 Imagine there was a way to guarantee your success in achieving your goals but in exchange you needed to give up meaningful relationships, secondary interests, service to others, and time developing your relationship with God. That is what hustle culture is offering us. Hustle culture is a mindset that idolizes hard work in pursuit of ultimate supremacy. Well, maybe more like just achieving your goals and getting validation and being successful. So what's so wrong with this? Hustle is better than laziness, right? Right, but from my experience it's far too easy to just trade the vice of undisciplined laziness for all-consuming and unhealthy hustle. In this video I want to share my first-hand experience of getting swept up into hustle culture as a 19-year-old content creator and share five principles that helped me break free. I was 18 years old and about to drop out of university. Why? Well, here's the thing. I actually really like school. I like studying. I liked writing essays. I like doing all of that stuff but something was off, like really off. I would show up for class every day and I'd just be so restless. I wanted to jump out of my own skin. I couldn't shake this feeling like I was wasting my time, like I was supposed to be doing something else. For me my dream was to help people follow Jesus daily with online social media content similar to what I'm doing right now but at the time I only had like 100 followers on one platform and maybe a couple hundred on another platform. If you were to look at my followers at that point and I were to tell you, hey, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life, you would have thought, man, you know, this kid is pretty delusional. But honestly, and this is a story for another time, I decided that it was worth the risk that you need to do things that sometimes seem scary or unpredictable or absolutely crazy in order to follow where God wants you. And for me that meant leaving university and pursuing this as my life's calling and passion. But it honestly didn't take me very long to realize that this was going to be a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. While all sorts of other responsibilities in my life were flaring up like other work I had and family responsibilities, I tried to dedicate every spare moment to pursuing this dream of making content and writing and filming. I love the work, it was so fun, it was so fulfilling creatively. But as time went on, I encountered a harsh reality. The algorithm was never satisfied. No matter how much I wrote, how much I shot, how much I edited, how much I put out there and released, it was never enough. And not only that, but at this point, my anxiety and fear were a constant companion in all the creative endeavors that I was aspiring towards. My fear and anxiety would tell me this is never going to work. In those early days, my identity was so tied to the views and the followers and the Patreon subscribers. It was so tied up into who I was, so every time a video didn't do well or a piece of social media content didn't actually strike a chord with people, I felt so debilitated and sad, honestly, like it was it was depressing sometimes. But honestly, each time I encountered that disappointment and discouragement, it honestly motivated me more to keep going, to put in longer hours and work harder to actually make something of myself. So I continued on with the affirmation of social media productivity gurus and entrepreneurs online that said hustle hard because that's what it takes to make it. And I believe them. People talk about the hustle, but then you're talking about your six o'clock, you know, happy hour drink or your video game or this and that. And here we are on holidays and everybody's going to their holiday party. And I've got one meeting coming up right now, two meetings after that, we're giving all my email. And so while everybody's drinking some eggnog, I continue to hustle. Unfortunately, motivational talks from Tony Robbins and Hustle Culture podcast by Gary V only work for so long before you actually stop getting rejuvenation from them and you just burn out. Then fear and anxiety would come right back and pull me out again back into the work. But that wasn't the only thing. I felt guilty for going out for socializing for spending time with my family for volunteering at church because I was quote unquote wasting my time when I should have been hustling at my dream job because at that point, even though I was putting so much effort and time into making content and pursuing that dream job, I felt so empty and sad because I had stripped away all the meaningful things in my life that brought me joy and that I was actually passionate about as well. I've noticed that Hustle Culture feeds on three things. Guilt, fear and greed. Guilt, I feel like I'm not doing enough. I feel like I'm not working hard enough. You might have experienced this too. It's a Sunday afternoon. You're sitting on your couch. You've set this time aside to rest and recuperate. You may be watching a movie or some TV and all of a sudden you feel this deep guilt within you because you're not being productive or you're not getting things done. Even though you've set this time aside to establish balance in your life, you still feel that guilt and Hustle Culture thrives on that guilt. Fear, we push ourselves beyond what is reasonable because we fear falling behind our peers or we fear not being able to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. Greed, I've fallen into this too. You want to make more money. You want to get more followers. You're greedy for that next step, that next dose of material possessions or validation or whatever else that may be. For me, it was a little bit of each one of these ingredients that made a poisonous concoction. So what did I do? Well, I knew there needed to be a change in my life and it needed to come quick. But honestly, what was I going to do? Just cut back on everything and not achieve my dream. I knew that I needed to work extra hard in order to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. But there had to be balance somewhere, a meaningful, healthy life that incorporated both hustle and rest. Here's what I believe to be true. God placed us on this earth to live every moment for him. And I used to think that that means that we always need to be working. But honestly, he gave us this earth to enjoy his good gifts, his good blessings. So yes, that means that we're working hard when it's time to work. But it also means that we're enjoying family, fellowship, food, all these, you know, alliteration there. Hey, you know, we're enjoying the good things that he's given us. And that's good. And that's right. With all that in mind, and I hope you've enjoyed hearing my story a little bit, here are five things that I did to break free from this toxic hustle culture mentality. First thing, set specific boundaries with your work. For me, that means no working on Sundays. I work for myself quite a bit at the time. And so that means I'm able to organize my schedule for you might be a little bit harder if you have kind of a weird work schedule, or it's less predictable, but try as best you can to set aside a day or an evening or something like that where you can intentionally rest. And even when you experience that guilt or the fear of falling behind, you can tell yourself, no, like this is important time where I need to be intentional, just as intentional as I am with getting my work done to be productive. I need to be intentional about getting my rest in so I can be effective and efficient in the God in the ways that God wants me to be to prioritize intentional action over busy work all the time. When I experienced this guilt, even if I don't have something to do, I'll figure out something to do all make up work for myself so that I can ease that guilt. This is not a good thing to do. You got to confront that guilt straight on and say, Hey, look, I don't have to be working now, because it's way better than to do that than to just make up random tasks that aren't actually that important. Because to you're going to wear yourself out. When there is something important to do, you won't have enough energy to do it. So that's second thing that's been really helpful for me. Number three, and I'm not super good at this yet, but create a life outside of the hustle, join a knitting club, join a volleyball team, play the guitar, you know, like to play the guitar. I think I want to, you know, take singing lessons. I think that would be pretty fun. But I'm trying to be intentional about taking these steps to establish somewhat of a life. Like I kind of take it as, you know, my personal joke that I have no life, but honestly, the joke kind of gets old. And so taking those steps, figure out some other activities that you can do. Number four is focus on fostering three to four friendships a month. And I know what you're saying. Isaac, I don't have that many friendships that I can, you know, I have to meet up with people that often. And if that's the case, look, ask somebody out for coffee from church, somebody that seems interesting. Look, if it doesn't work out, you guys don't click, it's all good, you know, try and reach out to some people that are your age and maybe in your same kind of space of career or passion, or maybe not, maybe they're totally different. It's also just rejuvenating to get the perspective of somebody else and help you get out of your own skin and your own thoughts about what you got to do and how you're going to, you know, progress your life into somebody else. And what are they doing with their life and how can you pour into their life? Number five, learning to say, no, there are a lot of good things you can do with your time. A lot of good opportunities that you can take on. But there's so much freedom in learning when to say, no, yes, it's important to be discerning and not just say no to everything and, you know, catch yourself off from the world. But it's really great to be able to say, hey, like, this is good. And I think, you know, what you guys are doing over there is great or whatever, if it's like an opportunity to serve somewhere or, you know, take on a role, you're like, hey, that's awesome. And you don't have to think it's bad just to say, no, you can think it's awesome, but you're like, that's not for me because you got to guard your time. You don't want to burn yourself out because you're so ineffective. If you do that, believe me, I know. And when you're in that space of just saying yes to everything, all of a sudden, everything becomes a burden. Everything becomes a chore as opposed to joyfully approaching each opportunity, each place of service, each area where you want to be productive with joy and excitement and exuberance because you've properly allotted your time. Establishing boundaries was an essential step I took in breaking free from hustle culture. When I recognize what I truly valued and what I wanted to intentionally pursue in my life, it became that much more easy to say no to things that didn't align and break free from the guilt and fear and shame and greed that was trying to coax me back into hustle culture but rather to use these things that God has given me for his glory and that was enough. This video was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon. If you enjoyed it and enjoyed the content that I make on here, I'd ask you to consider heading to the link in my bio and signing up on Patreon. It is only because of your guys' support that I can continue to make this content and helping people follow Jesus daily. If you enjoyed this video, give it a like down below and subscribe because I'm putting out new videos all the time. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you next time. God bless.