Redefining Hustle: Striking a Balance Between Hard Work and Healthy Living (Episode 8)

George B. Thomas (00:03):
You say you think a lot of people do it deprogramming. I would challenge that fact. I don't think people understand how to deprogram. You'll hear people talk about on the internet, there's just search, inspirational, motivational videos or YouTube channel, whatever, whatever. Just search it. You'll know I'm not coming up with anything new right now, but it is something that impacted the crap out of me personally. You have a phone, you love that phone, you carry that phone everywhere and for most of you, as soon as that phone gets that little red dot where you can update it and change it and bring it to the latest and greatest thing it can be you upgrade that bad boy faster than, I mean you're making head spin. I got to find a charger. I got to be above 50%. I got to upgrade my software. When's the last time you upgraded your brain software? When's the last time you went to version 15 of your life?

Liz Moorehead (01:09):
Welcome back to Beyond Your Default. I'm Liz Moorhead, and as always, I am joined by the one, the only, George B. Thomas. How the heck are you this morning,

George B. Thomas (01:18):
Liz? I'm hustling. No, I'm just kidding. I'm doing good. I'm ready to talk about this conversation. It's something that I've been wanting to unpack for a long time. When I started to use two words together, it was interesting, the questions that people had, the thoughts that they immediately jumped to, and I'm really ready to battle against a culture that is still out there but maybe starting to erode a little bit. Plus I think it's just confusing. Anyway, that was long-winded to say, I'm excited and I'm ready.

Liz Moorehead (01:52):
I also love how you teased us out a little bit. I bet our listeners in there right now are like, what? He's going to battle. What's he going to battle for? What's going on here? Man? Well, you kind of teased it. You teased it a little bit in your answer because today we're talking about the idea, the concept of the hustle have baby. And what I'm really excited about for today's conversation, and I'm going to encourage our listeners who may be feeling a little bit burned out on the too hustle versus not to hustle debate. This is a bit of a horse of a different color. This is not your traditional, I'm standing up against the hustle, anti hustle. In fact, I'd say quite the contrary. We're talking more about balance today and restoring a little bit of sanity. But George, let's start today's conversation. I'm just going to ask this. As someone who's known you for a number of years, you have been a hustler for as long as I've known you. And what was interesting when we started preparing for this episode is you talked about the fact that yes, that is true and at a point it turned unhealthy for you. And so I'd love for you to tell us about that. What made your relationship with the hustle unhealthy? What was the inflection point? Take us to that.

George B. Thomas (03:06):
Yeah, I mean, first of all, we have to realize, and I do want to level set, I am going to get to your question, Liz, but I feel like we need to level set and get rid of some confusion around there because there is literally this thing that is the hustle culture, which by the way, if you ask most mere mortal human beings, they'll be like, oh yeah, it's the hustle culture. It's 1990s, it's Gary V, and actually it started back in the seventies with industrial revolution of like, we need people to work faster, harder, longer because we've got to get all these widgets off of this conveyor belt. And so hustle culture has been around for a long time, but what I'll even say about it is that there was a period where it became this positive thing. And Liz, I'm super confused because I think hustle actually.

It's just what I talk about and what we're going to talk about. I fundamentally want the listeners to know that I'm talking about hard work. That's what I'm talking about because I'm not sure how hustle or hustling or a hustler, you even referenced that and even sang a little bit of a song there for a second. You're welcome, got a positive connotation or could be a thing that somebody would aspire to because words matter and if you start to break down words, right? So let's do this for a second. A hustler, an aggressively enterprising person, a go-getter, alternate to that, a prostitute hustling. I'm sorry, force. Yeah, yeah, it's in there. You can go to the dictionary, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not making this up. Hustling force someone to move hurriedly, unceremoniously in specified directions obtained by forceful action or persuasion, hustle, busy movement and activity, a fraud or swindle.

In all three of those words, there's nothing that says that means you're a baller, that you're making tons of money and you're uber successful on social media. None of that, which what by the way, the hustle culture leans into is like, oh, I want to be like so-and-So you got to rise and grind, baby, hustle your face off. And so what I want everybody to know when we're talking about a healthy hustle, we're talking about healthy hard work. That's the words that I want people to understand because your original question, Liz, was I've always been a, and I'm using air quotes for those of you are listening, I've always been a hustler As long as you've known me, man, this might have been an unhealthy part of me for most of my life because it just eroded so many things when I was hustling too much and I didn't do enough with my life when I wasn't hustling at all.

You see, that's the problem with this healthy hustle as we kind move forward in this. It's all about kind of trying to find the middle, because usually there's kind of two directions. You're either not a hustler, AK, a somewhat maybe kind of lazy and complacent in the default, or you're a hustler and you end up finding yourself in the hospital because you were doing 18 hours a day, a pot of coffee, all of that stuff. And so we talked about it, but Liz, when I was wheeled out in a stretcher to the ambulance and I looked back at my wife and I said, I don't have time for this. I have a meeting in 10 minutes. You have reached a whole new level of unhealthy hustle at that

Liz Moorehead (06:42):
Point. Yeah, that's not okay.

George B. Thomas (06:43):
Yes, you have bought into the hustle culture, lock, stock and barrel, and at that point you might ask yourself, Ooh, maybe this isn't exactly what it is. And by the way, this is the point when I had three and a half days in the hospital and I started to unpack a lot of the ways that I think about things in my life, and one of them was hustle versus just plain and simple. Are you a hard worker and do you have boundaries around the work that you do?

Liz Moorehead (07:16):
Let's dig into this a little bit more because I love, as someone who is also a word nerd, I love when we get specific. I love when we start thinking about the definitions of words and what they truly mean and to hear you talk about your definition of working hard. When I think about the George, I've always known it was really kind of erring on that side, right? You're a guy who believes in hard work, but my curiosity here is when did it go to the extreme? What happened? When did that relationship shift for you?

George B. Thomas (07:47):
Yeah, thanks, Gary. V, I'm just going to be honest. In 2012, I heard Gary V speak at inbound. I started to watch his content, listen to his tutelage if you will, and started to listen to all of the folks that were rise and grind in the different sayings that happened, and so by 2014, I was well on my way without knowing it to this future major catastrophic event that I would have in the closet that we've talked about. But here's the thing, I think that it was always there. I think that it's there for everybody because when I think about this idea of where does hustling for me come from? By the way, just know this is different for everybody. My curiosity is have you asked yourself where do the things that you do come from? Many times I find we don't do that, but this is going to be different for everyone, but my growing up showed me that it's about hustle.

I have two dads. One dad was a logger in Lincoln, Montana, a ranch hand for farmers in Montana, worked for the US Navy, the US Postal Service. It was all about hard work on a whole nother level. My other dad worked at a steel mill for 30 plus years, hot, big, massive hammers like pounding out these metal. I've worked there before, by the way. It's one of the scariest jobs I've ever had in my life. But once I worked there, I realized I could work anywhere and do any job ever that I want, but for 30 plus years, right? Grinding it out, doing overtime many times to make ends meet. So just seeing these father figures, and even my grandpa, I think I told the story of my grandpa, he got out of the hospital from having a neck vein surgery and he's raking tile in his driveway.

The day that he got all the men, all the women, actually, I'll just say family growing up, all the family, they were just workers. Blue collar down and dirty. Trying to survive hours equals money. The more you work, the more you make the better life. Hey, this is what you're trying to achieve, son. You want to become successful, you want to become rich, then you won't have the problems that we have. By the way, there's a whole nother set of problems trying to get there and a whole nother set of problems once you reach there. But I started this with thanks, Gary V because that's what turned up. It took this bed of information that I hadn't been fed growing up for my family, and it was like somebody took a blow torch to the kindling that was laying there and was like, this is what I'm supposed to do. Let's go. Let's go. I can sleep four hours and work 18, like, oh, as long as I get two seconds to go to the bathroom, I'm good to go.

Liz Moorehead (10:59):
We've talked a bit about the physical toll here and what you talked about here really leads me into one of the biggest questions I had today because it's all about the mindset, the mentality, what's happening in our brain, how we program our brain, right? Because you alluded to a story that's come up on previous episodes about, and one that happened very recently. I remember getting that text from your wife and my world stopped. It was terrifying. But aside from your physical health, we need to talk about the mental health side of this. What role does your mental health play now and how you view your relationship with hustling and has that changed?

George B. Thomas (11:41):
It's definitely changed. Here's the thing, when I think about this, what I think about it mentally is that I had lost focus. I had lost on truly what was important in life. Relationships weren't that great. Spending time, even designing some type of life's plan wasn't that great. Spending time spiritually on things that I should have been doing, not that great. When you get into this mode, it is affecting your physical body, but it's affecting your brain because it's almost like you're not giving yourself to think because it's just to do do the next thing. And what's funny is it's all based off of my measurement of what success would look like, and the measurement of success was pointed in the wrong direction, and so I was eroding my brain. I was eroding my body, I was eroding my relationship because everything was about the hustle. Everything was about getting as much done as fast as humanly possible. Here's the funny thing, if you ask me how much, by the way, let me just start here. The years between 2012 and like 2016, 2017 magical years for building a brand and becoming who I would need to be in the future life that I have. If you ask me how much of it I remember, not a whole lot. Not a whole lot, because it was just to do, to do.

There wasn't a pause to take what was being done and import it into the memory banks to recall it, to segment it, to dissect it, to learn from it. It felt like I was just on this conveyor belt of life.

Liz Moorehead (13:48):
How does it feel now though in retrospect, looking at that time period and going, man, what a ride. I wish I could remember it.

George B. Thomas (13:56):
Yeah, so a, I'm thankful for it because without it, I don't know where I would be. I don't know if I'd be here right now, but I wish that I could have done it a little bit differently, meaning I wish I could do it like I'm doing now with more focus, with more guardrails, with challenging myself against the status quo of what people say has to happen again. Back then, status quo was hustle, culture, work, your face off, rise and grind. I'll never forget when I actually left agency life or working for other people and was going to start my own business. I'll never forget that somebody said to me, good luck. You won't be able to take a vacation. That made me angry because I knew I was making the decision that I was making because I wanted to have a different style of life for me and my family.

I wanted to set my own rules, and one of those rules was to give our life the pause, the space, the freedom that I felt that it deserved, and to hear somebody say good luck. I literally challenged myself of like, you know what? I am not going to fall prey again like I did with hustle culture into this thing. I have been talking about healthy hustle. Let me put my money where my mouth is. And so literally, I think I had been in business for maybe three months and I went on a week's vacation with my family. I've made sure that almost once every quarter since we've been in business, I've taken five to 10 days and gone on vacation with my family. I've made sure that when it hits 5 30, 6 o'clock on 90% of the days I am walking out of my office because I'm going to go spend time with my family or I'm going to go have downtime by myself or whatever that looks like, but I try to put rules in place where you have this much time.

If you work that extra two hours, you're going to be burnt anyway, so it's probably going to be counterproductive, and that's the thing. If you start to think of life and yourself as this, well-oiled machine, think about a vehicle six cylinder, eight cylinder hustle. Culture is very much one cylinder firing all the time, but what about the other six or eight cylinders that you need to fire in life? How do you have enjoyment? Here's a question that I would ask the listeners right now. I need you to be honest with yourself because you should be enjoying your life right now. Do you have a hobby? Simple question. Do you have a hobby or do you have a side hustle? Because there's a big difference. A hobby equals something you enjoy to do, enjoy. Most likely a side hustle for you. Just if we're being honest with each other equals more work. Do you have a hobby? Do you have a time or a place that you just go sit down and don't do and just think or just be? By the way, that's probably a whole episode of just be,

Liz Moorehead (16:59):
I like to call that potato time, and it's funny, you and I came from the same background, right? The same agency's lifestyle, and I remember when you and I first started working together, you were very kind as I went through kind of my deprogramming, which I think is something a lot of people go through, where you actually sit there for a moment and you actually struggle to do what you just talked about. There's the guilt. I should be doing something, I'm not working, what should I be doing? And you almost have to reestablish your norms around when you're on and when you're off.

George B. Thomas (17:31):
Here's the problem though, Liz, I got to jump in here. You say you think a lot of people do it deprogramming. I would challenge that fact. I don't think people understand how to deprogram. You'll hear people talk about on the internet, there's like just search, inspirational, motivational videos or YouTube channel, whatever, whatever. Just search it. You'll know I'm not coming up with anything new right now, but it is something that impacted the crap out of me personally. You have a phone, you love that phone, you carry that phone everywhere, and for most of you, as soon as that phone gets that little red dot where you can update it and change it and bring it to the latest and greatest thing it can be you upgrade that bad boy faster than, I mean, you're making head spin. I got to find a charger. I got to be above 50%.

I got to upgrade my software. When's the last time you upgraded your brain software? When's the last time you went to version 15 of your life? Deprogramming and reprogramming, the way that you believe the structures of your life. That's more important than upgrading your phone. That's more important than rising and grinding. That's more than hustling your face off. You have to realize though how special you are, how important you are, how much of a key piece of the world you are and can be, but you've got to step into that. You've got to deprogram reprogram, upgrade yourself so that you can be in the spaces and places that God wants you to be that the universe wants you to be so that you can help and change and become the catalyst. If you're on a conveyor belt, if you're one cylinder firing, you ain't helping nobody in real deep levels.

Sure, surface levels. I helped a lot of people. 2000 tutorials helped a bunch of people, but I bet you it didn't help them as much as me slowing down, putting boundaries in place and creating this podcast will actually impact people's lives. See, here's the thing. Earlier, Liz, I mentioned that my measurement to success was off. My direction to success was off. One of the things that fundamentally I've changed by this deprogramming, reprogramming and updating is I'm actually not chasing success anymore, which means hustle. Culture doesn't fit. I'm chasing significance and for significance, I need long-term and for long-term, I need to be healthy because I need this vessel and this engine to run as long as humanly possible because significance is a never ending, never reach it, but always trying to obtain it game, and that's what I'm down for.

Liz Moorehead (20:29):
When we think about deprogramming, when we think about reestablishing norms, when we think about all of these little nuggets of fire, you've just been dropping, a word comes to mind that I think is very critical to this process, and that word is boundaries. So I'd be curious from you, you've already touched upon some of the boundaries that you set, like if it's X time, I'm making sure I'm doing this, or I'm at least away from here and dah, dah, dah, dah. But I would be curious to hear from you, what are your thoughts on boundaries and do you still struggle to set and keep them? You and I are both sitting here both knowing, hey, we feel a lot better with our relationship with hustle, but you and I both sometimes have what I like to call a relapse. We have those

George B. Thomas (21:16):
Moments,

Liz Moorehead (21:17):
We dip our toe back in the well, and we have to go, whoa, whoa, Nelly. So talk to me about that. Talk to me about your relationship with your boundaries.

George B. Thomas (21:24):
Well, a couple things. One, I don't necessarily view it as a relapse. I view it as it's a tool that I know I have that when I need to pull it out, I can hustle my face off, I can grind. I can go into that mode, but I have to be very careful to pull back and go back to what I know I'm supposed to be doing. See, that's the thing. Many times as humans, we always kind of put a negative connotation to something. Now, don't get me wrong, there have been times in this journey where I have just fallen back into it. I didn't use it as a tool, but I need to say that you can have something, and it doesn't mean that you need to fully eradicate it. You just need to put it in its place. Give it the boundary and understand it's a tool that you can pull out and use.

But to go to your original question list, I struggle with this all the time. All the time, and here's the thing, I think the, the magic word is boundaries, but the word that has to be attached to that, the mindset that has to be attached to the boundaries is that you must always be challenging yourself. George, why are you doing this belly? Why are you doing that, Susie? Is this actually what you should be doing? Is this what you should be thinking? Challenging yourself and challenging the status quo? I've said that earlier in this episode, but definitely challenging yourself and when you challenge yourself, giving yourself the opportunity to research and the reimagine what you do with the research that you just gained for your life. So I am always trying to figure out how do I keep these boundaries in place? I'm always trying to diagnose, have I let the boundaries slip out of place, which I know there are a couple that I'm like, I really need to get those back in place, and I keep talking about them, and I just need to do it.

But here's the thing. What most people will do is they'll again, try to go into this, how do I explain this? Most people are very binary ones and zeros, black and white. That's what it is. What that leads to is it leads to these kind of peaks and valleys, if you will. And so Liz, when I think about boundaries, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to lessen the peaks, and I'm trying to lessen the valleys, meaning I'm trying to create a life that is just this nice straight, flat stretch that I can just hit the gas, not in a like we're going sixty five, eighty five, a hundred ten miles an hour, but a Sunday drive looking at the trees, feeling the breeze drive. And so one of the things that I love, because I've done some traveling, is there's a highway in North Dakota, highway 46. It's actually the flattest straight stretch of road that goes for 120 miles.

Do you have 120 mile road in your life? Do you have a flat stretch planned out? Have you done everything that you can do to eradicate the peaks and valleys emotionally, the peaks and valleys, relationally, the peaks and valleys professionally, the peaks and valleys professionally, right? Think about the matrix that we've talked about before, like finances, spiritual relationship, all those things. And what are you doing every day to decrease the peaks and decrease the valleys and having more straight line stretch that you can enjoy the pace at which you're going. And in that, by the way, you're starting to focus on healthy, and I'm going to throw another word that we're probably going to start to talk about more in a holistic way that you're working hard or in today's culture in some weird positive connotation, hustling.

Liz Moorehead (25:24):
This leads me nicely into my next question, and I always appreciate how you do that. By the way, I always appreciate how, I don't think you're, you're welcome doing it, but you always just team me up so beautifully. But here's what I find fascinating about this whole conversation is that you could have very easily through the summary of your experience lapsed into the other binary construct here in this debate, which is anti just full anti anti hustles, anti anti, anti, anti. And yet you have not done that. And I want to be very clear that if you're listening here and you're someone who considers themselves anti hussle, that is absolutely fine. There is room for gray in these conversations. But George, I want to hear from you personally with the anti Hussle movement, so alive and well based on generations of people who are quite frankly very burned out because we had that stretch in the 2000 tens of hustle being really put forward, and then the pandemic, I think forced a lot of people to reevaluate the role that work plays in their lives. But what makes you more interested in redefining hustle as opposed to shoving it out the door?

George B. Thomas (26:34):
Yeah, I think first of all, if we go back to the very beginning of this episode, and the way that I'm defining hustle is hard work, anti hard work just doesn't make any sense. When you're working, work hard. Give yourself, give your employer, there's a scripture. Everything you do do unto him. I've got a saying, work hard, play hard, anti hustles or in my brain, anti hard work makes no sense at all because it's not about being against something. It's about manufacturing the scenarios in a way that these things work best for you and best for those around you. If all of a sudden I stopped working hard, stopped hustling, my clients would feel it, my bank would feel it, my family would feel it, I would feel it, and what would immediately happen knowing that it was taking this course, I would start to over index and feel like I have to work 18 hours a day and sleep four to get back to where if I just work hard when I'm supposed to work hard and play hard when I'm supposed to play, I've got the balance.

I'm enjoying what's happening. The thing, the other piece of this, I think anti hussle is dangerous because it gives your brain a way to escape of like, oh, well, they're foolish. I'm smart. I'm just going to do it. Now all of a sudden, we're talking about dividing people. Anything anti pro or anti, I have worked so hard in my life in so many ways to not be a polarizing, separating type human, and as soon as you go into this pro or anti, now you're ripping into two different cultures, and I'm saying that doesn't need to happen. There's a happy medium. It's not a one. It's not a zero. There's a middle ground that we all could be rolling in. There's a middle ground that we can meet in. Listen, for me, anti hustles, I get scared. I just don't even know how I would be able to live in a world that I wasn't coming and trying to give my best, which by the way, when I think about hard work, I feel like it's just me giving my best, laying it all out on the floor, half-assing your life.

Are you showing up as a half-ass human, or are you whole assing your life and are you showing up as a whole ass human? These are questions that only you can ask yourself, but if you're trying to get to this point that is beyond the default, a culture that you're part of shouldn't be costing or come at the cost of your own relationships. It shouldn't come at the cost of your own mental health. It shouldn't come at the cost of your spiritual health, your physical health. It shouldn't come at the cost of your own life. Have a meeting in 10 minutes. I don't have time for this, but the anti side of this also isn't that you're sitting on the couch, you're collecting some sort of some money from somewhere that you did nothing for, and you're just wondering, why am I even here? What am I even doing? Get up, run the race, work hard and design it in a way that it's healthy for you, for your relationships, for your health, for your spirituality, for you as a physical human being trying to navigate this planet.