I Hustled for a Decade—Here’s Why It Was a Waste
Blake spent a decade grinding nonstop from age 17 through his early thirties, sacrificing health and relationships. He argues a coach could have halved the time needed, and that unstructured time—playing games, taking walks—matters more than relentless work. His father's ALS diagnosis taught him that savoring moments beats working harder.
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Hustle culture is a disease. Stop going to dinner with your friends, you know, put your head down and grind. Look up in 10 years and you'll be a billionaire. Like, who cares? You've given up the best parts of your life. Like, everybody go right now and put a block in your calendar to play video games, do what you want to do, or do something stupid. Take a walk with no point, with no need to get better. It is one of the best gifts you can possibly give yourself.
You know who taught me this, right? Your wife. It was Claire. At a mastermind, Claire said, you need to do things not for a reason. Because every time I would do something, I'd try to be the best or just do things for the sake of doing things. And I was like, oh, I really like that. I need to do more of that in my life. And it's been a staple ever since.
It's the best.
Yeah.
Right. And again, the tweets, the Instagram reels, like the way we're shaping our mindset is, yes, look, we want to take some of these habits on and, you know, you don't want to be so unstructured that— Yeah. You lose purpose and you— we get it. I don't think most people listen listening are in danger of going that far. Most people, if they gave themselves a gift of an unstructured hour a day, would dramatically increase their life enjoyment.
Yeah. And it's also about— there's also something really interesting is what kind of worker are you, right? So for me, if you were like, hey Blake, I'll see you at 6 AM, what we're gonna do is we have a bunch of interviews that we have to do. Okay, I'm gonna do interviews from 6 AM to 7 PM. I, from a social perspective, I have no problem with that. I can talk for an entire 12, 15 hours and be excited and passionate and all that type of stuff. When it comes to writing and intellectual output and good ideas and good thoughts, 12 hours, no way. It's gonna be out of those 12 hours, gonna be 3 hours of actual decent material. And then the drop-off is so substantial that I'm like, I should just be doing something else right now. So it really depends on the kind of work you're actually doing. And I think our whole ecosystem is not really geared towards knowledge workers. It's geared towards like, you know, other stuff. And I hustled hard from, I'd say, the age of, 17, I graduated high school and the person to my right was going to Harvard and the person to my left was going to West Point. And I remember sitting there and going, I'm fucking smarter than both of these people. Like, what did I do with the last 4 years of my life? I didn't do shit in high school. I was playing cards, playing video games, and I was always smart enough just to always pass. The teachers hated me. They're like, oh, I can't fail him, but he's not a good student. I became— I made a commitment to myself. This is never going to happen again. I'm never going to feel like this again. So I went to school and I was a nut job. I got shingles twice. I was stressed. If I got a, you know, if I got an A-, I would lose it. I became an absolute nut job for 4 years. I didn't— all my friends partying, clubs. I did none of it. I worked, I studied, I went out once in a blue. Then immediately when I left that, I became an entrepreneur. Same thing. So from the age of like, I didn't really start living until I think I was maybe 33. It was work every single day. That's all I did. That's all I knew. And it was me hiding out and me doing all those types of things. And some of the skills that I have are because of those 10 years of being in that flame. So I don't want to make myself wrong about it. There's this woman, man, I, I got to find it because I've said this like 10 times. She wrote a thread on Twitter that I thought was so genius. It was— she said she was going— she ran a tech company with like 60 engineers, and I think it was in New York City. And she says, I was going on a date and I left my leather jacket. So I went back to my office to get my leather jacket, and I see this young engineer working in the office at like 9:00 at night. And I sat there and I sat next to her and I taught her about life-work balance and all and how you have to have all these things. And then I walked out and I immediately felt guilty because I got to where I was by not having that balance and then gaining it. And I didn't want to rob her of that. And I was like, that's so profound in a certain way, right? Like, so it's like, I don't think I'm half the person I am today without those 10 years. But if I had a coach, I don't think it would have been 10. It would have been 5.
That's—
and I still would have learned the lesson. That's what I— you know what I mean?
Right. Because, look, pain is inevitable.
Yeah.
Suffering is optional. And I think suffering starts to come in when we're learning the same lessons over and over. So how can I shortcut the suffering? Because pain is inevitable, right? Like, I am going through a really amazing period of my life right now, and I know that at some point it won't be this good. Yeah, something will happen, right? Maybe I'll lose a family member, a pet. What, like, whatever it is that's coming. So there's no way to avoid. But what I'm doing now is thinking about how, when I can see a valley on the horizon, how do I engineer out risk? How do I make sure that it's not catastrophic? How do I make sure that when that comes, I can sit there, I can be with whatever's coming up for me in the moment, but it's not— like, it's not going to be a disaster.
I mean, it sort of bring it all together. When my dad first got ALS, I remember looking up to the simulation and saying, I'm going to work harder than I've ever worked in my entire life. I don't know why I said that. Like, I had money to pay for his alternate treatments. The family was good, but that's all I know. In times of stress, work hard. That's all I knew, right? Then 2 weeks later, as my dad starts to lose the ability to move his hands, to drink, to eat on his own, I have this moment where in Austin, like, the sun's rising and I'm sitting there and I'm drinking a cup of coffee and I'm like, no, no, no, no. That's— working harder is not the answer to this. It's being able to savor these moments. It's being able to have the mind mindset of— I really, it sounds cliché, but it's like no matter what you're going through, there's somebody going through a lot worse. And I do this tool where I use a historical context. So I say like, okay, everything I'm going through right now, what would it have been like for people 300 years ago? Like 300 years ago, we might be doing this conversation and all of a sudden our village might get sacked and our wives get raped and both our heads are cut off, right? Or we're going to war. So if you just see that your problems in the grand scheme of reality are really not that big, it allows you to de-risk, it allows you to do all those things.
Well, there's just such an inherent narcissism.
Yeah.
Like, like when I hear— I'm going to, I'm going to get on a soapbox.
Yeah.
Like when I hear people that compare wearing masks and COVID with Nazi Germany, I'm like, no, Anne Frank was under these floorboards with machine guns. Like, how dare you compare having to wear a mask to the fucking grocery store?
Yeah. Different dynamic.
Like, this is, this is not the same. These things are not the same. And the fact that you would compare them, it says more about you than, than maybe we want to get into right now. Right. But, but so I agree, like this is inoculation from— it's not the trauma Olympics, right? Like, all we have is our own lived experience. And me losing my dog could feel the same as somebody losing their entire family. We only have our own losing lived experience. It's not trying to plot it and dismiss the pain that you're in, but there's a healthiness to saying, hey, you know what, this is the best time in the history of the world to be alive. Like, like, people are really worried about politics right now. They're really worried about a lot of stuff. This is the best time in the history of the world to be alive. Things are only getting better. And maybe, just maybe, I can stop feeling sorry for myself for just long enough to actually start to create some of these.
Yeah. And you need to feel them. You need to know the method that works for you. So some people sitting in it works. They sit in it for 30 minutes and they really feel their emotions and they really go through it and they cry or they throw something or they do whatever. Enough of that now.
