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.