4 ms·
This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over.
by pjlegato 10y ago
This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over.
Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company.
What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." It's a perfectly circular definition.
Proposal: always avoid the word "hustle." Instead, talk about specific actions and decisions that led to success in particular cases.
- bbcbasic 10y agoMaybe Hustle is like a heuristic or genetic search. Trying random things picked up from other companies and mutating them and trying again until certain things seem to work based on metrics. Then doing more of those things.
- Retra 10y agoYou can sort a deck of cards by shuffling it if you have enough time.
- bbcbasic 10y agoYour not trying to sort though. You are trying to optimise.
- barrkel 10y agoHowever, if you move randomly around a discrete 3D space, you only have a ~34% of returning to your starting point, even if you keep moving forever. The more dimensions, the lower the chances that infinite randomness reaches any given point.
- jv22222 10y agoOP here. That is an excellent point and now you have essentially named the title one of one of my new blog posts: "What is Hustle?" It especially rings true because something we've tried hard to do over the years on TechZing is unpack miracle functions exactly like this.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoif it rings ESPECIALLY true, and you've been trying for YEARS to do things EXACTLY LIKE THIS, then it seems that TechZing does not hustle, does not know how to hustle, and thus doesn't have hustle required to unpack what it means to hustle.
- pjlegato 10y agoSounds good! I look forward to it.
- amasad 10y agoInteresting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.
- amasad 10y agoInteresting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.
- bsder 10y ago> Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company. And, also, survivor bias. Lots of companies hustled and hustled and died. Elon Musk is a really good example. At one point he couldn't meet cashflow--and then the government contract for SpaceX finally came in. 3 months of delay on that contract and Musk is a goat instead of a hero.
- hoodoof 10y agoYou make a good point. This blog post is a common line of messaging in the "how to succeed in startups" - "see what (hugely successful company X) did? That's what you should do, that's how you succeed!" Truth is that success comes from a somewhat magical mixture of timing, luck, spotting of opportunity, knowing how to build it, having the resources to build it, meeting just the right people at the right time who will play a role in that success, somehow making the product "slightly more right" instead of "slightly more wrong" and sometimes seeing some incredible new way of viewing the world that others don't. Like a magic spell it's a bit of all these ingredients put together in a recipe that, well, works. Then the bloggers and venture capitalists come along, timeline what you did and say "ha! there is the recipe for success!".
- prawn 10y agoHaven't heard "goat" used in that context before. In my circles, goat/GOAT would be read as "Greatest Of All Time".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- phonon 10y agohttp://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fro4.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fro4.htm
- prawn 10y ago"Before the final twist, Mack, who led all scorers with 30 points, looked as if he’d go from hero to goat in that split second when he fouled Brown, who led Pitt with 24 points. He admitted he was guilty of the infraction." Odd that the first example appears to be from a basketball write-up, which is exactly where I very frequently hear the term goat/GOAT used in the sense I described.
- thr0waway1239 10y agoI don't know if hustle is enough for success, but I don't think people simply mean "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." when they use the word. Even though the precise definition is hard to pin down, you can easily spot it during its absence. There are times when you wish to do something, and you avoid it because it just feels like you might be pushing it a bit. If you still did it anyway - what you did was hustle. In fact, I would say that if you reflect on your life and think of the times when you didn't take that invitation to an event, or that break to go on a vacation, or introduce yourself to a person who you liked, and then realized that the choice you made was too safe, and your choice (lack of hustle) didn't help you all that much long term anyway, you can see its absence quite plainly. Having said that, I also agree with you on one front. Instead of using the word hustle, if these articles gave an example, and then maybe made a point about why that is hustle, it would read much better.