Hustling

Let's be honest, it's a pretty dumb word steeped in now multiple eras of usage and meaning, but I have my own private definition that I want to explain because I do think it's a useful bucket to categorize things with, and a strategy to live life by. Originally - like, a century ago - we had the gangster sort of definition: a hustler was a con man or a swindler, they were running these tricks to separate chumps from their money.

And then in the internet era it came to mean 'a go-getter' and was a rally cry for working hard and going outside of the system to achieve your goals, which I personally really like.

...but then we're in a wave now where that exact attitude was co-opted by the Tai Lopez and Gary V types who made it sleazy again, and came to mean 'I dropship cheap Chinese crap at an immense markup on my Shopify site with Instagram ads because I bought a $5k course that taught me how' and whatever hashtag #freelancelife nonsense is popular at the time.

So you can see why I'm hesitant to use the word for my own uses. It carries baggage.

But here's my version anyway.

To hustle is to find some way of generating value seemingly out of thin air, by thinking about the problem in an unconventional way.

That paperclip-trading-to-a-house story guy is a hustler, right? because it does sound vaguely scammy. It does sound like it's too good to be true, and involved some sort of trickery and there's no such thing as a free lunch and so on, right?

Yeah, sure. I see it too.

Also, you know, each of those trades was with willing participants who got what they felt was a good deal for themselves out of it - because they wanted something he had more than something they had - and made the deal. Win-win, and the value "grew" from the arbitrage of individual preferences.

Normal people, non-hustler people, look at that as magic because all they see is a paperclip, which isn't worth very much, and a house, which is worth a lot, and then a bunch of wizardry in the middle. And that magic typically, truthfully, comes from some sort of scam or dishonesty or scheme wherein there are victims who are taken for their value by dark methods.

It almost never is some dark arts. As much as we all get scam emails every day, the truth is most things are not scams and most value is generated wholesomely and traded for honestly by both sides.

Another common example:

People who buy cars, drive them where they need to go, and then sell them for the same (or more!) money in the end instead of simply renting them at a price.

This is a fundamental paradigm of hustling: what are you actually trying to do or get, and how can you do / get it in some other way?

Transportation, as it turns out, is pretty easy to get in a variety of ways. Renting is the convenient expensive option, buying and selling is an inconvenient option that might be profitable.

There's lot of variables here to see if that's a good idea for you, but you can see where the shift is.

Sometimes you can't even rent a car: they might not let you drive across country or whatever. These can be problem solving methods for even doing a thing you're trying to do in a new way rather than simply saving money or whatever.

All that to say: I think hustling is a useful skill, and I think getting into the mode of "how can I do this" from a sort of first-principles stance instead of a "okay, I have to do <thing> because that's what people do" stance is wildly handy in day to day life.

It looks like magic, what it is is consideration.

But we can create and find value everywhere if we're willing to think and look for it.