Hustle Quotes

“Be not afraid of going slowly. Be afraid only of standing still."   ―CHINESE PROVERB”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Think Different was a slogan used by Apple in 1997.6 Part of the campaign included a commercial known as The Crazy Ones. The narration goes like this:   Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.   It’s easy to dismiss this campaign as grandiose, hyperbolic, and idealistic. But it’s not. Big changes are usually the result of a bunch of little changes strung together. That’s how big changes happen. Thinking differently doesn’t guarantee we’ll change the world, but it gives us a better chance. And any change we bring about could potentially sow the seeds of a bigger change in the future. Don’t trivialize your impact. Most of us don’t think beyond what we know, or what’s expected of us. It’s hard to think different. But if we train ourselves to do it, it starts to come naturally.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.” ―Rita Mae Brown”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“It’s no longer what you know, or who you know. It’s what you create.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Stop talking about creating something awesome. Instead, go and do it. Release it to the world. Didn’t go viral? Try again. You’ll get better. There is no silver bullet. Fear, inaction, and failing to try one more time are your biggest obstacles.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“at some point, your trip to the amusement park will end. And you’ll feel like an idiot if you spent the whole time complaining instead of enjoying the ride. Risk”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Surround yourself with people who support you, and deliberately disengage with people who doubt you. I don’t care if it’s your best friend, your mother, or your boss. If they’re constantly feeding you words of doubt―get away.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“You Have Two Options Easy and boring. Hard and exciting.   Which”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Jimmy Valvano was a legendary college basketball coach and broadcaster. In June of 1992, he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. In March of the following year, Jimmy gave a powerful speech at the first ever ESPY awards, presented by ESPN. His message was just as simple as it was moving: “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” Eight weeks later, he passed away. In his speech, he also said this:   To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears―could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.   And finally, this:   Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.   There is no other reason to be alive than to enjoy it. So laugh, think, cry. Work hard. Celebrate your victories. Embrace the day. And don’t ever give up.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Noah Kagan went to UC Berkeley and graduated with degrees in Business and Economics. He worked at Intel for a short stint, and then found himself at Facebook, as employee #30. You’d think this is where the story would get really good: Noah went on to become the head of product and is now worth 10 billion dollars! That’s not what happened. Instead, he was fired after eight months. Noah has been very public about this, and it’s well documented. He even wrote about why it happened, which mostly comes down to the fact that he was young and inexperienced. Here’s where the real story gets interesting. After being fired, Noah spent ten months at Mint, another successful startup. For Noah, that was a side-hustle. After Mint, he founded KickFlip, a payment provider for social games. He also started an ad company called Gambit. Both of those companies fluttered around for a while and then fizzled out. Next came AppSumo, a daily deals website for tech software. AppSumo has done very well, and it’s still in business as of this writing, but Noah eventually turned his attention to another opportunity. While building up his other businesses, he had become an expert at email marketing, and realized there was a huge need for effective marketing tools. So he created SumoMe, a software company that helps people and companies build their email lists. SumoMe has exploded since its launch. Over 200,000 sites now use it in some capacity, and that number is growing every day. It’s easy to imagine SumoMe becoming a $100 million dollar company in a matter of years, and it’s completely bootstrapped. The company has taken zero funding from venture capitalists. That means Noah can run the business exactly how he wants. I’ve known Noah for almost ten years. I met him when my first company was getting off the ground. Several months ago, we were emailing back and forth about promoting my first book. He ended one of the emails with, “Keep the hustle strong.” I smiled when I read that. Noah is, and always will be, a hustler. He’s been hustling for his entire career―for over a decade. And he deserves everything that’s coming his way. Hustle never comes without defeat. It never comes without detours and side-projects. But the best hustlers all know this simple truth: All that matters is that you keep on hustling.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“For pretty much my whole life, I thought I was living to better myself, to create the best life possible. About a year ago, that mindset changed. I now believe I’m here to create the best world possible. This shift from me to everyone is what altered my entire understanding of passion, and my purpose. Ben Horowitz is one of my digital mentors (meaning I follow his blog). I find him very insightful. Whenever he says (or writes about) anything, I inevitably start nodding my head until my neck is sore. Here’s an excerpt from the commencement speech he gave at Columbia, his alma mater: “Following your passion is a very me centered view of the world, and as you go through life, what you’ll find is that what you take out of the world over time—be it…money, cars, stuff, accolades—is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. That is the thing to follow." Most of the time, if you follow your contribution, it’s either already a passion, or likely to become one. Doing something you’re good at is intoxicating, as is contributing to the world. Writing and launching The Connection Algorithm was a full year of hard work. It was the result of countless hours of reflection, deeply philosophical thinking, and brutal honesty. Throughout the entire process, I felt driven, passionate, and motivated. At first, I thought this was because I was doing it on my own. But I’ve come to realize it was something else—something far more profound. Shortly after the book was released, I began receiving emails from people who had read the book and been deeply impacted by it. A highschooler in Miami. An entrepreneur in Amsterdam. A small business owner in the midwest. People were also leaving reviews on Amazon—people I didn’t know, saying the book helped them live a better life. And on my Kindle, I could see passages that people were highlighting. People weren’t just reading my book, they were taking notes on useful things to remember. The craft of writing has been unbelievably fulfilling for me. And so I’m continuing the pursuit. My motivation is no longer to make a buck, or “win at life.” Rather, I’m working to improve the world. I think of myself as an inventor, creating a new piece of art for the world to discover. When you make the world better, you get rewarded. So find your craft, and then determine the best contribution you can make with it.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Jan was born in a small town outside of Kiev, Ukraine. He was an only child. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction manager. When Koum was sixteen, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, mainly to escape the anti-semitic environment of their homeland. Unfortunately, Jan’s father never made the trip. He got stuck in the Ukraine, where he eventually died years later. His mother swept the floors of a grocery store to make ends meet, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer. They barely survived off her disability insurance. It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous childhood, but he made it through. After college, Jan applied to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He spent nine years building his skills at Yahoo, and then applied to work at Facebook. Unfortunately, he was rejected. In 2009, Jan bought an iPhone and realized there was an opportunity to build something on top of Apple’s burgeoning mobile platform. He began building an app that could send status updates between devices. It didn’t do very well at first, but then Apple released push notifications. All of the sudden, people started getting pinged when statuses were updated. And then people began pinging back and forth. Jan realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service. The app continued to grow, but Jan kept quiet. He didn’t care about headlines or marketing buzz. He just wanted to build something valuable, and do it well. By early 2011, his app had reached the top twenty in the U.S. app store. Two years later, in 2013, the app had 200 million users. And then it happened: In 2014, Jan’s company, WhatsApp, was acquired by Facebook―the company who had rejected him years earlier―for $19 billion. I’m not telling this story to insinuate that you should go build a billion-dollar company. The remarkable part of the story isn’t the payday, but the relentless hustle Jan demonstrated throughout his entire life. After surviving a tumultuous childhood, he practiced his craft and built iteratively. When had had a product that was working, he stayed quiet, which takes extreme discipline. More often than not, hustling isn’t fast or showy. Most of the time it’s slow and unglamorous―until it’s not. ”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“The next time you sit down to work, think about what you’re doing. Are you dedicating yourself to a craft? Are you grinding through it and honing your skills? Are you doing truly meaningful work? Hustling isn’t about winning or getting paid. It’s about living for your purpose.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Rich Roll is an inspiring guy. He’s a plant-based nutrition enthusiast, a #1 bestselling author, and according to Men’s Fitness magazine, one of the twenty five most fittest men in the world. One of Rich’s defining qualities is his dedication to dedication itself. He believes we live in a hack culture, where people seek to find the quickest, easiest route to success. And I agree. Hustling isn’t always about hacking. It’s just as much, if not more, about grinding. Here’s Rich:   So if you have a passion and aspire to greatness―if you want to see what you are truly made of, or just how far you can go and what you are truly capable of―forget the hack. Commit to the daily pressure that compels infinitesimal progress over time. Wake up before dawn and apply yourself in silent anonymity. Practice your craft―in whatever shape or form that may be―late into the evening with relentless rigor. Embrace the fear. Let go of perfection. Allow yourself to fail. Welcome the obstacles. Forget the results. Give yourself over to your passion with every fiber of who you are. And live out the rest of your days trying to do better.   I can’t promise that you will succeed in the way our culture inappropriately defines the term. But I can absolutely guarantee that you will become deeply acquainted with who you truly are. You will touch and exude passion. And discover what it means to be truly alive.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“One of the masters of trendspotting is Rohit Bhargava, author of Non-Obvious. He curates the biggest trends each year and packages them up into a book. Then he explains how people and businesses can take advantage of these trends to improve their position in the marketplace. Thinking deliberately about trends is a secret sauce for most successful hustlers, because it creates an unfair advantage. When Evan Spiegel built Snapchat, he was capitalizing on a trend. He saw people using Facebook and their phones to share photos, but noticed they felt inhibited by the fact that the images were either permanent, or public. By reversing those two elements―making image-sharing ephemeral and private, he solved a big problem. Snapchat exploded across the younger demographics and quickly became a multibillion-dollar business. Another example is Kik, a popular messaging app. When Kik launched, plenty of messaging services already existed. In fact, the ultimate messaging services seemed to be the ones already  built into everyone's phones. Apple had a messaging app, and so did Android. So, why reinvent the wheel? Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, had other ideas. Why? Because he had identified a trend. Consumers were clearly upset with the built-in messaging services. First, the telecom companies were charging per message sent and received, which was a horrible experience. It felt like classic, capitalistic highway robbery. Second―and this was a big problem for teens: You could only exchange messages by giving out your phone number. Livingston noticed that teens wanted to chat with other people they met online, but had no safe way of doing that without giving out their number. So he created Kik, which allows people to create a username instead. Kiksters can then share their username to start chatting, while keeping their digits private. But even better, messaging is unlimited, and completely free. By examining the trends happening in the messaging market, Livingston was able to build a product that rivaled the multi-billion dollar incumbents. Now his company is valued at over a billion.   ”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Hustling requires more than just a shift in mindset. That mindset needs to actually inform your actions. The leap from mindset to taking action is a big one. But the actions themselves don’t have to be big. You can start by making small adjustments, and slowly build up your skills. Eventually, you’ll notice yourself making decisions differently, prioritizing tasks differently, and spending your time differently. This chapter goes through the different habits and behaviors, large and small, that you should be cultivating as you wade deeper into hustling.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Today, there aren’t any doors. You don’t need permission from anyone. You just need an internet connection and a computer. Here’s the new paradigm: It’s no longer what you know, or who you know. It’s what you create. This fundamental shift has been brought on by technologies (mainly the internet) that have made it insanely easy to create all kinds of awesome stuff. Want to become a published author? Go for it. You don’t need a publisher. Just write your book and publish it on Amazon. I did this, and now I’m a bestselling author, selling more books than most authors would have dreamed of twenty years ago. Want to sell a product? Go for it. You don’t need a warehouse, or manufacturing equipment, or a storefront, or a bank to finance everything. Raise money on KickStarter, use Google to find a cheap manufacturer in China, and ship your product to customers all over the world on Amazon, or through your own ecommerce store. Want to learn how to start a company? You don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting an MBA. Take a course on Udemy. Or, join a startup accelerator program―and they’ll pay you. Here’s the thing. Even if you’re not doing this stuff, other hustlers are. The trend is happening whether you like it or not. When new resources become readily available, a sliver of society inevitably flocks to those resources and uses them to their advantage, often reaping astronomically high rewards in the process. The competitive advantage has shifted from connections to creations. Knowing important people is still important, but the means of meeting them has changed. The order is now reversed. You don’t connect and then create. You create and then connect.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“In The End of Jobs, Taylor Pearson calls this The Turkey Problem, inspired by a clever analogy found in Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan. Taleb writes: “Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.” Bye-bye Mr. Turkey. The turkey thinks he’s safe, until he realizes at the last minute that he’s not. We tend to believe that working at big corporations keeps us safe. But in reality, it’s the job of the HR department to make you feel that way, even if it’s not true. Every day you work at a large corporation, you’re building up silent risk. One day, you might realize you’re a turkey. Do you remember a company called Lehman Brothers? I know it’s a distant memory for some, but before 2008 it was the 4th largest investment bank in the United States. Then it went bankrupt. Bye-bye.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Why do some of us work hard and some of us sit on our asses all day? Dan Pink, a New York Times and Wallstreet Journal bestselling author, argues that there are three main motivators―and they’re not what you think. Money doesn’t make the list. In fact, money can be a demotivator. It turns out that once you get beyond work that only requires rudimentary cognitive skill, higher monetary rewards are inversely related to performance. Instead, emotion becomes the driving force. More specifically, Pink defines the three main motivators as autonomy, mastery, and purpose.2 This has been backed up by numerous scientific studies. Here’s one: “Psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer interviewed over 600 managers and found a shocking result. 95 percent of managers misunderstood what motivates employees. They thought what motivates employees was making money, getting raises and bonuses. In fact, after analyzing over 12,000 employee diary entries, they discovered that the number one work motivator was emotion, not financial incentive: It’s the feeling of making progress every day toward a meaningful goal.”3 Consider what this means. If you aren’t hardworking, maybe it’s not because you’re lazy, but because you hate what you’re working on! I believe there’s a hustler in all of us. It isn’t about your genetic makeup. It’s about your environment and the emotional state in which you’re operating. If you’re having trouble getting up in the morning and going to work, there’s a good chance you’d be happier hustling. You just need to find the right thing to be hustling toward, and the right people to support you. If you had all the free time in the world, what would you want to master? What would give you a sense of purpose? What would make your heart beat a little louder? The hustle is somewhere inside you. You just have to find it and set it free.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Some of us just don’t feel comfortable with the status quo. If sitting around at night watching TV makes your brain boil, you’re probably a hustler. If you can’t bare the thought of being a cog in a wheel, you’re probably a hustler. If you want random people to know your name and what you stand for, you’re probably a hustler. It’s not about being famous or rich or powerful. It’s about making a difference in the world―doing something that matters.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Here’s one of my secrets to getting through the tougher times: Hustling during the in-between moments can lead to epiphanies that will alter the course of your existence for the better. The act of the hustle is more important than whatever it is you’re doing, or wherever it is you’re planning to go. Constant motion delivers life-changing results. So focus on the constant motion part, not the destination part. My last book was a #1 bestseller. It took a year to produce. This book is different. I wrote it, edited it, and published it in seven days. That’s right, seven. Why? Because it was a hustle project―and a bit of an experiment. Honestly, I really needed the money. But I also wanted to prove a point to myself: Hustling is powerful. More specifically, building momentum can lead to unthinkable results. Sometimes you have to hustle. You have to make something happen.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“If you happen to be hustling, you might find yourself doing a job on the side, or working on a non-traditional project, or freelancing, or temping for an unknown company, or veering off from your main goal in some way. While it can feel like an admission of failure, it’s not.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Be not afraid of going slowly. Be afraid only of standing still."   ―”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Taylor Pearson has a great brain dump on writing, launching, and marketing a book as well.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“So ask yourself, what’s the one thing you can do this week such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“There is no other reason to be alive than to enjoy it.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Be daring and choose to be different, even if it's unpopular.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Everything around us is constantly changing. Being able to adapt is critical.”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle” ―Abraham Lincoln”
― Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion