For us, the hustle is doing the hard work, the longer, harder, faster, stronger kinda thing (thanks, Kanye). The Gary Vee style.
Compare this to the following bliss thing aka follow your passion and going with the flow thing. PLUS the idea that if you follow your bliss and you don’t really work.
The funny thing about quitting the job to create a business out of your bliss is that the bliss becomes the job. You put yourself in a position where you NEED to do all the things, especially if you’re low on cash and cash flow. This was definitely us when we first started (and probably every other entrepreneur… cash flow? What cash flow. Hehe bad joke).
Following your passion doesn’t mean you don’t work. You’ll probably work harder than ever… but the key difference is that you want to do the work.
Some obvious tasks that suck are: tax stuff, accounts (WTAF), book keeping, emails, networking, speaking, social media (yes, this even feels like a task sometimes!), writing, content creation, cooking, photography and website updates and WordPress stuff.
Oh wait, we just listed almost every task we do because guess what…
sometimes you actually just don’t feel like doing any of your passion-driven work.
Netflix and the couch calls louder or coffee or cafe lunches (you get the picture and couches are just so comfy).
And yes, sometimes we hate our bliss and we say bring on a deserted island with zero technology and no huge goals or to-do lists. Where is the ‘run away and hide’ option?!
Then other days it will be like “This rocks, I rock, I’m gonna dominate this to do list today like Beyonce”.
And this is exactly the craziness you can feel when you quit the normal. When you quit the weekly salary. When you quit the job to follow your bliss and get your hustle on.
Well… we do anyway.
The hustle life vs. the follow your bliss life.
These work/life methods (not sure if life and method should ever be next to each other in a sentence) helped us self-publish 6 eBooks, 2 hard copy books, publish hundreds of recipes and blog posts, create a podcast with 0ver 80 episodes, create a recipe app that went to #1 in the Aussie app store on day 1. We’ve been given speaking opportunities in front of thousands of people and we’ve travelled to a bunch of countries all around the world.
These working methods have helped us to positively impact millions of people who have visited this very site (oh hello… maybe you’re one of them? Yay!). They’ve given us new friendships and magical relationships. They’ve allowed us to discover and learn so much about ourselves.
By following our bliss(es) and hustling we quit the soul-sucking jobs we hated to discover and create lives we love.
We wouldn’t be where we are without first learning about Joeseph Campbell’s philosophy of following your bliss. There’s no way we would’ve quit our secure jobs, with no savings, no plan, no strategy.
All we had was this faith, this weird-as ‘knowing’. We got this faith from being 100% woo-woo and 100% believing that we had to follow our passions, we owed it to ourselves and the whole entire world. We even picked angel cards and they said ‘It’s time to go’. Uh yeah… we told you, woo-woo!
Sometimes we look back to those days and think we were slightly (or extremely) delusional. Maybe we were?! But who really cares? It all worked out!
We also wouldn’t be where we are today without discovering the hustle mindset. That sometimes you just gotta go that extra mile and work when you don’t really want to. Work when it does not feel magical or flowing. Just get all the stuff done!
The one thing we’ve learnt is that there is no wrong or right way.
There is YOUR way.
It’s important to work how you want to work. If you want to go with the flow today… GO WITH THE FLOW. If you want to work a 16 hour day today and get your hustle on… do it!
Just make sure you are working how YOU want to work and that it’s actually working in your favour.
This is where it can get confusing, coz actually working 14-16 hours every day may be your style and you might love it… but your health won’t. Hello adrenal fatigue and burn out.
You might want to go with the flow every single day and only do the work that makes your heart sing. But, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, you will need to do the work you don’t really want to do or you’ll need to pay someone else to do it and that brings us back to the cash flow thing (the non-existent thing sometimes! So adding a wage to that… uh, no).
Work how you want to work. But remember the way you work will impact every single aspect of your life. Your health, your relationships, your happiness, your mood, your energy, your bank account, your love of life itself.
We’re grateful for many things but we gotta say starting our business in the world of health was a huge win for us.
Studying to be health coaches along with building our online business was the biggest reminder that this whole life thing is not just about building a successful biz and impacting the masses.
(Related: get more info and a sample class with IIN here)
It’s about creating happiness within, finding people to share it with, living for as long and as healthy as possible, giving back to people less privileged and realising that this is it.
We all got here randomly (or we were chosen, whatever you wanna think and believe) and we will leave randomly.
We know this is a kinda yuck thought, that one day we’ll all be star dust (or reincarnated, or in heaven, or dirt, or again, whatever you wanna believe)… but maybe we need to think about this every so often to remind ourselves to live each day how we want to live. To work how we want to work. To be grateful. To be love. To be ourselves.
Always merrymaking,
Emma + Carla
P.s yay to following your bliss and hustling.
Pp.s Feature image and couch image via Unsplash. Merries image via Rialba.