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The first book I ever read that opened my millennial mindset to the word hustle was Spark and Hustle by Tory Johnson.
Before that book, I had only learned to hustled in college and graduate school. I made my time there an opportunity for personal ego-building achievements that don’t count that much in the real world.
By the time I found Spark and Hustle though I had been working for a few years and had begun to see the wave of entrepreneurship hit the imagination of Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers.
The author talks about passion, purpose, and profit as the three main ingredients of a business built on what you love and for what you love.
As millennials, we have passion in spades. The hard part comes when it’s time to develop our own passion into a purposeful way to make a profit. It doesn’t take a keen eye to see profit comes last, when we desperately want it to be second or close to first.
What can we do with all of this passion?
On my last post I talked about 5 ways a millennial can compete at work and in life, this post will be about number 3: Mind the Hustle. And how minding the hustle is the best outlet for passion and the best channel for a purpose.
How can we hustle at work for passion and purpose?
- Add value to every task or assignment. What perspective is the team missing? what angle could you point to or further exploit? If you see it, share it. Passion shows in the way we do everyday things and communicate in everyday scenarios.
- Seek and find new projects to tackle on your own and further prove your worth. Remember, it’s about competing with yourself, what skill can you work on, what strategy can you implement. This will benefit the bottom line of the company you work for, sure, but it will also add to your personal bottom line, your personal brand.
- Reach for the right mentor at the right time. You might be in a very traditional workplace, a small business team or a collaborative environment, no matter, for every new challenge you face, find the person who can shed a little light, add a different perspective. Looking for guidance show our commitment to self-growth.
In an attempt to find that elusive profit building strategy we might lose sight of one thing, profit is not limited only to a financial gain, money in our bank account, we can also think of it as everything we can gain from a human, personal or professional relationship, leverage, credibility, connection, a foot in a bigger door.
Am I stretching the literal definition of profit? maybe. That’s the whole point, we must be creative about life, work, and hustle.
Make a profit with your hustle
The answer of this indie author (me) won’t surprise you…You need to write and publish your own book. See how it all came full circle?
Your journey is your hustle. You’ve been hustling for years and you don’t even know it! Once you sit down and start outlining your journey toward a book, you’ll realize how much you’ve faced and overcome so far to get where you are standing now.
Your hustle is your book. And once you get your book in your hands, it’ll become part of your hustle. Now you have a tool to beef-up your CV, an asset to enhance your professional career, and a resource that can turn into a passive stream of income.
And thanks to self-publishing, with a little effort placed on marketing, you can make a profit, or at least a return of investment as you can seamlessly leverage the amount spent in producing the book and the amount earned by selling the book.
This post was written in part to celebrate #NationalBookMonth
Will you be interested in further information (post, ebook, mini-course) about this topic? Say Yay or Nay below 😉
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