The poisonous antidote to success — the hustle culture
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (On Work)
To be in love with your work and to find your purpose is among the greatest gifts that life can give you. The purpose is what drives you, what makes you go the extra mile, it is what generates your flow, and it can make you consumed and submerged. “Find a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”. But is it really that simple?
80 hours per week? Make it a 100!
Elon Musk in 2018 tweeted: “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” referring to the Tesla employees who worked 100 hours per week. He also said that he exclusively slept in his office when he had a project to finish and that you would achieve twice the tasks that someone who works 50 hours would if you worked 100 hours per week, with pain level increasing exponentially after 80 hours. You can even work 130 hours per week, if “you are strategic about when you sleep, when you shower and how often you go to the bathroom”.
WeWork promoted the idea that you shouldn’t stop when you’re tired, you should stop when you’re done. The famous entrepreneurial influencer Gary Vaynerchuk bombards you with the exaltation of pushing, overworking, and having high aspirations and ambitions. Hustling has become a lifestyle with the notion that only work can give you the sense of worthiness and purpose. You must be at 100%, all the time, to succeed.
And it’s not just Gary. You open up LinkedIn and you get besieged with lurking posts about continuous achievements, constant grinding, never-ending cycle of pushing. Your ex-co-worker has just finished the zillionth course this month. The friend who works 15 hours a day was promoted for the second time this year. LinkedIn has become the Instagram of work and business life: you only see success stories, zero failures, and perfect careers (For some real examples of people obsessed with hustle culture on LinkedIn, click here). New Year’s resolutions are full of goals that will take you forever to accomplish. I even saw a job ad with a main requirement “to be a hustler”. Everything became a mindless competition, unsustainable on the long run and it seems impossible to come out of it a winner. You either give up, start asking yourself what’s wrong with you, feeling guilty that you are not working that hard or you fake it until you make it.
Breaks are for lazy people. Or are they?
The hustle culture is a way of thinking, a mentality that is quite common and not at all new. It is the glorification of working harder, of doing your job zealously, often after working hours, it’s the complete dedication to your work, while neglecting the other aspects of your life. Never taking a break, never unwinding, always connected, continuously busy. Work-life balance is non-existent in this scenario.
If you find it hard to disconnect, if you don’t take vacation days, if you feel guilty for every unanswered email received after working hours, if you check your email constantly even when you’re on the beach with your family or friends, if you only feel worthy when you achieved something or accomplished your goals, if you haven’t dedicated any time to your hobbies or your family activities because of your work, you might be a victim to hustle culture. And it should not be praised, even if you are doing something that you love, in a company that gives you a sense of belonging, or in a position that gives you purpose.
According to a study done by Deloitte, over 40% of employees feel exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed, experiencing fatigue and mental health issues. You can find extremely horrifying stories about people losing their health due to hustle culture and regaining their lives after an unpleasantly learned lesson.
Hustle harder, earn millions. Hustle harder, it’s a shame to enjoy your spare time. Hustle harder and see you on the top with the rest of the sleep-deprived hustlers.
This constant mindset cycle with zero or little reward can put your body in a fight-or-flight mode. No rest, no downtime, only burnout to look forward to.
It’s easy to get addicted to hustle culture, with accomplishment of the small milestones like a dope dose that will ephemerally give you the sense of pride, energising and motivating you to push further but it’s a plain lie that if you work double as much as your co-workers, you’ll accomplish twice as much. Research shows that productivity actually declines after 55 hours per week.
Sometimes the workload has peaks and requires staying overtime to respect the deadlines. But this should not be something that happens on a regular basis. It is unsustainable to expect that everybody will be at their peak productivity every day, 16 hours per day, seven days a week, without suffering from burnout. Do we see people as expendable resources on the short run, or partnerships on the long run?
The poisonously destructive mentality of grinding
Promoting hustling as a go-to way of working is extremely toxic. I’ve heard all sorts of stories: employees being publicly praised and celebrated for not taking any days off. Ever. Or employees being denigrated for not being team players, because they were not willing to stay every day 5, 6, 7 hours overtime without extra pay.
Astonishingly enough, toxic culture can make your employees 10.4 times more likely to leave the company, in comparison to compensation. Nurturing a hustle culture can reduce employees’ morale, can make them competitive, not trusting each other, which can lead to anxiety, stress and depression. It can negatively influence the company’s brand and it can lead to turnover. So, is it really worth it?
Furthermore, ironically, it’s proven that people who take breaks are better at processing information, remembering, being creative and, generally speaking, are more productive than their hustler counterparts. Having downtime and allowing your brain to relax is not being lazy, it’s being responsible.
Quiet quitting is one of the passive responses, alternative to resigning, to hustle culture, employees who are not disengaged, but are not actively engaged either, who will not go the extra mile, who will not raise their hand during meetings, who will not take on extra work, will just do their job from 9 to 5, completing the tasks they were hired to do. Too much pushing and putting pressure on people can reduce them to being “clockwatchers”, less psychologically invested in their job, decreasing their organisational citizenship. “Go hard or go home” motto turns into “go hard and potentially lose interest in your job”.
If you are an employer the attitude of pressing your people to make more money on a long term will make you lose money. Your employees will either leave your company, succumb to burnout, become alienated, have physical or mental effects due to the constant stress or become less invested in the job and be less productive.
How to create the right balance?
Taking a vacation should not be optional for the employees. Of course, planning when to take it is one thing, but praising employees for not taking it should never happen.
Managers should lead by example. It’s only obvious that if you as a manager never take any vacation days, constantly work even when you’re sick that your employees will not feel comfortable to unwind and take a break.
Promote a culture that emphasises the importance of occasionally disconnecting from work as a way of becoming even more productive and focused.
Create an environment in which people can tell you honestly if the workload is overwhelming and make them feel appreciated and seen. Don’t allow your people to quietly quit, talk to them and actively listen.
Instead of having exit interviews, to learn from your mistakes after it’s a little late, do “stay interviews” and show interest in encouraging and empowering.
A career is rarely just a way to get paid, it has meaning and a purpose. But it’s not the only thing that matters in our lives. It’s all about balance. As Stephen King suggests: “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around”.
Work is indeed love made visible. But constantly overworking yourself will only make you hate it.
