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Your business isn’t just your business. It’s your baby. No matter how great the potential rewards, financial or otherwise, no one starts a business unless they love the work. And to make your enterprise a success, you might feel as if you have to constantly be hustling. You might feel as if every moment away from the hustle is a moment of neglect of your business.
The reality, however, is that hustle culture can be extremely detrimental to you, your employees, and your company, particularly when you are just starting out. Indeed, rather than promoting your business’s success, hustle culture may well block your endeavor from ever reaching its full potential.
The Risk of Burnout
Starting a business is no mean feat. It can draw from you a wealth of resources, physical, emotional, and psychological, that you never knew you possessed. However, it is precisely
because the demands of launching a business are so substantial, multivalent, and unrelenting that self-care is equally as important.
If you don’t take routine breaks away from the hustle and give yourself time to rest, recharge, and recenter, you will become exhausted, and it will likely happen sooner rather than later.
And you are not the only one who will suffer from the effects of failing to practice self-care. So, too, will your team. As the founder and owner of your business, you are also the visionary and the role model. If you do not model self-care, and if you don’t encourage and facilitate it in your employees, their performance will suffer, attrition will be a constant threat, and, consequently, your business company’s growth will be stifled.
All Things to All People
When you are starting a business, hustle culture can make you feel as if you have to have your thumb in every pie or else you are derelict in your duty. In truth, however, the all-purpose expert is a myth. There will be aspects of running your business that you simply do not excel in.
And that’s okay. Indeed, it’s an asset, provided that you can relinquish the drive for complete control and learn to delegate. For instance, your talents on the creative side of your business may be second-to-none, but your accounting acumen may be lacking.
Hustle culture may insist that you do it yourself anyway, but a wise ship captain knows how to select the most talented and trusted shipmates. Bringing on board a specialist with a degree in accounting or finance will free you up to leverage your unique talents to optimal effect, while also ensuring that these key facets of your business are in the best possible hands.
Dreaming Big
It takes a special kind of person to start a business. Entrepreneurs are, by nature, dreamers. Unfortunately, though, the stereotypes inherent to hustle culture can put a damper on these dreams because they can suggest that launching a successful business is impossible if you don’t have “the hustle,” big money, and big connections.
But your business doesn’t have to wait until you’ve found the key to the mint. Successful businesses can, and often are, born of modest means. It is possible to start a thriving business on little money.
From housesitting to blogging to selling your artwork or handicrafts online, the opportunities are out there. You don’t have to be a hustler sitting on a pile of money or incessantly chasing the almighty dollar to start a business. All you need is to be passionate, committed, and strategic.
The Takeaway
Hustle culture has received a lot of hype in the business world in recent years, but it can be highly detrimental when you are starting a business. Hustle culture can increase the risk of burnout, foster a destructive desire for control, or even dissuade would-be entrepreneurs from ever leaping into business ownership.