i used to hate hustle culture i couldn't understand why anyone would want to work for 12
or more hours a day and i remember i was out with some friends and one of them asked me what job i
want in the future and i said to them it doesn't really matter what job i eventually end up with
i just want a job where i can work as few hours as possible so that i can have more free time
to enjoy my life and i want to be earning just enough money so that i can enjoy my hobbies
go out and do things but not be a slave to my job so that was eight years ago how did that turn out
well now i can quite easily work for 15 hours a day from the moment i wake up to the time i go
to bed at night in fact i want to do that i want to work all week even for the weekends because i
love what i do i love my job and i wouldn't have it any other way so what happened that
made me turn from hating hustle culture to loving hustle culture from wanting to work the absolute
minimum i can get away with to now wanting to work the absolute maximum i can get away with
and i'll explain more about what triggered that transition later on in the video but first it's
important that we understand what hustle culture is and why it's not for everyone and i feel as
this channel for more than four years was purely a study motivational channel that throughout
pretty much all of my videos i'm essentially promoting this idea of hustle culture i feel like
i should address this issue on my channel i have videos titled 8th grade students are hungry for
success just keep studying and be the hardest worker in the room so i personally have been
pushing this message of hustle culture throughout the entire channel because the number one issue
with the audience of my channel the number one reason why you're watching my videos is because my
viewers have problems with procrastination they're struggling to study and achieve strong grades as a
direct result of procrastination and so yes i do want my viewers to push through that feeling of
not wanting to study and just go and study and so my videos have been designed and created in
order to address the issue of procrastination now the reason why hustle culture is so controversial
is actually very very simple and it's about priorities and problems arise when
you prioritize your work or your studying higher than your happiness and higher than your health
that's when hustle culture becomes a problem so for example if you've been studying for 10
hours that day you're mentally and physically exhausted because you've only been getting two
or three hours of sleep a night and then you turn on youtube to get a bit more motivation to push
yourself that bit further and you watch one of my videos and you just keep going at the detriment
of your mental and physical health now that right there is the problem and it's also a major reason
why i transition from making purely motivation videos to talking head study advice type videos
exactly like this one because it's very difficult in a motivational video to explain that you need
to get enough sleep that you need to eat well that you need to manage your time well so you're
not getting too stressed it's very difficult to get that message across in the context of
a motivational video in every one of my recent study motivation videos i do have a message in
the description of each video explaining that happiness and health should be an absolute
priority over any studying but it's just difficult to incorporate that message into the video itself
and so as i said it's a big reason why i pivoted to these talking head study advice videos because
i can explain myself a lot more effectively i can elaborate and expand on things which my previous
study motivation videos just couldn't the message for my study motivation videos was basically
study harder and it's like well okay now what but now i can go over how you study harder how
you study smarter how you can avoid burnout how you can make your studying almost completely
stress-free i feel like most people are in two camps the camp that i used to be in where we
live for the weekends and work is just a necessary thing we have to do to survive and the second camp
where you're working all day every day because you love what you do you're passionate about
what you do and you get as much enjoyment from working as you do from hanging out with friends
or going to the bar for a drink so i'm sat firmly in the second camp where i love hustle culture
but i'm in that second camp because i want to be there and i really can't overemphasize that
the problems occur and this is why hustle culture is so controversial problems arise when someone is
in that second camp but they don't want to be there they're sucked into this idea of hustle
culture and working 14 15 16 hours a day but they don't want to and maybe they're working
at a prestigious investment banking firm and it's just expected of them to be working 16 hours a day
there's a huge difference between working 80 hours a week because you genuinely want to
and working 80 hours a week because you have to so just last week there was an article on
the bbc news reporting that first year bankers at investment bank goldman sachs are threatening to
quit because they are averaging 95 hours of work a week and sleep just five hours a night their
personal relationships also suffered as did their physical and mental health and that right there is
a textbook example of toxic productivity where the first-year bankers have been pressured into
working 95 hours a week but they don't want to and as a result it's having a massive detrimental
effect on their lives so they're in some ways being forced into this idea of hustle culture
so i think that we can all agree that work ethic is a foundational requirement for success if you
want to be successful then you need to work hard and you need to push yourself but how do you do
that without falling into this trap of toxic productivity and to answer that let's go back
eight years when at the time hustle culture to me was something i really didn't want to get involved
with and looking back at it now it's because i had at least in my opinion an unhealthy relationship
with work at the time my job was stacking shelves as a supermarket for eight hours a day and
for me there's only so much enjoyment i can get from putting items on a shelf ready for
the customer to buy it wasn't until i started my own business i started to work for myself
that i found passion in my work because i was then working for myself working on things that i wanted
to make working with things that i wanted to work on and i found my passion in business in having a
positive impact on people's lives at scale and suddenly work just stopped feeling like work
and as the saying goes choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life
so the idea of hustle culture i'll be honest with you for me personally i love it and i wouldn't
have it any other way but there are three main things that i need to keep in mind but also you
need to keep in mind too and firstly your mental and physical health should always be prioritized
over everything i think our health is something that as a society is often overlooked and we just
don't give it the respect it deserves whatever we want to achieve in life whether it's to achieve
huge success in whatever way you define the term success or whether it's just being the best mother
or father or the best son or daughter you can possibly be having our health is a fundamental
requirement in order to achieve anything in life so that should be your first priority the
second thing you need to keep in mind is that your happiness should be prioritized if you're working
12 hours a day but you hate your job and you're living for the weekends and you're just not happy
then what's the point a lot of people are trapped in this idea of hustle culture and they're working
like crazy but it's making them miserable and in that case i'd suggest finding work that you
actually want to do that you're passionate about because it really is important that if you're
spending eight nine ten hours every day doing it then you're going to want to enjoy it people say
you you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing and it's totally true and
the reason is uh is because it's so hard that if you don't any rational person would give up
it's really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time so if you don't love it
if you're not having fun doing it you don't really love it uh you're gonna give up and
thirdly this is really important the hustle culture is not for everyone and i personally
don't like having too much free time i need to be kept busy i need to be doing things to stay happy
but maybe you're not like that maybe you work a nine-to-five office job that pays the bills
and you don't actually mind your job and you can go home on an evening and spend time with your
family then you have saturday and sunday off where you can spend more time with your family
and go out with friends and pursue hobbies and if that's what makes you happy the more power to
you keep doing that and if you're a student and you don't like hustle culture and you
don't want to study hard then you need to learn how to study smart that's the absolute minimum
you should at least learn how to study smart unfortunately for you i made a video on how
i study less while learning more so how i study smarter not necessarily harder there are a lot
of more advanced study tips that i go through in that video to make your studying and the learning
process more efficient you can click on the video on the screen and i'll see you over there