Key takeaways
- Young people are working ten hours or more a day to get ahead.
- Working for the sake of work amounts to living life with a surface-only approach.
- People need meaning, value, and purpose in life.
- Take the time to find a job that feels more like play than work so you can enjoy where life takes you.
Back in 1975, there was a really popular song called Do the Hustle. I bet you know this song because it uses the same words over and over again: “Do the hustle.” I remembered this song when I saw this article in The New York Times about why young people are pretending to love work.
According to the article, young people are working from six o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night. They worked really hard to get their degrees and when they got out of school, they realized that everything isn’t going to get handed to them in the real world. Once this realization hit, they went in the reverse direction and said, “Well, I’m just going to work my butt off. I’m going to work harder than ever and I’m even going to go and beg some billionaires for jobs. I’ll do everything I can just so I can make it.”
This amounts to a very surface-only approach to life, kind of like that popular song from the seventies. It just has the same words over and over. These are not great lyrics. Actually, there aren’t any lyrics at all. Basically, if you’re working like this, the lyric of your life is saying, “I’m going to do the hustle really hard and make money.”
If you’re in doubt, go ask people in GenX or the Baby Boomers where that goes because it doesn’t go anywhere good. In fact, it leads to all sorts of problems. I know it’s going to sound strange, but you might go back to how you thought originally when you first got out of school—when the world looked brand new and you felt like you could do anything. The point is you still can do anything.
If you go back to that state of mind, here’s what happens: You’re doing the hustle, then you realize it just isn’t working. Then you ask yourself, “What does work?” What works is MVP, which is Meaning, Value, and Purpose. And life involves a lot of elimination—eliminating one thing after another. When you find out that one type of job doesn’t cut it, you find one that involves the kinds of things that really do move you to action.
You don’t work from 6:00am to 9:00pm. You work regular hours. Or, if you do end up working long hours, it’s not really work. It’s play. In fact, one of my team members reminded me that when she started 21 years ago, the first thing I said to her after the interview was, “Now it’s time to play.”
I’ve always viewed life in this way: play, have fun, enjoy. Don’t hustle. Don’t bustle. Don’t do things simply because it seems like the quickest, fastest way to make a buck and to get where you need to go. That’s not a fun journey at all and it doesn’t make sense. Although the song is fun, has a nice beat, and you can do a nice little dance to it, it’s not life.
Life is about MVP, ultimately, and I know all of us want to have that. You can too, but you really do have to put in the work to figure out how to do it. Figure out what that job is and where that career’s going to be so you can hustle the way you want. That way you get to move in the direction you want to go—one that fulfills your vision for your life. Until next time, enjoy.
Gary
