Happiness is more than just doing fun things. It’s about doing meaningful things

— Maxime Legacé.

This episode is going to be about how I replaced the hustler’s mentality for just making happiness my essential goal for my life. 

Happiness should come before anything. Why would I continue to do things that are miserable? And if it is miserable there should be at least one thing about it that I enjoy. This  “hustle mentality” is broken and toxic. I know I will trigger a lot of hustlers saying that, but listen to the full podcast before you jump to conclusions. This is just what works for me if hustling is your thing then more power to you. I’m not choosing that route for myself ever again. 

Before I continue I want to say work ethic is extremely important, but hustling should have never been equated to someone’s work ethic.

If anything I view it as how much energy can I put into something to try to yield faster results to short term success and unhappiness? 

What I notice is that so many people become obsessed with “chasing” this one goal and they get so deep into this “I need to make it” mindset that they haven’t taken a second to stop chasing the future. When they become refocused to the present moment and not obsessively chasing a future goal they realize they hate what they are doing and don’t even know how they got to that point. So many people think that these people who have been labeled hustler is bc they focused so much on achievement and “making it”. I disagree with the people who have reached society’s standards of success lost themselves and if you were probably able to go deeper into their stories I’m willing to bet they hate themselves internally, struggle with their identity, and hustling is what made them feel seen. This is why I think it’s broken, toxic and outdated.

 In historical terms, I think it was really breeded out of colonialism bc the colonizer was hustling for money and power. Hustling so much to the point that their currency became black and indigenous people of colors bodies. Hustling became about money and power dynamics. Passion, happiness, and gratitude was demolished in order to uphold a lot of these capitalistic values. Believing that there wasn’t enough land for everyone (scarcity mindset) and claiming land ownership through mass genocide, rape, torture showed success.  At the core tho the colonizer obviously hated themselves bc in reality they were jealous bc they were never as advanced as the black and indigenous people of color that they colonized, abused, oppressed and murdered. My theory is that’s why you see a lot of literature from that time calling black and indigenous people of color savages, uncivilized, incompetent is due to the colonizer projecting how they view themselves on to them. I’m a psych major so I stay referencing Freud.

So overtime you see a cultural shift, which is the more you have to show then the happier you will be which is materialism at the core. Hustling is not for me bc it’s honestly stressful, not fun, tiring, and mentally exhausting.

Life should not be stressful if you accept that what should be for you will. Your life’s purpose has always been instilled in you and the real focus is on the things that make you happy. When you’re happy you’re more compassionate, understanding, and kinder which leads to a much greater feeling.  Your purpose starts to manifests itself bc you don’t doubt what’s meant for you and you don’t have to chase anything. Like ask yourself why are we even chasing anything if tomorrow isn’t for certain? Your focus doesn’t become the chase like in a hustle mentality. People who follow this mentality really try hard to convince me it’s their ability to be so driven, having a high work ethic, and wanting to be the best, which really is just another way of saying  “chase”. Bc I possess all of those qualities minus wanting to be the best and I don’t chase success. Bc if you believe that you are the best at what you do then you don’t feel need to validate it by stating it to people and making an excuse for being unhappy, which is essentially what that is. 

Your focus becomes happiness and happiness becomes your internal driving force for your own personal form of success not society’s. When your purpose gets a little difficult that means you’re growing into something greater for yourself to carry out your next mission. It can be difficult but the transformation is necessary but bc you know it’s your purpose and happiness is at the center of it your driving forces kick back in bc you realize you love what you do. When you love what you do then honestly success manifest for you and the people around you. Success is bigger than just you, which is hard to shake from in a hustlers mentality.

You only chase after things that aren’t meant for you. Imma say that again. You only chase after things that aren’t meant for you. 

You don’t chase purpose, you walk with a purpose. Meaning you don’t have to get so caught up in your future self. Just claim that your future self is proud of wherever you’ll be bc it doesn’t help to constantly think about it bc anxiety will just brew. The only moment that truly matters is the now! Are you happy right now? Or will you chase happiness in the form of future success? When you could change that and be happy right now? I can’t answer that for you any of you only you can. If you disagree with my perspective that cool too I’m not here to judge but this is what has worked for me. I will leave you all with this story about myself. I use to be so consumed by this hustler mentality bc it’s just engraved into societal norms. I became obsessed with my grades, gpa, community involvement, having a job bc I wanted to make my family proud. I wanted to make it and I wanted to be so successful become rich and take care of my family. I’m not gonna lie my grades were amazing, gpa was through the damn roof, and I was overly involved in too many community engagement related things that were doing extremely well… In reality  I was extremely miserable, sad, depressed, I cried so much bc I was exhausted but pride made me take on more than I could chew bc I started obsessing over having money and being successful. On the outside, I looked happy and everyone was so proud of me and I tricked myself into being proud of me. If you asked anyone they’d never know how sad I really was bc I’m good at faking it bc I had always had a plan for myself but I knew that I was not happy deep down. I kept chasing tho bc I told myself I committed to it. Side note: I’m also a scorpio so when we become driven by materialistic type things we tend to not want to give up and start over bc we’ve spent time obsessing over our lives and planning to be this extraordinary individual (external validation), which is so toxic but it’s the truth. Anyways tho back to what I was saying. I kept chasing and chasing but there was always something that I had to do. It was never ending, but I just kept going through with it bc I had a goal that I wanted to complete. Well things came to halt when I ended up being diagnosed with this eye condition that I’m not gonna go into further detail about bc I’m saving that for another podcast episode. With this diagnosis it was the first time in a while that I had to just be still and rest. At the time I thought my body was giving up on me and I was so upset bc I thought I had put in so much effort to be successful and then my body just went weak on me. I was honestly so angry and sad, until one day I wasn’t. I’m so thankful for that moment happening bc I think about it now and my body was really just letting me know that the life dream I was chasing wasn’t meant for me. I realized at the core I was chasing after external validation and not giving myself internal validation. With my eyesight being temporarily impaired I had so much time to think and I slowly realized I didn’t even know myself or who I was really was once I stopped chasing. My body literally went into system override and  forced me to be present in life bc in that moment I realized everything I wanted was not motivated by happiness. It was motivated by the need to have more so that I could reach happiness. It made me realize that I had to be happy first in order to attract the happiness I wanted for myself. I had to realize that we really are set up with the basic kit to follow our purpose that will lead us down a path of true happiness. Some people’s kit comes with privilege and some people’s kit come with 400 plus years of oppression so let’s all remind ourselves that part. Everyone’s kit comes with baggage, trauma, and things we need to accept for healing. I had to find that within me and examining all things I was doing up until that point made me more self aware. I realized I had lost a lot of passion for life itself so I distracted myself by convincing myself that everything I was doing was so I could be happy. I had stopped writing, reading, drawing and just creating in general. I had honestly been existing and just going through life without any true direction even tho I thought I was bc I was always planning my next move. I use to be so passionate about a lot of things that I can’t even tell you when it began to fade it just did. 

So, I told myself once I got to college that I would find a balance between taking things seriously and not taking things so seriously, but that the biggest thing for me was to start doing things with intention while also not obsessing about my life 20 years from now. Being intentional was what made me happy bc it was like a fence around me and my passions so that I wouldn’t get off track and start existing through life blindly again rather than experiencing it at its full capacity. I could plan my life away but without intent it’s truly meaningless. Intent for me is asking how will this serve my own happiness while also adding value and happiness to others? So that’s really what I’ve tried to do and have I made mistakes? Ofc, it’s apart of growing and honestly the mistakes taught me the most. Make all your mistakes a lesson. I’m not this perfect all is love and all is light individual. I have a shadow side just like everyone else, but I do the work on myself to balance those attributes and deal with them accordingly. Through shifting my awareness to intent my purpose started to develop and I became a lot happier. And through intent I started to  really started to find myself. Keep in mind this has all happened over the course of like the last 3 years so other life events since my eye issue have triggered this self realization like being on campus during an active school shooting. 

But continuing through that self examination I realized even when I was burning myself out my purpose was always trying to call out to me, but I was distracted by the hustle. I’ve always felt the most happiness when I’m able to do things for others, listen to others stories, and just be present for people who have trouble with people being present for them. We need to accept that life is difficult, but we really have all the power to change that. Don’t hustle. Don’t hustle away from your problems. Don’t hustle toward external validation. Don’t hustle towards material wealth. Walk with your purpose. Walk with the intent to heal yourself internally. Walk with internal validation. If you’re always running through life it’s harder to see the bigger picture that’s meant for you. We settle for doing things quickly for short term success and then we end up 40 years old done chasing life then we think what could we have done differently to feel happy? Short term success is chasing money for happiness. Long term success is chasing happiness for purpose. Purpose never dies. Just like life doesn’t end when you’re 40,50, or even 100. At 40, you’ve barely experienced life even if you think you have but by that age you have so much knowledge in your purpose kit that you could dedicate your next 40 years to find true happiness.