Is burnout an inevitable part of success? A survey found that 40% of workers believe this is the case. That’s far more than a fringe belief: it’s a working assumption that almost half of the workforce ascribes to. We’ve absorbed the idea that achievement requires running ourselves into the ground.
Over the past several years, I’ve watched the anti-hustle culture movement push back hard against the “rise and grind” mentality. Fewer social media posts celebrating 80-hour weeks as proof of dedication and sacrifice. People sharing their experiences of stepping away from work to recharge.
The criticism is warranted (and overdue). Chronic overwork does lead to burnout. The culture of pushing through when our bodies and minds are telling us to stop has long been a structural problem, even though the hustle bros would have you believe it’s a personal failing.
But somewhere in the backlash, the conversation fell into two camps. Either grinding is the path to success, or intensity itself is the enemy. You can’t have both. Both sides treat work intensity as a permanent setting — you’re either “on” or “off.”
That framing misses how we move through different seasons of life. Including dialing up and dialing back as needed.
In my career, I worked intensely at a tech job for 15 years. In many ways that I won’t enumerate here, that was bad. The pandemic hit, and I was tired of it all. But I had to keep hustling and pushing myself in order to find a new landing place in my second career.
That season of intensity was necessary. Not because the hustle-culture crowd was right, but because building toward something new or different requires it.
The question should be: Is this hustle temporary? Or a permanent fixture in your work life?
Hustle has its place when it’s temporary
Hustle mentality is usually seen as a character trait. And, of course, some people will still pursue relentless hustle in pursuit of their goals.
But for many people, hustle might be tied to circumstances. Two situations come up again and again that look nothing like “hustle culture as a way of life.”
Trying to leave a job
When I knew that I wanted to leave my tech job, I put in long hours. I had my regular 9-5 job, and then was freelancing in the evening, often for several additional hours per day. This was necessary to build the writing portfolio I needed to change careers. Then I added applying for new jobs into the mix.
It was utterly exhausting. But I knew it wouldn’t last forever, and I was right. Three months after I started freelancing, I landed a full-time job at a content marketing agency and a retainer agreement at a magazine.
That kind of intensity has a clear purpose (build the skills necessary to get out) and a clear end point (the new job). If I’d only said, “I’m working 60-hour weeks,” it would have looked like hustle from the outside. But it didn’t feel like hustle because it was temporary, and saying otherwise would have been performative. I wasn’t trying to prove anything to an employer. I was doing it because the alternative was staying “stuck.”
Unfortunately, the current job market demands even more of this kind of effort. Job searches may stretch into months of interviews and take-home assignments. Or a job-seeker may spend a ton of time networking. Anyone in the middle of a career transition knows this. The work of finding a job is a much longer season of intensity and can be hard to sustain.
Trying to build something of your own
The same principle applies when someone is building a solo business or pivoting to self-employment. The early days are intense by nature. You’re taking on the work of finding clients and building systems, often without support. There are months when the hours are long, and the to-do list feels absolutely endless.
This was my second season of hustle in recent years. I lost my job and decided the next day that I was going to freelance full-time. Even though I had some pieces in place from freelancing alongside my 9-5, it was a mad scramble to build up a full roster of clients and pull in the income to support my family.
But the early hustle of building a business on your own terms is completely different than corporate overwork. Every client relationship and everything you create is an asset that belongs to you. Corporate hustle often comes without a reward proportional to the effort an employee puts in. Employees trade their nights and weekends for what? A modest raise or a new title? In far too many cases, they get nothing at all.
When the intensity is in service of your own thing, there’s a direct relationship between what goes in and what you get in return. I’m not a fan of never-ending hustle, but the connection between effort and outcome makes a temporary hustle season tolerable… maybe even energizing. And unlike a corporate environment where the expectation of intensity never slows down, the self-employed person’s hustle phase can dial back when they reach the point of a sustainable business.
Building so you don’t have to hustle (as much)
The anti-hustle crowd gets one thing right: permanent intensity is destructive. Without an end date or a target in mind, it becomes a state of being that leads to burnout. We’re simply not designed to operate that way.
Ask yourself: Am I choosing this intensity, or is it choosing me?
Corporate hustle is often unchosen or a baseline expectation. Seasonal hustle is deliberate and has a particular outcome.
Jay Clouse, founder of Creator Science, put it this way on his podcast:
“I want to be world-class at something, but I want to be world-class on my terms. I don’t want to be world-class in a way that requires me to build a business that I don’t want to build in a way I don’t want to build it. … And in this season, I just don’t want to [do more].”
My days now look so different than the way they did in 2020 (at a corporate job) and in 2022 (when I first started my freelance business).
That’s the whole point. Hustle seasons should have boundaries. You push hard and work toward what you need, and then your hustle season ends. It’s not because your ambition disappears, but because the season did its job. Your goal is to create a season that means the next phase of your career can look different than the last.
Thinking about a career change? Download my guide: 5 Types of Career Pivots.
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