I accidentally pissed off the internet.
I wrote a simple article called “Your 9-5 Pays the Bills. Your 6-12 Builds You F*ck You Money.” The crazies came out to play.
Let’s dissect the point of after hours work so you don’t burn out, and access the incredible benefits of online pursuits.
You don’t work 6-12, 7 days a week. OMG.
As soon as the hustle culture mob sees 6-12 their fragile minds miss the point. Obviously you don’t work 6-12 every day forever.
That’s how you burn out.
6-12 is a window of time where you can work on a side hustle and build a second income stream. It’s a time slot many people, including me for most of my career, can work on a project.
Not once in my article did I say work 6 hours every day when you get home from work. We’re not robots. We need rest. The truth is the 6-12 time slot gets too easily filled with Netflix which won’t move your life forward.
And don’t worry, I’m guilty too. I don’t get this after hours formula right every day either. The formula isn’t a prison sentence — it’s a guide.
If you love it, it’s not hustling
The hustle culture weirdos don’t get it.
When you’re working on something you love after hours it’s not hustling at all. Maybe the phrase side hustle needs to die.
I hustle doing things I hate. I hustle when I want a task to be over. I hustled at my 9-5 job every day trying to get people to buy financial products. That’s what led me to burnout, not my after hours passion project.
When I worked after hours on my writing project I freaking loved every moment of it. It was the one time my life felt complete. It made absolute sense.
Flow states were easy to access, whereas getting into flow while sitting in a bank cubicle was impossible. My mind would keep drifting back to my side hustle.
Work done between 6-12 is fun as hell.
These hustle culture weirdos should try it. Maybe then they’d understand this after hours movement and stop wasting their time shouting, when nobody is listening.
They think everything is a scam
What bleeds through this hustle culture tribe is that everything is a scam. Making money online is a scam. Entrepreneurship is a scam because it can be loosely tied to capitalism.
Yet most of them work for a capitalist business and use wifi to make money at their job. LOL. The scam mentality comes from too much skepticism. Instead of trying new things they simply refuse.
They don’t believe in experiments or trialing multiple career paths or multiple income sources or letting money work them. Nope. They’d rather do nothing and become an unpaid critic.
The truth is none of us know what we want to do in our lives.
We find out by throwing sh*t at the wall to see what sticks. That’s what an after hours side hustle you work on during the 6-12 time slot gives you. Data. Evidence. Proof of work. Time in the game.
When are you going to find time then? 9-5????
The hustle culture crazies don’t provide practical solutions.
They expect us to work on our side hustles during 9-5 while working a job. Now that’s how you’ll burn out! Your split focus between the two is worse than multi-tasking. You’ll end up making a ton of mistakes that get you fired.
You think your boss won’t know that you’re focused on your side hustle while sitting in their meetings? Of course they will.
Actually, working on a side hustle during 9-5 will get you fired. Then you’ll have no income and you’ll definitely have to quit your side hustle.
The hustle culture crazies don’t provide any other solutions.
They just shame us for working on what we love after hours and say we’ll burn out and die. And we watch too much Gary Vee apparently (he’s said many times that people misunderstood his message).
It all boils down to this
If you delusionally think working after hours is hustle culture that’ll lead you to an early grave, you’re probably going nowhere. Stay broke then. Ignore what you’ve wanted to do for work for your entire life.
Keep living a life of doing the bare minimum between 9-5 and see where that gets you.
Wait for your boss to bless you with an opportunity for warming a seat for 8 hours. Hope to get a delicious raise from your employer who’s got their back up against the wall, thanks to this recession.
Or hope the highest inflation in decades will magically go down and so will the cost of living. Hard truth: there will be no more government handouts. You’re on your own.
There are no freebies in life. You have to work for it.
I know this is a harsh message. I know it hurts. But all I have is the brutal truth to deliver. Nobody is going to give you a golden ticket in life.
6-12 is the time slot where you can work for what you want in life.
