When Hustling Goes Too Far

Entrepreneurship is a game of high stakes. Few entrepreneurs actually reach the top, but for those who do, the rewards are huge. You have to be full time. Doing it part time, even full time, won’t cut it. So you’ve got to be hustling all the time. Bryan McCaw, Founder of WineAlign, recently described it to me as waking up at 3am thinking about how you can improve your company to beat your competitors. Then not being able to sleep until you’ve made that improvement. If you aren’t doing that your competitors probably are and you won’t make it.

Entrepreneurs need to always be hustling 24/7.

A recent Sprouter article recently outlined about how Andrea Lown of SmartBride uses “The Law of Three Feet” to tell anyone about her startup:

Anyone who comes within three feet of her hears about her startup idea. Whether she’s on the bus, in line for a coffee or at a party she is constantly talking about her idea to strangers and getting their feedback, even if they don’t fit her company’s target demographic of women 24 to 34 years old.

At the inaugural SociaLIGHT conference last Saturday, Kunal Gupta of Polar Mobile spoke to a room packed with entrepreneurs, “Do you know what a CEO is?” Everyone in the audience nodded, thinking they knew. “It isn’t a Chief Executive Officer, it’s a Chief Everything Officer.” Gupta also spoke about he grew Polar Mobile to a company which has launched over 1200 apps and hit 10 million app downloads. With most of his media clients being in New York City, he would initially fly once every two weeks. Then every week. Then a couple times a week. Eventually he ended up buying a place in Manhattan.

Photo credit: Aaron Rodericks

Robin Sharma, author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, gave some advice to entrepreneurs looking for the extra time so they can hustle even more.

Get up at 5am and start exercising. Listen to an audiobook while you ride a bike or do your situps. Then work, and it will be the most productive hours of your day. When you exercise you pump endorphins into your body giving you energy for the whole day. You’ll be energized for the next 15 hours.

Before giving the advice, he did warn it was the “unsexy” part of his talk. I still talked to half a dozens attendees who said they will at take on Sharma’s challenge to try it for 40 days and see the results. I’m on my 3rd day in a row getting up at 5am and those early hours have been the most productive in my day.

But when is an entrepreneur’s focus too much? Right before the end of the satellite interview with famous entrepreneur and author, Tony Zappos, everyone heard from a “surprise speaker.” SociaLIGHT listed a “surprise speaker” in the event schedule, but no one, including the organizers, expected it to be a man in a jeans, a shirt with his startup on it, and a Canadian flag cape.

Photo Credit: Nick Preobrazenski

David Tran stormed on stage, grabbed the mic, pitched his startup Herobox during Hsieh’s interview and asked Tony if he could talk in further detail. Is this “hustle,” or is it just plain rude to pull a Kanye? Tony was probably very confused as to what was going on since this was an audio interview and suddenly heard a new voice telling him about how his startup is changing e-commerce.

Herobox just won Startup Weekend Toronto and is representing Canada in the Global Startup Battle. I’ve seen the startup at four tech events in just the past week asking people to vote for them. So they’re hustling to win, not only for the startup’s recognition but to represent Canada in the startup community.

Whether it was a classy move or not, there were definitely an influx of attendees checking out the Herobox booth after the interview.

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