Hustlin: A Non Hustler's guide to faking it till you make it!

No Urban Dictionary definitions for you this time cos let’s face it if you don’t know what hustling means or what a hustler is? You’ve been living under a rock and yall still using phrases like ‘work hard’ instead of Rick Ross’ fantastic offering to English vocabulary ‘hustlin’.

Hustlin is working hard at multiple aspects of your life to achieve your goals- monetary, financial, career, passion, academic etc. etc. Traditionally hustling is used to describe working as hard as you can and beyond that to get that paper!!!

But I think in modern context and particularly for ‘millennials’ hustlin has a general meaning of simply working hard at several aspects or one aspect of your life in particular to get yourself where you want to be. It could be trying to get into shape whilst juggling a heavy work schedule amongst other commitments, pursuing your passions whilst studying and helping out at home. It also in a lesser sense means working hard yet not being 110% perfect at everything, hustler’s are always continually working to better their game, higher productivity, better concentration, new skills and knowledge etc. etc.

I’m going to be real and say I’ve just in my opinion entered this whole hustlin world as I’ve recently acquired a job (my first job ever, fanfare rings all across unemployment land) , literally a week before uni started back up again for the second half of the year. So beforehand I was simply just doing uni and life in general i.e. finally having a regular and consistent exercise regime!! and trying to make this blog into my own idea of ‘successful’. Now I’m trying to get back into the swing of things with my exercise regime as I went on a one month hiatus due to the cold weather, accustom to my workplace whilst also adjusting to not only working but also doing uni, whilst still doing other things that I struggled to have time for before the job anyway.

I may be rambling but to all the ‘pro-hustlers’, the ‘long timers’, the ladies and fellas doing the hard yards- snaps to yall and exuberant African style shouting and exclamations!!! Yall are troopers, the real deal, don’t know how you do it and some of yall be looking beat and all snatched up compared to us with nothing to do.

I ain’t forgetting all my fellow sisters and brother’s travelling this road for the first time and feeling like failure at every corner but we keep getting up and trying cos we’re all trying to use the time we have to the best of our ability.

Word to the wise, Oprah is like the fountain or google of wisdom for me and she had Steve Harvey on her Lifeclass show to talk about his life experiences and his book ‘Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success’ .  Steve Harvey said there are 5 questions to understanding whether or not you have a lid on your dream, as in are you indirectly stopping yourself from achieving your dream. The questions are…

1. Am I excited about waking up in the morning?
2. Am I sitting around all day bored out of my mind?
3. Do I have time to do everything that anyone asks me to do?
4. Do I have time to watch all of my scheduled television programs and not miss an episode?
5. Do I believe I can achieve my dreams by myself?

In a way hustlers are fighting every day to getter closer to their dream or dreams because I believe and we all know it you can have more than 1 dream and in many forms. If you’re truly a hustler, I’m assuming the answers to the above question would be yes, no, no, no, no.

I’m not a hustler myself so feel free to give suggestions/tips on how to be more motivated and driven however I think there are some sure fire rules that most people follow.

1.     What are my goals?

2.     How can I get there?

3.     What can I do to better myself whilst I work towards that goal?

Let’s keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits because you truly never know what tomorrow holds. 

Static Silence Deafens Me

This is probably going to be the most confused, nonsensical, laissez-faire post I’ll have ever written but it’s going to reflect my state of mind for the last 6 months. This post for any living soul out there who regularly reads my posts will kind of explain my absence and just general lack of material.

 I hate that I keep comparing everything back to high school but that’s all I’m sure of compared to the present day. So in high school I was the type of person who was very sure of themselves, knew who they were and what defined them, understood my attributes and how they manifested in reality and where I stood in the world of high school. Now I feel like all that knowledge I had before is completely gone because I’m now in a new environment and I haven’t come full circle in terms of adjustment, self-awareness and feeling comfortable enough to truly immerse myself in life and have experiences. I’m finding that all this confusion and lack of answers is what I term as static silence- there’s no noise or that voice that’s always reassuring and edging you on, reminding you of who you are and why you’re going after something.

I find that having all this silence in your head sort of interferes with your ability to create goals and plans because you have nothing to mentally sound board ideas from .It kind of becomes like you have all these ideas or thoughts but you have nothing to attach it or base it on. You think well can I achieve this- am I capable? What makes me think I’m capable of for example having a blog and making it into what I deem successful? Currently I deem myself as just a wandering somebody with no direction, no tangible vision and no immediate drive.

Having a sense of no direction, goals or well thought out plans makes me feel like I have no potential left because I feel like I have nothing going for me and I’m not creating an environment for me to have something to chase after. A friend of mine helped me realise I’m telling myself a version of the truth I want to hear and not reality or the real truth. The real truth is if you don’t have any goals or solid plans you will feel like you have no potential to achieve anything when really it’s simply undiscovered and not non-existent. 

So the consequences or manifestations of this confusion and all the emotional and psychological stress is it somewhat leaves you feeling paralysed from fear and lack of strength to push yourself to the limits of self-awareness and discovery hence the deafening sensation. You’re trying to stay alert and survive but nothing comes in, sinks in and stays there.

The consequence of all this for the blog is that feeling mentally exhausted leaves you with no energy to experience life and from those experiences are where inspiration for material comes from. With no material there are no blog posts and hence there being nothing on this blog for the past 5 months or so. Other consequences are sort of going back to basics of a shell with no fillings as in hobbies or drive.

There’s no use constantly discussing things with no action. I know to get myself back to a good place where I feel comfortable and aware of myself I have to literally throw myself into life and continually try/ attempt to try to push myself out of my comfort zone.

So I’ve decided to sign up for dance classes, do something about drama/acting which has always been a big part of me and my identity I guess, a new FFF challenge however this time it’s 3S’s ( which I’ll talk about in another post after this one ) , continue to work on my fitness and just continue to push through it all, work on myself and just push through all the uncomfortable and hard questions because at the end of it all if you’re not better or stronger what was even the point?

I’m not sure if this at all made sense but I felt like writing down exactly what’s going on so I can continue to make more sense of it and perhaps someone out there gets this or has experienced something similar before.

Comment below on ways/things that helped you find yourself again and how you motivated yourself.