In this panel from Hustle Con 2015, Sam Parr and a group of entrepreneurs each share their personal definition of what it means to "hustle." Sam frames hustle as ethically bending rules to achieve a goal using creativity and resources, emphasizing passion and excitement. Other speakers add complementary angles: running into obstacles and iteratively fixing them; pursuing passion to achieve exponential growth; selling a vision to get others on board; believing in oneself and enduring hard work; creatively leveraging assets to raise capital; viewing hustle as accessible to anyone willing to be a bit crazy; never giving up and staying true amid criticism; and refusing to accept “no.” The discussion highlights hustle as a blend of resourcefulness, persistence, vision‑selling, creative financing, and resilient mindset, all grounded in personal belief and ethical problem‑solving.
Chapters
So a lot of people think that hustle means breaking the rules. I don't really think that's what it means. To me, hustle means finding out what the goal is, what the rules are, and kind of saying, "Screw the rules. What's the best way that we can get there using the resources that we have, including our creativity?" That doesn't mean half-assing things or to be sneaky or to be scammy, but it means to— how can we get from A to B in an ethical way that makes everyone really happy, yet we're gonna think outside the box and only use what we have? That's what hustling means to me. Hustling is following your passions. Pursuing what you believe in and getting other people as excited as you are about what you're working on.
Hustling to me is running straight into a brick wall, pausing to freak out, but then stepping back, diagnosing what's wrong, fixing that, and moving on to the next brick wall. For me, hustling means finding out the rules of the game that you're playing and how to break them to put things into your favor.
Hustling to me is doing whatever it takes to grow, to reach the next order of magnitude. Hustling to me means finding something you really what you really are passionate about and pursuing it without ever being self-conscious about it.
Hustling means to me is selling other people on your dream and your vision and making them buy into it.
To me, hustling starts with believing that you can. From there, it's doing whatever it takes to make that true. Sometimes that's doing something particularly clever, and sometimes it's just brutal hard work. Hustle is really just about endurance.
Hustling is the ability to stretch the dollar as far as it can go.
Hustling is, well, what I did to raise money for my my first company. I had no funding, I couldn't get any funding, but I did have a lot of clothes from J.Crew. So I looked at the back of the J.Crew catalog and they said there's unlimited return policy. So I boxed everything up, I shipped it back to them, and they sent me about $2,000. That was what I started my business with.
Hustling is something anyone can do. You just have to be a little bit crazy.
And to me, hustling, it's pretty simple.
It just means never giving up. Hustling is being able to stay true to yourself and believing in you when tons of haters are out there telling you otherwise, and being able to wake up every single morning.
Not taking Not taking no for an answer. That's hustling to me.
I guess hustling comes down to resilience. To me, hustling is all about being relentless.
