Hustling Quotes

“The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“It is good to stay in a peaceful poverty than to stay in a painful wealth.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I'm here to tell niggas it ain't all swell.
There's Heaven then there's Hell niggas
One day your cruisin' in your seven,
Next day your sweatin', forgettin' your lies,
Alibis ain't matchin' up, bullshit catchin' up
Hit with the RICO, they repoed your vehicle
Everything was all good just a week ago
'Bout to start bitchin' ain't you?
Ready to start snitchin' ain't you?
I forgive you. Weak ass, hustlin' just ain't you
Aside from the fast cars
Honeys that shake they ass in bars
You know you wouldn't be involved
With the Underworld dealers, carriers of mac-millers
East coast bodiers, West coast cap-peelers
Little monkey niggas turned gorillas.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“I'm an entrepreneur."

"Entrepreneur?" Pepper said the last part like manure. "That's just a hustler who pays taxes.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“If you're an entrepreneur, I encourage you to have meaningful conversations with other entrepreneurs and with all kinds of people working in all kinds of industries. With time, this will give you greater clarity about how the world works and you'll start to have more of an eye for business opportunities.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.”
― William Kennedy, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“Who told these people with dreams, goals and ambitions they could take time off?”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“If you're not a smart worker, it's about how hard you work double the amount from the heart; if you're not a hard worker, it's about how smart you work but times two from the brain.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The book ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000-hour theory–that almost anyone can master a skill if they dedicate 10,000 hours to it. The same is true for your side hustle. If you put in the right hours–into the right places–then you can build a successful side hustle, too.

The rate at which you put these hours in is up to you. Yes, if you go slower, then it will take longer. But compared to your other option–doing nothing at all–what’s the hurry?

Here’s the tried and true technique I use to put the necessary time into any new project without overwhelming myself:

Set aside 20 minutes–no more!–every single day to work on your project, and protect those 20 minutes with everything you have. Never let anything get in the way of this time.”
― Rebecca Scott, Hustling 101: Selling your Talents without Selling your Soul

“A good hustler isn't curious. A good hustler only wants his pay.”
― Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

“Life curses some poor people with the love of luxury, while it blesses some with the very same thing.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If our society remember the iconic people by they hard work and self effort impacting our community, so I can consider myself as one of them because you will remember how hard I've been working to make it till there.”
― Amen Muffler

“As a winner, learn not to let negative comments affect you. Just treat it as firewood that feeds your fire. Soon that fire will be so big and so bright that those who criticized you will smell the smoke, even if they happen to be on the other side of the world.”
― Kevin Abdulrahman, THE BOOK on What Ever You're Into: These are the 52 Timeless Winning Truths you Need To Know to have a chance at Winning

“Act and fail, but don’t fail to act.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Productivity is now sold as a lifestyle. People hustle away and grind for the sake of grinding. New calendars. New dry erase markers. New journals. But when they write in advanced journals, they write of goals and next steps— never of thoughts and secrets. When they write of goals, their goals are to have more goals. So you abandon the empty castle that is productivity and enter the little cottage of your funny heart.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“There are days when the loneliness eats me like cancer and I can´t find one single reason to keep running, keep searching, hustling, creating. But deep inside this mind of mine, I know. I always know. And there is no turning back. There is no alternative. This is the place I´ve been given and been made for, and someone´s got to fill it. So you need to ask yourself: will you keep resisting the place you´ve been given, ignore the signs and find excuses for everything, just to get by? Or will you surrender to fate, trust your story and take your place so proud and sure that no one will ever doubt that that place was made for you and you only, like it in fact was?”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“An empty stomach will teach you lessons a full stomach can’t.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“A patient dog will have no bone to eat because other dogs have eaten”
― Ojo Michael E.

“Crackheads were different. They’d smoke in hallways, on playgrounds, on subway station suitcases. They got no respect. They were former neighbors, ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’, but once they started smoking, they were simply crackheads, the lowest on the food chain in the jungle, worse than prostitutes and almost as bad as snitches.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school drop-outs are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did. And they inevitably move into more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Africa’s hopeful transformation lies in entrepreneurship”
― Nicky Verd

“A little bit of rest can go a long way.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo