Growing up, I was taught that being ambitious meant hustling. In my mind, hustling became synonymous to working hard. Ambitious meant you wanted to achieve big goals and accomplish big things. So therefore, if I truly wanted to achieve all the goals I’ve set for myself, hustling was the only way to make that happen.
This became part of my work ethic, my ethos about how I filled my time and treated my task list. My identity was tied to both of these things. I was a hard worker, a hustler. I was ambitious.
So when I first learned about anti-hustling, I was resistant. How could I be both ambitious and anti-hustle? If I want to work hard, I have to hustle—but that’s a “bad” thing? Is working towards something “bad?” Does that mean I can’t or shouldn’t work hard?
I wanted to believe this new anti-hustle life, but I couldn’t comprehend how to separate ambition from hustle culture. I want to work hard and I have these big dreams, how else am I supposed to achieve them?
If we were to draw a distinction around the difference between working hard and hustle culture, it comes down to: Why are you doing this? Where is this coming from?
Hustle culture is based on the idea that you have to meet external expectations of productivity in order to be worthy of love, money, safety and happiness.
Anti-hustle says you’re already worthy of those things, so your desire and drive is coming from within.
The conflation of ambition and hustling is a super common misunderstanding. There’s a difference between the cultural idea of “hustle culture” which is damaging our writing process, and the verb of “hustle” meaning to work hard. When we talk about being anti-hustle, we’re not equating that with “laziness” or the opposite of being ambitious. It’s not simply “don’t work hard.”
It’s: How can you work hard and sustainably? How are you also incorporating rest into your life?
Because we firmly believe we could all be resting more.
Still, that doesn’t mean that working hard isn’t aligned with anti-hustle. Sure, for some of our clients who are burnt out and working themselves into the ground, we do recommend not working quite as hard—but let’s untangle what that looks like with personal examples from us.
After Rachel graduated from college, she worked for a successful startup that sold into the corporate world. She started as one of three employees but as the company started making money, her payment structure became directly tied to how well the company performed financially. If the company surpassed certain financial goals, her salary was raised in proportion.
For her, the harder she worked for the company was directly tied to how much money she made.
And at 21 years old—that had a huge impact on her sense of self.
I started in the nonprofit sector, which has a different measurement—instead of trying to make money you’re trying to make the world a better place—but it shares the same toxicity. I felt that I had to give up myself for the cause or else I was being selfish. I was only worthy when I was making the lives of other people or the planet better.
So when we started Golden May, these were the mentalities we brought in with us.
We believed that the harder we worked, the more money we’d make, and the more valuable that made us to society. We believed this because this ideology was successful in the past. But eventually, reality crashed around us.
In 2022, Rachel realized she had been burnt out for years. In order to heal she had to peel back all the layers of hustle culture to reveal her real motivations and drive. Through this, she realized being a hard worker was a core part of her identity, and an aspect that she liked about herself.
It wasn’t that she had negative attachments to being a hard worker—but the behaviors that resulted from it were unhealthy.
She experimented with what she needed to let go of in order to heal and rebuild her attachment to her work. Now, after years of conscious effort, she doesn’t believe her value comes from her identity of being a hard worker.
In the same way working hard isn’t intrinsically tied to hustle culture, neither is choosing to push yourself for an ambitious goal. This fall, my publisher requested me to complete a developmental revision of my first draft in three weeks, and a line edit in one week.
And I did it. I did it, I didn’t hate it—and I didn’t burn out.
But let’s talk about why I did it. This was an absurd request that I could have said no to and asked for an extension, and I gave myself the permission to do that. But then I thought: what if I could do it? Was it possible for me to revise a novel in three weeks? I had no idea. So my decision to try came from a place of curiosity and self-love, but I also gave myself guidelines because I knew this push would be tough on me and my family.
If I felt I wasn’t giving the book justice, I’d take an extension. If I stopped having fun, I’d take an extension. If my husband was struggling or my daughter got sick, I’d ask for an extension. These were the things I was not willing to sacrifice for my publisher, and I truly believed in them. I knew I was trying to achieve this goal for myself, not because I was too anxious to upset my publisher or agent.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to push yourself to meet an ambitious goal, but it’s important that you know who you’re really doing it for. The reason behind why you have those goals matter. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t reach a deadline, you’re not a piece of shit if you need more time.
One of the challenges people encounter with upholding hustle culture is you’re working so hard and feeling unhappy without an end date in mind.
Because even if you reach one goal, often your expectation for yourself moves. For my revisions, I had an end date I was sprinting towards. I wasn’t going to work at that pace forever. Embracing anti-hustle culture helps us look at our goals differently, by changing the perspective of what we’re working towards.
Because what should come after a huge push towards a goal?
Rest.
This is usually where burnout stems from. We complete one goal and then immediately keep progressing without any recuperation. This was a miscalculation I did as well! I gave up on seeing friends and spending as much time with my family for weeks, and I told myself that I would let myself rest for one week.
Know what happened? Immediately after I turned in revisions, I got sick after a family visit. So my “one week of rest” turned into weeks of being sick, and by the end I didn’t feel rested. So I decided that I will rest until I feel rested. We always need more rest than we think we do.
People subscribing to hustle culture think they can cheat the process to achieve results, and while it may work for a little bit, it’s only going to hurt your writing in the long run. It’s not sustainable.
Rachel has 10 book ideas within the Shadows Syndicate world, and she wants to do them all in the next three to five years. That’s ambitious! She has a big goal, but instead of driving herself to the brink of burnout to make this happen, she’s only living one day at a time. As she wrote in an Instagram post: you have to believe in the micro that showing up each writing session will accomplish things. We will see progress on the macro level, but only if we have that day to day trust that showing up will get us there.
Just remember: you’re allowed to want things. You’re allowed to have big, big dreams for yourself and for your books. You can still achieve all those things and be anti-hustle.
xo,
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