Written by: Lisa Moore, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
It’s Time to Reject Toxic Hustle Culture and Develop a Growth Mindset
The hashtag rise and grind is just one part of hustle culture grinding our workforce down. It has been well-documented that as working hours increase, actual productivity goes down. So how can we reduce the burden for everyone, while getting more work done? The solution to toxic hustle culture is developing a growth mindset.
Hustle culture is ruining work
Hustle culture is what happens when working hard becomes a lifestyle. Its fans preach about things like “grit” and “ambition” while discarding anything else that would bring balance to their lives. The “hustle” itself is nonstop, in a way so invasive and toxic that many people do not know how to break free. And in modern conversations, these are the terms that have replaced negative phrases like “rat race” and “workaholic.”
Indie filmmaker Noam Kroll says that the opposite of hustle culture must be apathy. He defends a person’s right to take value from their work, and he is half right. He specifies that entrepreneurs, creatives, and business owners are typically passionate about their work and shouldn’t be discouraged. But the levels of control and self-direction those groups enjoy are missing from the vast majority of jobs.
Instead, hustle culture has managers routinely asking employees to stay late, because of the pressure on them to promote extreme output. Power dynamics can quickly overload the people lowest in the organization. All the extra work piles up at the bottom of the totem pole, with nowhere left to delegate it.
Hustle culture’s role in the modern health crisis
In Japan, they don’t have a word for hustle culture, but they do have karoshi which means “death by overwork.” A history of long hours and routine stress in Japan has plagued their business environment since the 1970s. Recent government attempts to reform working hours and holidays have fallen short of a cure – there are still plenty of strokes, heart attacks, and suicides linked to excessive overtime.
Not everyone can imagine such a negative, intense work environment, but it is the reality in many industries around the world. In 2021, the World Health Organization labeled working long hours a significant threat to workers everywhere.
When people are exposed to stressful situations, the brain releases cortisol as a stress response. When you push your body and mind past their limits for an 80-hour week, your cortisol levels wreak havoc on your physiology. Humans are omnivorous, large predators by nature. But while lions spend 16-20 hours per day resting, we have invented the need to clear out our email inbox each morning.
A balance of hard work and true rest is much healthier for our bodies, minds, and outlook on life. The hashtag thank God its monday tries to reject the need for recovery, as a part of hustle culture. But anyone who has pulled an all-nighter at a keyboard knows, you have to ignore your body’s warning signs to be able to continue overworking.
Who is encouraging hustle culture?
So, where did hustle culture start? When did overworking become a valid lifestyle choice? Well, somewhere between the Industrial Revolution and people asking “And what do you do?” after learning a stranger’s name, society took a wrong turn.
Too much self-identity is derived from our occupations and the outcomes of our labor. And companies took notice. And then they leaned into it… And now it may be inescapable.
Public figures with wealth, such as Tesla founder Elon Musk, promote “the grind” and demand everything from their employees. Musk himself has said, about working for Tesla, “There are easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”
But as Musk’s wealth increased by $122.3 billion in 2021, it is safe to say that hustle culture is benefiting those at the top. And at Tesla, nothing is demanded of employees that the leaders do not also take on themselves. But whether or not Tesla is a toxic work environment, small startup founders everywhere want to imitate Musk and squeeze every last drop of effort from their teams.
On its way out?
Plenty of people around the world knows that hustle culture is terrible. Hustle culture is ruining people that could have been our future best and brightest. And as more people become burnt out or develop health problems from their job, they simply want out. Just look at the Great Resignation.
The truly insidious nature of our shared culture is how hard it is to leave the riptide on your own. Right now, people are quitting jobs left and right. They feel more supported by their peers to quit than supported at work. Any manager or team leader should be taking a serious look at their organizational culture and stamping out any embers of hustle that remain.
Why a growth mindset is the solution to hustle culture
So, if hustle culture focuses on output, disregards an unhealthy work environment, and only exists to serve the profit-takers… why do so many people accept it and internalize it?
Hustle culture is a problem, but it is a problem with a solution. An organizational culture founded on a growth mindset can undo much of the damage that hustles culture creates.
What exactly is a growth mindset?
A growth mindset, in short, is an understanding that your abilities can be improved through learning, effort, better strategies, and input from others. On an organizational level, this involves empowering employees through development and support.
These principles are a clear alternative for people who are sick and tired of hustle culture. With a growth mindset, focus shifts from raw output to improved, informed processes. Managers can become leaders, and support, teach, and guide their employees. And those employees can learn new skills and ideas that often propel their company to new heights of profitability and organizational stability.
A growth mindset has clear mental advantages as well. The way we think about our mistakes directly changes how our brains process them. A growth mindset is focused on using mistakes and failures to learn and improve, which fosters real, measurable growth. Accepting errors leads to fewer mistakes being made in the future. Your brain adapts to process errors faster and learn from them more rapidly.
Like hustle culture, a growth mindset celebrates effort, but you must get results and improve. Most people attracted to hustle culture have a fixed mindset, the opposite of a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe their talents and abilities are innate and locked in, hence “fixed.”
Someone with a fixed mindset in hustle culture will repeat something that worked for them over and over, without scaling or improving… because they don’t believe they can improve. Their identity is connected to their talent or “gifted” status. The need to adapt, grow, or put in effort would challenge their core beliefs. So, those people soldier on, without admitting that self-improvement is a universal necessity. A fixed mindset within a hustle culture can quickly lead to burnout and hopelessness.
So if you are sick of the “more is more” ideology of hustle culture, you may be ready for the “better is better” path that developing a growth mindset will set you on.
How to change from a daily grind to a growth mindset
Are you ready to escape hustle culture and begin a life of thoughtful, intentional work? Whether or not you are convinced of your own ability to change yet, these strategies will start you on the path to developing a growth mindset.
1. Change your metrics
Hustle culture spurs workers to put in more time while celebrating their sacrifices. Someone who is successful within their terms might have a lot of sales or complete a lot of projects each year. While measuring those things may be important, they are not your most important metrics. A growth mindset would shift your focus to the skills and processes that lead to success. With a growth mindset, you accept that you can improve yourself and those around you – so you should focus on that.
For example, try switching one metric. Instead of living and dying by your number of sales, look at how you can improve yourself to make the sales process easier. Many people with commission-based pay want to hit “X-figures” when they could be building skills to reduce the time spent with each client.
2. Ditch Idols for role models
It can be easy to see the success of others and let jealousy or admiration drive your own choices. But the people who flaunt their wealth and power are not always the right choice for a role model. The billionaires are not necessarily the thought leaders or innovators they once were. Seek out a role model that has values you want to apply to your own life.
Look for inspirational stories, not aspirational wealth. Unless your career plan is to claim an inheritance or win the lottery, you will need to study the art of perseverance to make it. Michael Jordan was kicked off his high-school basketball team, for crying out loud! Thankfully, his mother instilled a growth mindset in him, and she told him to work harder and improve his skills. Imagine if she had believed in “talent” and told him to choose another path in life.
3. Review your goals and vision
Goals are important, but they need to align with a clear vision of the future you want to create. A series of goals with short, medium, and long terms will help you focus on the processes to achieve each step. A growth mindset would mean your effort is directed at opportunities to improve yourself and your business processes. Time spent learning how to achieve your 5-year goal will often make your more ambitious 20-year goals easier to accomplish.
4. Stop comparing yourself to others
Struggle is natural and necessary – when you struggle, you’re learning! In a snapshot of any group of people, there will be various strengths and weaknesses. That is why we need teams, mentors, and friends. But those strengths and weaknesses are not set in stone. You can always learn and grow your skills in any area.
Instead of putting yourself down for something you can not do, realize that you can not do it yet. Don’t compare your strengths and weaknesses to teammates who have prepared or learned different skills. Ask those people to show you some of their tricks or recommend resources. That way, your whole team is learning and improving together.
And if you are a person with a clear strength… share it! Teaching others can push your understanding of complex topics to a new level of clarity. And beginners often find new ways to approach problems they don’t know the “right way” to approach yet. An added benefit would be helping your team to develop a growth mindset, too.
5. Stop working!
Okay, don’t quit your job or slack off while in the office. But it is proven to be much healthier for both your mind and body to not overwork them. If you are still deep in hustle culture and would feel guilty about taking a break, you need to reframe it. An incredible variety of things that don’t qualify as “work” will actually improve your ability to work. Framing healthy or enjoyable activities as a way to optimize work is one of hustle culture’s traps, but the added benefits to mental and physical health will carry over into your personal life as well.
Exercise, reading, and meditation have all been linked to improved cognitive function and stress reduction. Even if your version of those activities is playing with your dog, picking up a trashy romance novel, and taking a nap on the couch, it will help. Time away from staring at a spreadsheet could also spark creativity that you forgot you had.
Set yourself up for a healthy workstyle, with a growth mindset
Those tips are just the beginning – a growth mindset requires constant learning and self-improvement. For ways to incorporate a growth mindset into your organizational culture or in your personal career, visit our Success Tangent blog for more tips and informative reading.
Lisa Moore, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Growth mindset and the power of the brain are Lisa Moore’s passions. As a former Corporate Trainer/People Operations Executive, she has 16 years of experience working with organizations to help them develop their people. Lisa's areas of expertise include Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Organizational Behavior, and Cognitive Neuroscience. She received her graduate degree in psychology from Harvard, where she studied growth mindset in organizational settings, especially as it relates to employee performance evaluations. She now uses that knowledge as CEO of Success Tangent Business Consulting to help businesses and individuals on their path to success through training programs, content, and coaching framed through the lens of a growth mindset.
