‘Hustling’ to Get What You Want
One of my new favorite voices in blogging and social media is Gary Vaynerchuk. If you’ve never seen any of his videos, here are three that every blogger should watch (1, 2, 3). Interestingly enough, he’s a passionate speaker who consistently restates something both very true and very obvious, yet very ignored: success with blogging, social media and online entrepreneurship is all about ‘hustle’, in other words, hard work, persistence and most importantly, sacrifice.
The point that inspired this post was made at 12mins 15secs in Gary’s recent Web 2.0 Keynote in NYC, where he suggested that an online entrepreneur who wanted to be successful should be prepared to work on their business from 7pm to 2am every night. The audience laughed as if he’d made a joke, but Gary’s face was a picture of seriousness. “It’s not going to happen if you do it any other way!” he said emphatically. Of course, the hours between 6pm and 7pm could be designated ‘family time’ in this fictional schedule. But that’s still 1 hour family time, 7 hours work time (15 if you count the day-job). That’s also five hours sleep every night if you have to get up at 7, and assuming you don’t need any wind-down time before stumbling from the computer to bed. I know whenever I tried this I had emails dancing before my eyes.
To me, and probably to you, the idea of working on your business that much sounds crazy. But it’s an approach that allowed Gary to build a 50 million dollar wine business and organize appearances on shows like Ellen and Conan O’Brien. I’m not suggesting that we all follow his example, but rather, that the size of what you achieve is usually comparable to what you sacrifice (temporarily or permanently) to achieve it.
And that’s the justification: that a crazy schedule like that is just a temporary period of hard work/hustle/sacrifice in order to reach a glorious future time where you are doing something you love and making a fortune. And it’s true–very few people can achieve that kind of success online without a period of sacrifice where some other things (health, friendships, relationships, study, day-job) lose out a little. As much as we try to outline strategies and formulas for success, often the single difference between a successful blogger or online entrepreneur and one who hasn’t met his or her goals is numerical: a comparative measurement of hours clocked doing hard, grinding work and building momentum.
When we see someone, like a Yaro Starak, who is working 10 hours a week to earn $10,000 a month, there’s a tendency to assume that person is naturally someone who has always had an angelic work-life balance. Yet, you’d struggle to find someone in that position who hadn’t spend the months or years preceding the launch of the business sleeping too little and working too much. Behind every ‘laptop on the beach’ scenario is an incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice.
Blogging is a more poignant example than online business because I don’t believe there’s ever a point where you can coast along writing three posts a week and grow at an incredible rate (though I wanted to believe there was!) When you’ve written your content for the week, you need to be making connections with people, responding to comments, tweaking your ads, updating Twitter, building your brand and putting yourself and your content everywhere. There’s no tipping point where your workload dries up and you only need to kick-back and reap the rewards. The bigger your blog becomes the more opportunities, communiques and requests for your time you’ll receive.
Based on my own experience and what I’ve observed in others, if you want your blog to be growing at the maximum possible rate, you probably need to be spending about 20 hours a week on it. If that sounds scary, think of it like this: a whole lot of people spend 20 hours a week watching TV, playing piano or shooting aliens on the computer screen. The obvious progression from that point is that you should give those things up and spend the time blogging if you really want to succeed (as Gary puts it, “stop watching f-ing LOST”). But here’s the rub: a whole lot of people spend 20 hours a week doing those things because they love doing them. If I didn’t like spending time with friends and family so much, Skelliewag would probably be updated ten times a week. But I do, and I can’t help it, and it’s not. It’s no coincidence that when I was spending 20 hours a week on the blog and willing to make those sacrifices, it coincided with the time when the blog grew most rapidly. When I started to devote more time to new projects, the blog’s growth began to slow. Funnily enough, it works through the same principle — I sacrificed the blog’s rate of growth to have success elsewhere because securing a career I loved became more important.
What I’m getting at in this post is that if you want to become a big name in blogging or online business you’ll need to make sacrifices–hopefully temporary, but very possibly long-term. This sounds a little depressing, but it’s not. It’s no different to the author who has to scale back to part-time work to finish the novel she’s always wanted to write, or the aspiring young footballer who practices juggling the ball for hours while his friends sit sprawled in-front of a Playstation 3. You can have a bit of it all, but you can’t have all of it all. You’ll drop some balls, you’ll let some people down, you’ll forget some things and break some promises, all despite your best intentions. If you were perfect, you’d be a millionaire philanthropist Zen master already, right?
If you want to take your blog/business/brand as far as it will go, you need to commit yourself fully. If it’s truly a high priority, you’ll make the necessary sacrifices. If you like the idea in theory but aren’t willing to ‘hustle’ to get there, you should feel no shame about realigning your goals to match your true priorities.
