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MicroSummary: You’ve probably heard of Neil Patel, one of the biggest marketers in the world. In his book, Hustle, he brings us a fun and practical guide to changing the way you live, work, and thrive in an increasingly uncertain world. In Hustle, Neil joined Patrick Vlaskovits and Jonas Koffler to teach you how to look at life with a new approach based on finding your unique talents and better enjoying the opportunities which come your way.

The Power to Charge Your Life with Money, Meaning, and Momentum

Do you not know what the word “Hustle” means? No problem, let’s find out together in this microbook!

“Hustle Summary”

So, What Is Hustle?

Since its inception, the word Hustle has borne several meanings. Its origin comes from Dutch, and in the XVI century it meant “to shake something”.

In the last decades, in the United States, the word Hustle has gained pejorative connotation associated with “stealing” or “cheating” and also positive ones like “making something happen” or “to persist despite obstacles in the way.”

It’s in that latter direction that Neil Patel and his co-authors go in Hustle.

They want to help you be able to make it happen in a world full of uncertainties.

To become a “Hustler,” you need to take control of your dreams, and this requires you to balance 3 fundamental forces: Money, Meaning, and Momentum.

When you enter Hustler mode, you join a group of renegades who take risks and change the future through control of their destiny.

Conquer Your Dreams

In the past, in the United States, only work ethic and willpower were enough to build a decent, stable, and successful career. The American dream of homeownership, family, and career was accessible to all.

Today, the economy is being shaken by globalization, and the work dynamics are changing. More and more jobs are outsourced out of the US, and other jobs are disappearing.

Besides, more than 40 million Americans have student credit debts and cannot get out of their parents’ home.

That puts the old model in check. Today, for you to get along and achieve the life you seek, you have to become a Hustler. The old rules for living exist only for social control.

Things like getting good grades, getting good jobs and retiring is what society expects.

But living by these principles is playing a game of marked cards. It exists for you to reach adulthood with student debt, credit cards burst and a job that does not fulfill you and which will eventually be replaced by robots.

A hustler does not play this game.

The End Of The American Dream

If you do not have money, you can often see yourself part of a frustrating routine, just not to disappoint your family, your friends, and society. You need to take the reins of your life to get out of the conventional system.

You need to follow your dreams and choose your adventures, and for that, you have to be the owner of your dreams.

For this, you need to actively live life, making decisions without fear of consequences and correcting their mistakes as they occur.

Hustle
You need to move and act in full control of your destiny. Many people talk a lot about their dreams, but they do nothing to fulfill them.

The secret for you to achieve is to make small steady progress.

Get Out Of The Same-Old

When you do not act and just follow the course of life, you optimize your life to avoid failures. You must move now and take calculated risks to succeed.

In your day to day, you are in a constant struggle between moving forward or staying behind in your life and in your work. But what will free and fulfill you is to develop your appetite for risk.

Have you ever felt as if you were a rat running inside a wheel in a cage? Have you felt that your life was stagnant and purposeless, even though you are apparently doing everything that society expects?

The constant repetition of bad habits causes your mind to recalibrate your expectations of life for the worse. When sameness takes over your life, it becomes part of your identity.

This sameness culminates in despair, where your expectations for life diminish, your ambitions die, and you cease to act merely by force of habit. Often we do not know where to start.

We spend our youth waiting to find out what we want to be and always keep repeating the same mistakes. Every day we enter the ring to fight an opponent who should not be in our category.

That leaves us with no money, no purpose and no momentum. To succeed, you need to find your unique talents, be able to manufacture your own luck and become a Hustler.

Finding Your Unique Talents

There are 2 types of talents: Light talents are the talents that are easy to get noticed by others and usually have an average value for society.

Hidden talents, which are hard to perceive, but extremely valuable.

You should focus on your hidden talents, and the only way to find them is to live a life focused on experimentation.

You need to interact with people, live in dynamic environments and put yourself at the mercy of challenging opportunities.

Also, to find your unique talents, you should avoid over-specializing. Discover yourself gradually, in different situations and work on the talents you discover.

Are you good at persuading people? Study sales, marketing and evolve this strength. Identify your abilities and always improve them.

Take Risks And Create A Portfolio

To become a Hustler, you need to be able to take calculated risks. A risk is not something good or bad, but something inevitable. You can not escape it, so you must accept and embrace it. There are 2 main types of risk in the stock market:

• Intrinsic risk: It means that something good or something bad can happen to a company. Example: If the company is caught in a scam, the stock price drops. If the sales in a quarter are better then expected, the share price rises.
• Market Risk: It means that something outside the control of the company can change and this changes the value of the company’s stock. Example: If the economy is growing, people spend more, and this causes the stock to go up. If a disaster strikes, this causes corporate stocks to fall.

If you have a diversified stock portfolio, you do not suffer from intrinsic risks. If something bad happens to a company, others probably benefit. You need to be open to the right risks to be able to capture more value from potential positive events that may occur.

The more diverse the risks you assume, the lower the chances that you will have substantial losses.

Small Doses of Pain

If you want to be a Hustler, you need to embrace pain in moderation. There is a phenomenon called hormesis which means that the same element has absolutely opposite effects in small and large doses.

If you expose yourself to small doses of poison, for example, your biological system does not weaken, it strengthens. Start with small risks and increase the dose as you build resistance.

Look for the little pains that make you stronger.

Physical exercises, for example, cause pain in the beginning. Each time you lift weights, your muscles suffer minor tears, but over time they regenerate and come back stronger and stronger.

That allows you to lift more weight in the next workout.

It may seem challenging at first, but it develops your self-esteem and your willpower. But it is important to be careful. Find the right dose for you.

Just as a small dose is good, a large one can kill you. Do you have difficulty speaking in public?

Make a short presentation to your closest friends. The more minor, controllable risks you assume, the less you expose yourself to negative risks and thus create space for great opportunities to emerge.

Add Daily Pain

To create more and more opportunities and develop your risk tolerance, it is important that you have your daily dose of pain.

The important thing is that you can find small risks that you can run that can bring big gains in the future. Are you out of shape?

Add 10 push-ups per day. Are you shy? Talk to a stranger each day. Expose yourself to new controlled risks.

Manufacturing Luck

Many think that luck is an inexplicable force which appears occasionally and that some are luckier than others. Hustle authors believe luck is something you can create. There are 4 different types of luck:

• Random Luck: This is luck that happens without any influence from the person. An example: You’re late for a huge festival, and you’re lucky enough to find a free seat after going through the gate;
• Hustler Luck: This luck is created by your actions. It’s when a stranger you approached at an event invites you to a job interview, for example. It is important that you always do something and take risks. For luck Hustler to happen, you must do something, anything; do not be consumed by the fear of doing nothing.
• Hidden Luck: These are the opportunities that appear to everyone on a daily basis, but people who are seen as unlucky do not see them. Opportunity only appears to the prepared mind, and this fortune is based on your past experiences. To develop it, you need to look at the world around you and always be open to connecting things with your past experiences;
• Lucky Luck: This is the sort of luck that happens because of your innate strangeness, your unique and peculiar side. Your unique habits and characteristics allow you to do things that others could not do.

When hidden luck combines with Hustler luck, peculiar luck is born. You make your luck happen when you embrace your skills and persist on the path to your dreams.

The 3 Hustler Laws

• Law #1 – Do something that moves you: Do not be skeptical and look for something in your heart that moves you. However, you have to be careful, after all, it is very easy to analyze too much and stop doing something. You may have difficulty finding what moves you clearly, but the important thing is to do various things and then find out what and why things move you. Start by doing something, then find out why. However, attention needs to be paid. Often the press, books, and TV tell us that we must follow our passions and follow our reason for existing. Your reason for existing and your passions change constantly. But the things that make you unique do not change. Take the first step and see if that moves you.
• Law #2 – Raise your head and open your eyes: See what others do not see and watch for opportunities. To see differently, you need to doubt the conventional. Where others see fear, see an opportunity to try something new. Opportunities are in all the situations that you live in your day to day. The most crucial step is to be attentive. It is also important to understand the difference between easy and simple. Not everything that is simple is easy, and that is why you need to be able to understand the different types of opportunities.
• Law #3 – Close the Deal and Make It Happen: You need to prove you are a Hustler and the only way to do this is to close the deal. Execute. You need to have commitment and actions defined as next steps. Want to start a business? How about trying to close the first customer this week? Your ability to bring things to reality helps you to form the correct habits, and your identity derives from your habits.

Finding Opportunities

You have to choose the opportunities you are going to attack by dividing them into 4 groups:

• Easy to understand, easy to do: Start a blog, apply for a job. This type of opportunity also has its problems: anyone can do it, that is, there is low risk, but also a low potential of return;
• Complicated to understand, easy to do: Make a mobile app, fly airplanes. These are complex tasks, but once you get past the initial complexity, the next steps are easy.
• Complicated to understand, difficult to do: Develop a train that connects 2 capitals or an electric vehicle. They are activities where you cannot go wrong, and most people will avoid;
• Easy to understand, hard to do: Set up a company, record an album. That is the most natural area for Hustler to act because he can communicate simply with those who doubt him and prove his progress and, also, faces small doses of pain.

Once you choose which of the opportunities you want to attack, the next step is to have a delivery date. If you are starting, it is normal that you see your project as a great work pile.

To overcome this, you need to always define your next steps, with dates. Break your tasks into small weekly goals. Focus on the volume of activities and completing things always.

To attain your momentum, you need to be able to close tasks constantly.

Finding Your Way

It is well-known that the shortest path between 2 points is a straight line, right? Not for a Hustler.

If you have a dream, you may not think you need all the resources, capital, networking and a planned, straightforward sequence to reach it.

The great truth is that no one knows the future and to realize your dreams, you need to create paths that do not exist.

Analyze your unique talents, develop them and let them evolve in diverse, unpredictable directions.

That creates a longer path but allows you to run an indirect path to your goals. This path leaves you prone to serendipitous discoveries and causes each step to reveal the next one.

The important thing is that you do not follow the conventional paths let alone the way that other people want you to follow.

A Hustler creates an optimized path for your talents instead of taking a path that has been followed before.

If you follow someone else, you are at the mercy of their abilities and not yours…

Create Your Own Adventure

There are 4 archetypes of Hustlers, and each one must be used in different situations.

1. Hustler from the outside in: Your goal is to get into something, such as getting a job at a company that you admire. And the easiest way to do this is to do what no one else is doing. If other people are sending emails to apply for vacancies, pick up the phone and try to dial to the company’s HR director. Do what no one else does to get in.
2. Hustler from inside and up: Your goal is to prove your worth and be promoted. You enjoy the environment where you are, but you also think it’s time to take on new responsibilities, make more money and feel more fulfilled. The key is to be in an organization that is aligned with your goals and prove to everyone internally that you are able to accomplish more.
3. Hustler from the inside out: Your goal is to undertake. You have to leave the comfort of a company and take the risks of getting something from scratch. That is a high risk, unsecured path, but it also has high earning potential, after all, you are in full control. You exercise your autonomy at the last level. You need to have the courage, believe that your business will be successful and have clear actions to achieve the desired success. The best reason to follow this path is when you feel that you are not learning much more where you are.
4. Hustler from the Outside and Up: Your goal is to take your entrepreneurship and your creative deeds to an epic level. That is for the few, and it is extremely challenging. It is necessary to assume very high risks and radical decisions. The most important thing is to be adaptable and confident, as well as being able to actually manufacture luck. That is where you find the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk. You need to be able to tolerate a lot of pain and have a very strong vision of what you are willing to sacrifice to reach this level and create empires that change people’s lives.

Regardless of which Hustler you are, the more experience you accumulate and the more challenges you face, the greater the rewards and the chances of realizing your dreams.

The Essential Habit: The 10 Minute Rule

If you had just to adopt a new habit, it should be the 10-minute rule that is able to help you develop your skills to become a Hustler.

The rule is simple. Instead of analyzing and overthinking, do something uninterruptedly for 10 minutes and then evaluate.

If you want to exercise and get fit, instead of rationalizing about when to start, exercise now for 10 minutes.

At the end of the activity, see if you feel good if that’s what you really wanted, and see if you feel better about yourself.

That is a simple way to increase your productivity, focus on the present moment and develop your persistence.

POP: Your Personal Opportunities Portfolio

You need to have a plan to prioritize and execute the best opportunities for your life. For this, the authors propose that you create a POP, your Personal Opportunity Portfolio.

Make it clear what your next steps are so you can continue to grow and develop in the long run. It is an array divided into 4 essential components that you must master:

• Potential: Understanding your potential helps you to know who you are and how you become who you want to be. It guides you and helps you know what needs to be done to achieve your dreams. It describes what the unique talents, attitudes, and habits that you should expel are.
• People: The best opportunities in your life come from the relationships you create and from the connections you make. This part represents your social skills and how you can use them to leverage your network to achieve your personal and professional goals. You need to create your own community.
• Projects: The projects you dedicate tell a lot about your actions. Choose projects that match your skills and use them to demonstrate your ability to execute. Your projects demonstrate that you can maintain your hustle, generate revenue and realize you as an individual.
• Evidence: You need always to demonstrate your reputation and credibility. Social proof of who you are helps you differentiate yourself in the crowd and always be able to say “I did it”, “I got it.” Evidence increases your market value and allows you to be able to improve your persuasion and your income. If the 4 elements of your POP work in harmony, your hustle will be in the best shape.

Money And Momentum

Many people dream and have great ideas, but they cannot get them off the paper, sabotaging themselves with money.

It is important that you optimize your POP to generate money and profits, after all, you should always profit from your work.

If you make money from your work, you can create momentum and reinvest in your hustles. It is essential for you to be able to keep running, doing and growing.

You must be ambitious for the right reasons, to be able to continue, not for the wrong reasons.

Balance of Money And Purpose

If you focus only on financial gain, your personality corrodes, and this is destructive. It is human nature to want to make money and to boast, but the exclusive focus on money is detrimental to another essential pillar, purpose.

Your purpose is how you contribute to society and how you gain confidence to know you have an important role, but it is also important to be careful not to live by purpose all the time and forget that money is needed.

Purpose and money have to be balanced all the time.

Just as money does not solve all problems, purpose does not get you out of sameness. Work to find the balance every time.

The Journey Is Infinite

The journey of a Hustler does not have a clear end. It is a constant experience of learning, accomplishment and personal development.

Fate is not the goal but the journey itself. To better understand yourself, do not overthink and overanalyze.

Execute, and this will show you the way. Never stop being a Hustler. Keep Hustlin!

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Final Notes:

In a world of uncertainty and totally dynamic, the only way to achieve your goals is by acting.

The Hustler exposes himself to chance, exposes him/herself and prefers to act rather than overanalyzing.

Learn to know yourself and develop your potential, your skills with people, choose the right projects and prove to the world that you are the guy. Be a Hustler!

Emir Zecovic

Emir is the Head of Marketing at 12min. In his spare time, he loves to meditate and play soccer.