We have hustle culture all wrong.

To be abundantly clear, I want to use this platform to breathe life into the questions that I have wrestled with my entire life. I am, in real time, deciding exactly what it is I want to offer the world, and what gifts lie within me that are calling my name to be actualized. But within that pursuit is a battle between intrinsically motivated self-actualization, and a rat race within ourselves that will never end.

Recently, I’ve had a cataclysmic actualization of the thoughts that have been spinning around in my head. Aside from growing up in this kind of society, my family is genetically inclined to be ambitious and entrepreneurial. I despised going to college and paying so much money for an education I could seek out on my own, so I made my own. But in doing so, I had to face all of the struggles I had with concepts all too familiar in hustle culture. I was convinced that procrastination and a lack of self-discipline were why I couldn't perform at my best, both as a student and a human being. I flooded myself with commentaries and blogs online to try to fill this hole inside of me that said, "You'll find the solution in the next click."

While this led me to become positively passionate about research surrounding our biological nature surrounding achievement and success, it also showed me that all of that emptiness I felt wasn't because of a lack of success/being. It was, rather, that it had been drilled into my head from every possible output in my life that I constantly needed improvement. My desire to rest was lazy; the way I didn't like certain subjects was lazy; et cetera.

Ironically, I started a company this year that specializes in helping people master these things (procrastination and self-discipline) to pursue their goals—but I genuinely thought that I was set apart because I wanted people to use what we know about the human mind (flow theory, intrinsic motivation, etc) to conquer these things instead of a new list of hacks that may or may not work (and also just address the symptom). But the entire time, something still felt off about this.

Because even though this helps people understand why they do what they do (and don't do what they don't do), it still doesn't address why we have these obscene goals in the first place. You're not exactly worried about that when you're about to get fired from a job for not performing, or when you have put off all your college assignments and desperately need help getting back on track. But there is something deeper here that creators in my niche have ignored: that it's more about "finding balance," "fulfillment," and "self-discipline." It's about rewriting our pursuits from the ground up in a way that is biologically sound, and not socially twisted.

How different would our pursuits be if we lived in the middle of nowhere with no access to the internet, without a New Year's resolution in sight?

I'm surrounded by other money-obsessed entrepreneurs, and I can see this greed in them that far supersedes what we need to be fulfilled, happy, or safe. I don't know the answer, how it will change my business, or what I want to offer the world. The one thing I know is that there IS a positive application of self-improvement in the sense that we are constantly striving to be Christ-like and to fulfill our gifts so that we can serve the world in which we live. But we have twisted that beautiful, simple concept far beyond what it was meant to convey.

As I continue to develop my research-driven products and courses, I think there will be a point in the journey when I finally feel confident to sponsor this narrative in full, and direct people in a way that can truly lead them to fulfillment--not just another few rungs on the (corporate, entrepreneurial, or otherwise) success ladder.

Thanks for listening.

Faithfully yours,

Anneliese Steele Taylor