1.

Hard Work ≠ Success

Yes, you heard it here first! Hard work doesn't necessarily equate to your success. There are
many factors that contribute to a person’s success — not only how hard you work on a daily basis.
Imagine Elon Musk working 40 hours a week while you work three separate part time jobs for 60
hours a week. No matter how hard you’re working in this case, you’ll never be able to reach the
point of overwhelming success, due to the work environment. The truth is, you could be exerting all
your energy every day on the wrong things, the wrong way, or even the wrong time. Not only is this
harmful to your body as a source of exhaustion and stress, you create an unhealthy mindset for
yourself as well.
Don’t get me wrong though. Working hard is an essential part of your growth but hustling, just for
the sake of hustling, won’t get you anywhere.

2. Encourages Quantity > Quality Mindset

I've always been the type of person to take minimal breaks, registering for different events,
finding something — anything — to work on every single day to stay productive. When I do take a
day break, I tend to feel restless, as though I'm wasting my life away and proceed to switch my
laptop back on just to get something — anything — done.
At the time, I believed that all these steps were essential if I wanted to chase and achieve my
dreams. But looking back, I ask myself, were some of the things I did really contributing to my
overall productivity or was it just an excuse to stay and look busy?
The hustle culture encourages you to create an imbalance in your life — where work becomes
your life and the other things you’re doing start to lack purpose. It encourages you to prioritise
quantity over the quality of your work until you forget what it was you’re actually chasing.

3. Leads to Breakdowns

Whether it be mentally or physically, the hustle culture is going to take a toll on your body. With
the pressure of abiding to the hustling laws, we often create or set unhealthy habits to sustain our
working environment.
You start consuming caffeine at midnight in order to complete your assignment, joining late night
study sessions on Discord to focus better, losing out on sleep on a daily basis, skipping meals, and
anything else that your body requires to function at 100%. You lose interest in the hobbies you
found comfort in, having no time for self-care, and lack the time for socialisation.
This is the reality of an over-glorified hustle culture. Only when you look at it from a microscopic
view, will you realise that the things we’ve been normalising is also the reason we experience
exhaustion and burnouts.