Are You Hustling on the “Right” Things?

If you’re a hard worker, then you love the grind and stay hustling. You thrive on hustle. An afternoon of doing nothing might sound horrendous to you. You stay so busy you can barely keep track of all that you’re involved with, or maybe you excel in trying to keep track of all of it. This behavior is a part of your personality. It is who you are to some degree.

But do you ever get the feeling that your work life or daily schedule feels cluttered and unorganized? Amidst all the calculated, planned timing of things, there is an underlying chaos instead. You should feel alleviated and accomplished at the end of the day, but instead you feel rundown, and almost like you didn’t reach your goals for the day. This may be because you’re not working on the right things. You may not be “hustling” in the right areas to reach those accomplishment goals you have in your mind.

There is a quote I love so much, from Francis Chan, that “our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things that don’t really matter.” Think about that for a minute. Are we striving for accomplishment in things that ultimately don’t matter or that we don’t care about? Are you slaving away for a promotion that, if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t want? Are you spending hours in the campus library studying for a degree you don’t want to use?

The image I have in my mind is one from the movie, The Last Castle (good film). In the movie, the main character is General Eugene Irwin (played by Robert Redford) and the prison warden, Colonel Winter, is trying to make an example of him by breaking his resolve. He has Irwin move one huge pile of boulders from one side of the prison yard to the other, for no reason other than to make a point. It’s a defining moment in the film, as General Irwin defies the Colonel.

Yet, this scenario plays out in some of us time and time again. We work one job, get bored and become unchallenged, and decide its time for change. So we flip over to an ironically similar company, doing ironically similar things that bored us just years prior, only to be surprisingly bored and unchallenged again. Hence, moving rocks (for money at least) from one side of the yard to the other. This mentality needs to be given some further reflection, wouldn’t you agree?

Working hard is healthy. The “struggle” is good for us and develops our character, enhances our creativity, and gives us strength, but in many cases, all of this may actually lack what matters most. Purpose. Purpose is the fuel behind what we do. Purpose is what should wake us up in the morning and remind us of why we struggle and hustle in our work. When we lack that purpose and intentionality, we become mindless drones. Coin-operated (via paycheck) task-doers.

The importance of hustling on the “right” things is essential. Hard work devoted to something that keeps you unfulfilled is “succeeding at the wrong things”. We should feel accomplishment and achievement with our work. Anyone who says otherwise is incredibly wrong. But, we all should audit that work regularly and focus the intentionality of our work on those “right” areas. Don’t succeed in the areas that don’t matter.