Ambition is not the same as hustle

It’s easy to confuse ambition with hustle, but they are not the same thing.

The turn of the century and explosion of social media gave rise to influencers that glorify the merits of hard work. The promise goes something like this:

“YOU are now a business. Your successes and failures depend entirely on your ability to aggressively squeeze as much performance out of every second of your day, ignoring any leisure (because the grind is the reward), and relentlessly pursuing a financial escape from your 9-5 on your way to untold, generational wealth, recognition, and power.”

It’s an attractive promise. Who doesn’t want to be rich? Escape the status quo? Live life on their own terms? It’s the American Dream, baby!

But hustle is not the same as ambition - it’s a dogma that assumes you have more agency over your outcomes than you really do. Before I tear the philosophy apart, I do want to mention one of the movement’s positive aspects that is often unfairly lumped together with everything else.

Hustle suggests you have agency over your life.

Instead of only reacting to circumstances, you can strategize, plan, and influence the events of your life by taking action. This happens by intentionally choosing how you spend your time, and often requires making some sacrifices to suspend pleasure in favor of hard work and investments into yourself or your business.

You have to believe you have agency in order to achieve anything. It’s the engine of action that gives you permission and belief that it’s possible to change your life. To grow into a craft. To make a difference in your family, profession, and community.

The opposite of agency is helplessness. Taken too far, and helplessness becomes victimhood, the belief that you’re merely a background character of your own life and circumstances happen to you without a choice to influence them yourself.

“Well hey, that doesn’t sound so bad! What’s wrong with taking a bit of ownership in your own life?”

If all you take from hustle culture is a motivation to be responsible and grow, you’ll be okay. After all, ambition requires the same attitude toward agency.

But here is where the crossroads appear between ambition and hustle.

Ambition is the ability to focus your energy into becoming a person of unusual capability. It’s a requirement for the pursuit of mastery. And most importantly, ambition is about who you become rather than what the world thinks of you.

Hustle defines success using the opinions offered by the world, including fame, wealth, and the ability to influence others. The assumption in the hustle philosophy is that you need to become wealthy and influential to be considered successful. Happiness is behind the doors of hard work and worldly measuring sticks of success.

Ambition, by contrast, doesn’t use the world as the ultimate judge of success. Ambition leaves room for your spirit. For pacing yourself and learning, and even encourages wasting time in the journey of exploring the man or woman you’re becoming.

Unlike hustle, ambition does not shame you for failing to wake up at 5am or taking a break for a few hours, or even a full season. There is no shame in steering your ambition towards your family or a “normal job”. Anyone can be ambitious, even if their dreams fail to live up to the otherworldly expectations that hustle culture sells to the public.

Ambition doesn’t come without risks, but you get to decide the benchmark of success instead of the world.

It’s almost impossible to live up to the incredibly high standards and pace of success defined by others, especially people who have a list of accomplishments and a social following. Take their word with high levels of suspicion and skepticism because they are the result of survivorship bias.

For every active voice in hustle-speak there are thousands of people who worked just as hard that never achieved the same pinnacle of “success”. The philosophy heavily implies that if you deploy hard work long enough, you’ll eventually break through or get lucky and beat the odds. Peek under the covers of many successful hustlers and you’ll find two important things:

1. Their trajectory in life was heavily impacted by things outside of their control, usually luck or timing
2. They are usually have something to sell you related to “making it”

To point one, here are a few names you might recognize and examples of each:

• Gary Vaynerchuk inherited his father’s established liquor store that was already generating millions in cash flow every year, and bought keywords on Google AdWords (which had recently launched) for pennies per click, which would be impossible today with the rise of web 2.0.
• Tim Ferris published The 4-Hour Workweek right before the housing market crashed. The recent invention of Skype and newly accessible high-speed web made the business model he wrote about feasible for the millions of people seeking work in the aftermath of the crisis.
• Codie Sanchez, who borrowed money to acquire boring businesses did so in a period of economic growth and 0% interest loans, which no longer exist.
• Steven Bartlett expanded his social media agency in an era with insanely high organic reach on social media platforms before they throttled organic reach to force brands to pay for ads.

That’s not to take away from their hard work or ingenuity. If anything, their work ethic and persistence led to their chance timing working in their favor. After all, you can’t be fed if you don’t show up to the dinner table.

But the ethos of hustle suggests that luck and timing are guaranteed to strike if you stick with something long enough, which isn’t true and promotes dangerous levels of dedication to a practice that values outcomes over character.

Remember, accomplishments have three inputs: effort, talent, and training.

Hustle places all the marbles into the effort category, assumes talent will follow, and usually treats training as a waste of time because it uses time in a less economically efficient manner. The only acceptable forms of training are those that have clear returns on investment. Reading for fun or learning something unrelated to your craft is typically frowned upon until you’ve “made it” and you can afford such silly luxuries.

In the eyes of mastery and ambition, training is a righteous act of its own. Improving your skills is a reward of its own. It is success because you are becoming more capable within a craft. Any accomplishments associated with training are side effects of your growth. Training builds expertise, granting you superhuman abilities to use even less effort to collect wins because of your earned experience and wisdom.

And unlike hustle, ambition encourages you to train, learn and fail with grace on your way to mastery.