215. Hustle Smarter - Balancing Action with Wisdom

Are you blindly hustling? Or is wisdom informing your action?

I got a very quick lesson and a powerful one many years ago when I was coaching my kid's soccer team, specifically my daughter's team. We were coaching some five year olds and four year olds on soccer, or football as it's known to the rest of the world.

And what I saw is there were two basic categories of coaches. All of the coaches were parents who wanted to help kids. That was the same across the board. So that was great. They were willing to dedicate their time. Great people. Giving people. Wonderful. But there were two sort of styles. One was the person who didn't know the sport very well.

And when the kids were in a game situation, and they weren't doing too well, the person would just say, Go! Run! Hustle, hustle, hustle, go, work harder, try harder, push. And then there was another group of parents, who were coaches, who had played the game, perhaps for years, or knew the game, and they were giving specific instructions.

Go, move to the open space, look the person who's open upfield, move to the corner, be square from the person, whatever it might be. And so, there was wisdom in play. Now, if you have hustle without wisdom, you're going to just simply run around a lot, you're going to work really hard. Sometimes, you will get results, and those results will seem to reinforce the idea that you should just keep hustling.

And then sometimes, you're not going to get results. And if you listen to people who are uninformed in your profession, they'll just say, well, that's just part of it. Sometimes you just kind of throw energy around and nothing comes back. And there is some truth to that. For example, if you make calls or you do appointments with people, you might find that, okay, not everybody that does a strategy session or a sales call with me turns into a sale.

But if, for example, in 2023, you're still making cold calls to 100 to 200 to 300 people a day, as opposed to first sorting that data or having some sort of data gathering process or some sort of wisdom behind it, then you really are just blindly hustling in most situations.

Blind hustle looks very exhausting.

It looks tiring. It's often glorified by a somewhat macho, machismo male thing of, well, I can handle the hustle and I can do it and I'm just going to keep hustling, hustling, hustling. And actually, there's usually a deeper voice that goes with it. There's big muscles and I know I'm kind of making fun of it.

You might say, well, Wade, you don't have big muscles. That's why you're making fun of it. Life doesn't need to be that hard, and if you look at the world situation, some of us are already in a very favorable position. place to start with. So I'm all for work. And in certain parts of the world, you might be listening to this, you might say, wait, I'm in a part of the world where I have to hustle to survive.

Okay. But how much better are things when your hustle is informed?

And so informed hustle, can make a big difference if you can guide your activities. If you can figure out what's that most important activity or activities is getting results for you. Now, before we get to informed hustle, which is of course where we want to go, let's pause for a moment at what a lot of people seem to think is the opposite of blind hustle.

And in some ways it is, and that is informed or wise inaction. That's the person that perhaps knows what to do, and yet is either unmotivated, unwilling, scared to fail, afraid of not being as successful as they thought they could be, and so they have the wisdom, they have the Maybe the degree, they have the credentials, they have the experience, and yet people say, well, gosh, this person has all the experience, why aren't they doing something with it?

And some people will rightfully say, no, that person needs to learn how to hustle. So, again, this is not an indictment or a criticism of hustle, it's saying hustle by itself isn't that great, the same way that the most intelligent person on a subject who takes no action about it, chances are not a whole heck of a lot is going to happen.

Certainly there are times when it is good to be wise in our decisions, and to be prudent, and to think a little bit before we act, but outright inaction is not going to take us very far. If we can,

we want our hustle to be informed by wisdom. This is where research comes in. This is where learning from mentors comes in.

This is where combining new information and new insights from other people with what we've already learned to create a more evolved game plan, a more evolved strategy.

This is not to say you give up your intuition, your gut, your wisdom. I would never tell you to do that. What I would say is take what you learn from other people.

Take it with a grain of salt, especially if there's money involved, because some people that are selling stuff do just make stuff up and they've not created the success that they're telling you they've created. So it's understandable how some people say, Wade, you know what? I don't want to learn from the gurus and these people.

I'm just going to figure it out. And yet, if you do enough research, most of the people, that have lots of reviews that suggest that they've done a positive job. Let's say on a place like Amazon where it's really hard to fake that many reviews, you might still not like their style. You might say, well, this person is a mentor and their sales style is too aggressive or too abrasive, or this person's too passive, but usually somewhere in there, there's going to be some wisdom, some insights, some processes you can take with you.

So

Rather than you figuring things out from scratch, that you can inform your hustle. and make the most out of it. Overall, we want to make sure that if we're putting efforts out, that we're getting results. It's not brilliant to hustle without wisdom, to just bang our head against a wall until we make a hole in it.

There's nothing enlightened about that. There's nothing brave about that. There's nothing more valuable about you cutting my lawn with a pair of scissors instead of a lawnmower. That's going to make me pay you more. And yet we need the action. We need to make sure there is drive and passion and hustle.

We can take the time, inform ourselves, and make sure we're getting the most from that and then note as we go that certain things that if it feels like we're hitting our head against the wall, that maybe we examine those.

So I hope you find this helpful. It's a topic that to a certain degree, It seems obvious when we look at it, but I encourage you as an action step on this, just to

Look at the things in your life that are not flowing.

Things that you've tried where it really does feel like you are beating your head against a wall. And I invite you to simply consider. Have you informed your hustle? Have you done research? So there are certain things that will take a long period of time to get results. If you want to be a successful YouTuber, artist, entrepreneur, anything, it's going to take a while to get results.

And yet, if you're doing things in a way that is completely uninformed and completely unorthodox, and there's no evidence to show that it works, then you might just be working really hard and five years from now, you still might not get the result. So just because Johnny or Susie put in five years on YouTube before their YouTube blew up doesn't mean that you putting in five years is necessarily going to make your YouTube blow up and be awesome.

They might be doing different things. There's nuance. There's things that might be working for them that aren't working for you. So, if you're going to put in the time to do the hustle, make sure you put in the time to do the research. I hope this serves you. As always, I look forward to helping you impact more people and make more money in less time.

Do what you do best so you can fully enjoy your family, your friends, your freedom, and your life. Thanks for listening.