What's the Difference Between Grind and Hustle?

I’ve been a self-employed writer for most of my adult life. That’s pretty fucking terrifying, actually. From the time I graduated university in ’07, I have spent (checks notes) just under three years in gainful employment. The rest of the time, I’ve been scrawling my little tushy off.

Even in the past five years, when my main gig was editing an audio website, I was still technically employed as a freelancer—a handy perk for my bosses, who didn’t want to deal with the arduous obligations an employee comes with. I didn’t mind; the pay was good, I got cool audio gear through the mail, and I got to write books on the side. Beats tending bar.

One thing you encounter over and over again, as a self-employed freelancer, is the idea of hustle. You are encouraged to hustle endlessly for work. You are advised to read blogs about hustle or listen to podcasts about it. Services like Fiverr have sprung up to cater to our need to hustle.

And as work has become more nebulous in the wake of Covid, we're all being encouraged to turn our hobbies into a business. That's hustle, baby!

I call bullshit.

The concept of hustle—and this is something I've learned through painful experience—is trash. It's designed to make you uncomfortable and unhappy. It takes all the joy out of working for yourself. I can't for the life of me uncover when hustle started to be used in its current context, but here's an illuminating nugget: look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and you'll read that it comes from the Dutch word "husselen," meaning "to shake or toss." What an apt origin for a word that means you will never be comfortable.

I hardly need point out that freelancing is hard. It is unstable, erratic, requires endless bullshitting skills, and is made even more annoying by how governments treat and tax self-employed workers. Believe me, I've had to deal with the revenue services of multiple countries, and they all suck. But you know why I survived so damn long? Yes, I have always been good at bullshitting, but it's also because I stopped hustling and started grinding.

I don't want to sound like a self-help guru—it's important that you realise I know fuck-all about a lot of things. But this is one thing I do know.

The differences between a hustle and a grind are simple. They go like this.

(Obligatory YMMV: I'm a straight, white male with a fair bit of generational wealth, so your circumstances may be quite different to mine. Hopefully what comes next will be helpful though—reframing generally is.)

• Hustle means never saying no to a project. Grind means understanding which projects won't be worth your time.
• Hustle means you are constantly working. Grind means that you understand the importance of rest, health, and sleep so that you can work more effectively.
• Hustle means being endlessly ON. Grind forces clients and customers to respect your time and your ability.
• Hustle gives all projects equal priority because—hey!—even a small one might lead to something big. Grind knows which projects are worth the largest time investment.
• Hustle demands you monetise every moment of your life, extracting profit from activities you enjoy. Grind has a laser-focus on a single activity, extracting maximum profit and professional benefit from one thing, and one thing only.
• Hustle quickly moves onto the next thing because TIME IS MONEY. Grind takes extra time to evaluate what worked, what didn't, and how it can be done even better next time.
• Hustle is all about the quick fix. Grind builds a body of work over a long period of time, and eventually, that body of work requires very little effort to add to.
• Hustle has to be active on social media all the time, constantly, or they might miss something. Grind understands that 99% of social media posts generate no benefit. Grind doesn't avoid social media, but it doesn't spend more time there than absolutely necessary.
• Hustle is all about winners and losers. Grind understands that very, very few things in life are zero-sum games.
• Hustle has goals and quantities. Grind has habits and systems.
• Hustle's mother was a hamster and its father smelt of elderberries. Grind will now taunt it a second time.

They're all true. Especially that last one.

Now I admit: grinding can be hard, at first. If you're just getting started, or in a difficult situation, a little hustling can be useful. It can! But what I learned early on was that it can't last for long. It can't. You'll burn out. I almost did, chasing every writing gig I could get my hands on, working all hours, until my wife actually had to lay down the law with me because I was becoming a pain in the ass. She was right.

It was only when I stopped focussing on every little gig and started diving deep—into both audio journalism, and writing fiction—that I started to make some real money off this shit. And more importantly, it's when I started to enjoy this shit a lot more.

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