep thought work, time for your mind to wander and dream up the incredible ideas that make your art unique and wonderful. You can’t “do all the things” and also have time for deep, soul-searching creativity. Yes, you need to work if you want to build a thriving creative business, but you don’t just need to work harder. You need to work smarter.

How do you do that? How do you reject the screams coming from the culture around us that we need to “Hustle! Hustle! Hustle!”?

The first step, as is often true of the problems facing creative entrepreneurs, is a mindset shift. The way you seek something is the way you will experience it. In other words, the attitude you use as you seek to build and grow your business will continue throughout the life of your business. The way you seek your thriving, fulfilling creative business is the way you will define it. I know a lot of creatives feel like they have to hustle during the early stages of their artistic careers, that they have to push harder and harder and harder to get their businesses off the ground. But if you start your business with hustle, you will continue to experience your business with hustle. If you want to one day have a thriving business characterized by ease and joy and contentment, you need to cultivate a mindset characterized by those things now, while you’re building that business.

Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” If you repeatedly push yourself harder and harder and harder, that hustle becomes who you are. But you are so much more than that. Choose a mindset that says no to continually working harder, that recognizes that doing “more” isn’t always the answer. Choose a mindset that works smarter, not just harder.

The next step to moving past the societal drive to hustle is to let go of the not-working guilt. I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about. I know all this stuff and I still deal with it more often than I’d like to admit. The not-working guilt is that guilty, sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you have time away from work that there’s something you forgot to do, some vital task that remains undone that’s going to come back and bite you, that any time you have away from work is somehow wasted because you’re not using that time to be productive. Not-working guilt can be so insidious!

A 2017 study by two employment research firms, to me, really highlights the cultural pervasiveness of not-working guilt. The study looked to quantify the productivity of remote employees as compared to in-person employees. The remote employees were found to be exceptionally productive, but despite that high level of productivity, 62% of the remote workers surveyed feared being seen as lazy by their colleagues and felt guilty about working from home. Even though the remote employees had a better work-life balance and were more productive, the pressure of hustle culture wouldn’t let them actually relax.

Now, I fully recognize that this study was done before the pandemic, and attitudes about remote vs. in-person work have definitely changed since then. But I think the study results do quantify, in some small way, just how hard it is to reject the hustle culture message that we should be working all the time. Those remote employees were more productive and yet still felt guilty.

What helps me personally let go of that guilt is to remind myself that time away from work is actually good for the quality of my work. Yes, that time away from work is good and beneficial for a whole host of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with my work and instead have everything to do with my contentment and well-being as a human, but those not-work-related reasons don’t help me get rid of work-based guilt! So, I focus on the work reasons I have to take time off.

According to a 2022 report from the American Psychological Association, workplace stress actually leads to “reduced efficacy and exhaustion.” When I’m overly stressed about my work and the state of my business, I become less efficient in my work. One of my friends and narrator colleagues, Shaina Summerville, recently shared a post on her Facebook page that speaks exactly to this phenomenon. "If you don't pick a day to relax your body will pick it for you. If you try to organize and be productive with every minute of your day, eventually, your body will pull the rug out from under you in a dramatic fashion ... So rest now. And work on making sure the people around you know it's OK to rest." Thanks, Shaina, for sharing those words of wisdom.

In short, resting and taking time away from work is necessary if you want to do good work. Anything that helps me reduce my work-related stress increases my efficiency and actually allows me to become more productive.

I know from experience that I am not able to be my creative best when I am stressed and overworked and juggling a bajillion projects all at once. Creativity requires space and energy, and if my energy is completely consumed by all the things I have to get done, I don’t have any energy to create.

Time away from work is good for your work! The kinds of activities that are most refreshing for you will be unique to you. The kinds of things that refresh me the most are lovely morning runs through my neighborhood, a leisurely afternoon biking along the wooded bike trail not far from my house, a hike through a nature preserve, cooking a delicious dinner with my husband, and evenings spent with my family playing games or putting together puzzles.

What activities help you to let go of the stress of work? What activities, for you, push the “refresh” button on your creativity? What activities, when you engage in them, help you to approach your work and your personal life with renewed energy and vitality? What things do you do that help you be both a better artist and a better person?

Your refreshing activities may resemble mine or may look nothing like mine, but whatever those activities are, prioritize them. When you allow yourself the freedom and time to engage in those things, you will return to your work a better artist. You’ll have new ideas to approach your problems and roadblocks. You’ll have fresh eyes to innovate and experiment. Your time away will do wonders for your soul, and it will make you better able to do your creative work with excellence.

When you feel that not-working guilt creep in, put your mindset foot down! Acknowledge that this is a harmful myth and that it’s not true. Remind yourself that time away from work is good for you and good for your work. Let go of that guilt.

Once you’ve made those two mindset shifts, once you’ve committed to pursue your creative business with the same ease and joy with which you want to experience your business, and once you’ve committed to letting go of any not-working guilt, it’s time to look at your strategy. Remember, I said the key is not to work harder, but to work smarter, and working smarter is all about having a workable strategy.

It is a simple fact that you can’t do everything and be your best creative self. And yet, as creative entrepreneurs, we have a lot of tasks on our plate! Owning your own artistic business is a lot of work, and sometimes it feels like the work never stops. If we want to get rid of the grind, we have to prioritize, in our tasks and in our daily schedule.

In terms of your tasks, as Greg McKeown says in his book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” the key is to choose the vital few over the trivial many. There are lots of tasks before you on a daily basis. Rather than just diving in willy-nilly, take a moment to rank those tasks in terms of how urgent they are – how desperately they need your attention right away – and how important they are – how much of an impact they will have once completed. And every day, focus on the things that are both important and urgent. Do first the things that both need your attention right away and that will have a significant positive impact on your work when you complete them. Those are the tasks that are your priority. The rest simply don't matter as much, and frankly, a lot of it, you can probably let go of and not do, and it won’t make much of a difference. Choose the vital few over the trivial many.

And when it comes to determining how to spend your time each workday, setting that daily schedule for yourself, again, prioritize the things that really matter. The first thing to schedule, the item of utmost importance, is always the time you need for your creative tasks. Creative work is deep work that requires longer stretches of time. It’s hard to be truly creative and innovative in 15 minute segments scattered haphazardly throughout your day. It’s a lot easier to be truly creative when you give yourself an hour or two or more to sink into your artistic task. Schedule those blocks of creative time first, as your highest priority.

Once those blocks are set, then set blocks of time when you can batch together those pesky administrative tasks that are the bane of every creative’s existence: sending invoices, paying bills, updating your website, writing newsletter or website copy, project management, customer correspondence, etc etc etc. The exact types of administrative tasks you have will vary based on what exact creative industry you are part of, but what I can say with certainty is that you have them. Set aside time every other week, or every week, or every day – whatever cadence works best for you – to get those things done.

I set aside between 30-45 minutes at the end of every workday to take care of emails and the little daily urgent tasks. I save anything bigger than that for Friday afternoons, when I do my planning for the coming week, and I handle financial tasks like invoicing, paying bills, and balancing my checkbooks twice a month, or every other week. I’ve figured out over time and lots of trial and error that this is the cadence that works best for me. What works for you may look similar, or it may look nothing like it. But whatever routine for completing those administrative tasks works best for you, settle into it and stick to it.  

When you know that you have a plan for taking care of the many tasks that pile up in your business, while simultaneously giving you the time you need to do your creative work, the peace of mind that results will allow you to do that creative work with ease and serenity. Your mind can let go of the administrative tasks, resting assured that you’ve prioritized appropriately and that you have a plan for getting the tasks done that need to get done. In the meantime, you can be free and create. You can do that deep work, and you can be your creative best.

More than just prioritizing your tasks and your work schedule, prioritize you. In your life, work is not your priority. Your well-being is your priority. The relationships with those you love is your priority. Doing what you need to do personally to be a fulfilled human being who is also an excellent artist is your priority. You come first. Rather than working hard, choose to work smarter. Do your artistic work with balance and calm and intention. Say no to the hustle.

Thank you so much for being with me today for this look at how we, as creative entrepreneurs, can reject the “work harder” mentality that the hustle culture tells us is a necessity. I hope this conversation gave you some food for thought and maybe a few practical action steps to make positive change in your work and in your life. If you have any questions about this or any of the other topics I’ve discussed here on the Starving Artist No More podcast, please reach out to me. You can contact me via my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, which is also where you can get all the information you need about how to work with me further. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, I would so appreciate any ratings and reviews, and of course, don’t forget to subscribe so you’re notified anytime there’s a new episode available. If you have a friend or colleague who you think would benefit from today’s episode, please pass it along to them. Sharing is caring! And as always, a huge shout of gratitude goes out to my husband, Arturo Araya, who does all the back-end audio engineering magic for this podcast to make sure I sound my best.

The culture around us may tell us that hustling is necessary, but that isn’t the truth. You can build your business with joy and ease and contentment, which will allow you to experience your business in that way. You can let go of the not-working guilt and prioritize the activities that allow you to feel refreshed and renewed. You can prioritize your tasks, focusing on the vital few and letting go of the trivial many, and you can establish a daily schedule that prioritizes your deep creative work while also setting aside time for those admin tasks that have to get done. You can work smarter, not harder, prioritizing yourself and your well-being. You can say no to the hustle. I can’t wait to see what you create.