I Called It Hustle

I built something good and gave it a bad name.

Back in 2017 I made a practice for myself. One hour, once a week, broken into seven timed moves. Five minutes clearing my head onto paper. Seven reaching out to one person. Twenty-five creating something for my own business instead of producing for a client. Eight setting one big thing in motion. Then a few minutes each to unstick something, promote somebody else, and write a note by hand.

It worked. It still works. It is the single most useful hour in my week, and I have handed it to more clients than any other thing I own.

I called it the Hustle Habit.

Why that word, of all of them

I have been trying to be honest with myself about why I reached for it, and I think it is this: hustle was the only word available that made the pace sound like a choice.

I was tired in a way I did not want to examine. I was saying yes to things that made sense on paper and keeping a speed everyone around me seemed to be keeping. Calling it hustle turned all of that into a virtue. It let exhaustion sound like ambition, and it let me say it out loud at a conference without anyone asking whether I was all right.

That is what I would want you to hear if you have a word like this. It probably is not dishonest. It is doing a job. It is letting you describe something you could not otherwise justify, to other people and mostly to yourself.

What was actually wrong with it

Here is the part that took me longest to see. The problem was never the hour. The hour was always good. The problem was the story the name told about the hour.

Hustle Habit implied the hour was something you squeezed in. One more thing, wedged between the client work and the invoicing, powered by will. Something you would eventually be too disciplined to need.

But the whole design says the opposite. Twenty-five of the sixty minutes go to creating in your own business. That is not squeezing anything in. That is the most protected block of the week, defended on purpose, because the work that grows a business almost never announces itself as urgent.

The name argued against the thing it was naming. For years I did not notice, because I was too busy being proud of it.

Retiring a word

So this week the practice became the Business Hour. Plainer, and accurate. It is an hour. It is for the business. There is no heroism in the title, which is right, because there is no heroism in the hour. You set a timer and you do seven ordinary things.

Changing the name meant admitting something in public: that I spent years recommending a word I have since come to think is doing harm. Not enormous harm. But it is one of those words that makes tired people feel that being tired is the point, and I do not want anything with my name on it doing that.

I kept every single one of the seven moves. I changed four letters on the cover.

Your word

You probably have one. A word you use for a pace, or a season, or a way of working that you have not looked at closely in a while. Grinding. Slammed. Crazy busy. Fine, said quickly.

You do not have to give it up today. But it is worth asking what it is translating for you, and whether the thing underneath it is as good as the practice underneath mine turned out to be. Sometimes the answer is that the work is sound and only the story needs retiring.

That is the cheapest fix in the world, by the way. I did not have to change what I do on Monday morning. I only had to stop calling it something that made the exhaustion sound like ambition.