I mean it’s all relative, but if you’re reading this you have access to the internet, you most likely have electricity 24 hours per day (as an immigrant this still feels fantastic btw), clean water is plentiful, and you go through life feeling pretty safe for the most part. In contrast,
HOW THE OTHER HALF OF THE WORLD LIVES
For the rest of the world, things that you don’t even think about are daily pressing concerns. No access to clean water, kids dropping out of school at 12 years old to work to support the family, and this is provided you’re not unlucky enough to be among the 300 million or so people that live in a war zone.
So to about half of the world’s inhabitants, your life, even if you are not well off by Western standards, would look like downright freaking luxury.
MY TAKE ON THIS REALITY
We owe it to these folks not only to do something with all the opportunities we have, but to recognize our privileges (even if it’s tough with our individual lots in life), and hopefully be moved to help out where we can.
Peep https://www.kiva.org/ if you can, it’s legit, you can extend loans as small as $25 to folks in developing countries and help them with their hustles.
THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Comforts can kill your hustle. If there’s a dream you want to get out, being used to comfort will make small challenges seem insurmountable. On the other hand, if you’re living closer to the edge, small challenges seem like just that: Little blips on the radar that you’ll deal with as you encounter them.
Facts are, you will NEVER be in a space where you have
Enough time
Enough money
Enough knowledge
Enough support
The right relationships
Enough technical skills
or whatever else we tell ourselves to stop us from getting our dreams out. That perfect situation will never happen!
The time will NEVER be right.
And this isn’t some motivational b.s, it’s reality.
If you’re a new entrepreneur, chances are, you still have a full time job, you may be living paycheck to paycheck, you’ll be in relationships that need crazy time, you may have health problems…life is pretty much organized chaos.
And so be it.
The people that win are the people that scrape and hustle and bloody up their knees, despite this crazy chaos. Not the people that think business is going to be an extension of the basic comforts they enjoy. Or that it will be fun! The winners have a mindset that is more like the second half of the world for whom living is closer to survival than comfort.
OH ABOUT THAT FULL TIME JOB
I had one as well…my schedule used to look like this:
6:00 am: Wake up and work for 1 1/2 hours
8:00 am: Leave for work
12:00 pm: Work on my biz at lunch time
5:30 pm: Leave work and go to a coffee shop and work
12:00am: Leave the coffee shop and head home.
Saturdays and Sundays: 12 hours each per day.
Rinse and repeat. I was putting in 40 hours at work and more than 40 hours on the side hustle. There is time.
It got to the point that if I sat at the bar at the coffee shop (Bus Boys and Poets in Washington DC), no matter which bartender was at work, he or she knew to reach over and grab the extension cord to plug in my laptop. And that’s why I tip obscene amounts when I’m there. I literally built my company there and their staff looked out for me night after night.
ONE YEAR ‘S WORK IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR FREEDOM
So we’re talking a complete almost insane, slightly obsessive hustle that you have to maintain for about a year. It’s very hard to get into this mindset of having to wake up and take risks every single day if you’re comfortable. But if you can will yourself into that uncomfortable space, good things quite often happen.
Oh and after a year of that insane hustle, I quit that job. The image attached is the post I made on Facebook right after I quit what is hopefully the last non-hustle job I have.
Even now people ask me if I don’t sleep. I have plans and dreams and things that I still want to get out (looking at you Innclusive!!!).
Hopefully this explains my mindset a bit and why sometimes I lose patience with people that seem to just want everything to be so comfortable and perfect.
Or folks that ask questions like, “What’s the least amount of work I can do and still win?” or tell me how little time they have, or ask questions about “passive income”…childddddd please! All these get the Whitney Houston side-eye from me. (Recently got an influx of these type of questions that inspired me to post this here.)
Hustle peeps. The best you can. Growth doesn’t happen in comfortable spaces.
