The Refined Hustle

By Katy Marr

In this world of hustlers, over-achievers, boss babes, and success gurus, it's not hard to feel like our worth is directly tied to our success. There is a resounding message in hustle culture that says if we achieve more, win more, reach a certain level, or obtain a certain status. . . we will finally feel good enough, worthy, and acceptable. My hope is to change that narrative for you. Your goals are absolutely worth pursuing and success is undoubtedly available to you, but I want to debunk the myth that the only option to reach that success is to burn yourself out.

This book is going to help you to filter out the noise of what you "should be doing" and to instead, give yourself the freedom to figure out what you're actually graced to accomplish in life. When you steward your season, prioritize your well-being, and honor your needs, you will reach success and you will be healthy enough to enjoy it.

What you're building with your life matters, and grace will take you places that hustling alone, never could.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosebud Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781737124191

Book preview

CONTENTS

What’s Next? (Introduction)

Hustle Culture

Burnout

Grit and Grace

You Don’t Belong in a Box

Healing the Root

Right Where You Are

I’ll be Happy When...

Steward Your Season

More than enough

Staying Power

Planting Seeds

Surviving to thriving

Send off

Acknowledgments

Introduction

What’s next?

I asked myself this question one month after publishing my first book, sitting in my new studio apartment with boxes still left to be unpacked. I had just gotten to the peak of one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. I became an author. My book, my name, and my story were on Amazon, on bookstore shelves, and a stack of copies was sitting on my desk waiting to be signed and taken to the post office. I moved out. On my own. I found an apartment, submitted the application, passed a credit check, got approved, and moved in. And as I’m sitting here, one day into this adventure of living independently I can’t stop thinking about what’s next.

At this point, I recognize the fact that I am driven by achievement, fueled by goals, and held up on a foundation of accomplishment because this has been the one thing that has given me a sense of worthiness. I alone, was not enough to feel worthy of love and a good life. I needed to accomplish something great and become someone better for that worthiness to kick in. So, I ask myself, what’s next? I couldn’t allow myself to sit still, I needed to keep moving, keep growing, and keep pushing for more and for better. I was aware of how much there was to accomplish in life, and I couldn’t let myself waste any time. I would call myself a goal chaser. And it’s not necessarily because I just love to work, but because I love the results that come with reaching a goal. I loved what it did for my self-image. I loved the way it made me feel worthy, accomplished, admired, and above average.

My whole life I felt average and like I wouldn’t be worthy of anything more than average so to have a life that was better than what I grew up seeing, I became obsessed with how much I could accomplish in as little time as possible. I used goals and accomplishments to offset the wounds of a traumatic past. It became engineered in my mind that if I could accomplish enough and become enough of a successful person I could forget about everything that happened before. I thought that successful people automatically had good lives.

I wanted a good life. Desperately. I wanted people to look at me with admiration, respect, and love. I wanted to inspire people and help influence them to have a good life too. To make good choices instead of destructive ones. To love their family instead of having animosity towards them. I wanted to influence change within my family. I wanted people to look at me and love me and if they could not love me for who I was then maybe they’d love me for what I could accomplish. I was trying to earn love and approval not just from other people, I was trying to earn it from myself too. If I took a day to do anything besides work on my goals and become someone else, I spiraled into anxiety and self-loathing thoughts. I mistakenly took obsessively working on self-improvement and achieving for a healthy way to move on from my broken past.  What I came to find out over the past year or so, is that overworking and correlating success and accomplishment with your self-worth is just about as destructive and unhealthy as any other medicating tactic used to treat the symptoms of our pain instead of the root of it.

The effects of this method of over-achieving don’t set in as quickly. They marinate over time and come up when you least expect it. How could I possibly feel so defeated when I am achieving so many things? We think. I should feel on top of the world, I am kicking butt and taking names. I’m doing the work. I’m making the moves. I’m achieving. What I learned, and this took some time, is that a life of high achievement was a standard that I, alone, put on myself. Nobody put that on me. Nobody ever said, Katy if you don’t become a successful author, move out on your own, make a ton of money and become successful I will not love you. Nobody said I won’t respect and honor you until you accomplish enough things in life. Those, sadly, were beliefs I adopted on my own, and I defended those beliefs with every ounce of energy I had.

When it finally clicked.

Since I was 13, I had been an over-achiever. It was how I delt with the hurt in my life. At 13 I began training myself to be a dancer and this really instilled in my mind the power of accomplishment. It was an outlet for me and gave me a sense of worthiness and greatness. I worked so hard and trained so much, it was like a drug. I became a first-place competitive dancer and this taught me the value of hard work, goals, and discipline. As an 18- to 19-year-old, I started going to business conferences and learning about personal development. I was involved in a business model that very much pushed the message of all work, no rest.

There, I learned things like suck it up and do the work, you can sleep when you’re dead, sacrifice what you want now for what you want in the future, and you don’t accomplish anything by sitting on the couch, the only way you’ll make it is if you go to sleep at 3 and wake up at 5, millionaires don’t rest, no days off. There I learned that extreme effort, obsession, and no days off were what I needed to do to have a life of value. I got to the point where this mindset of hype up, don’t rest, don’t stop was no longer serving me in this business so I took that mindset somewhere else. But bringing this same approach to different opportunities gave me the same results.

New mindsets were birthed from this experience like the thought that I needed to become a millionaire. At the time, I had no idea why I thought I needed to do that. What would I do with that much money? Why was that important to me? I didn’t know. But it was a value I adopted in hopes to become successful and above average. I started about 4 businesses in 2 years trying to figure out how I’d reach those levels of achievement but not really knowing what I wanted to do. I jumped around in many different outlets, started businesses, learned about real-estate investing, wrote a book, wrote another book, stayed in a relationship that wasn’t right hoping to make it successful, and moved into an apartment I could barely afford - all in the name of achievement. All with the intent of creating a life of success and earning love and admiration from others and from myself. There came a point when all the running around, all the side work, the hustling, and the obsession with achieving at a higher level was no longer enough. It sent me into a heaviness that I could not understand.

In my mind, I was doing a lot of things, but I was really just running around in circles with no direction, no inspiration, just an obsession with accomplishment. My achievements fueled my self-worth so I had to keep it up so I wouldn’t get depressed and hate myself. Ironically enough though, it was this workaholic tendency that drove me to an unhealthy point in my life. What I did with feeling so down about myself, so unhealthy, so lost and confused was I just kept working. I kept looking for new things to work on, new projects to start, setting more goals, and imagining my future self and who I wanted to be, and where I wanted to go. There was so much resistance at this point because I had been going and going for years so now, I wasn’t thinking about what I truly wanted in life, in fact, I had no idea who I was or what I wanted at all. All I knew was that I was exhausted, burnt out, and had no inspiration left but I couldn’t stop because that would mean going backward. My mom always told me, you need to slow down. My dad told me that I don’t need to have it all figured out right now and my grandparents told me countless times that I don’t have to focus so hard on achieving something and having it all together. The 4 people closest to me, the 4 people who love me the most, and I wouldn’t listen. Even when my own body was telling me to stop; when my heart was sending a message that enough is enough, I pressed on.

I chose to latch on to the belief that I was only worthy if I was achieving.

I’ve learned to start listening to my body. Even as I sit here writing this, my body is telling me it’s time for a break, to drink some water, eat some food, and maybe get some fresh air. Normally I would ignore those signals and power through but today I’m going to listen to my body and take care of it. Although there is nothing wrong with being a hard worker and setting goals, there is the importance of slowing down and listening to your body as well. I will be taking the lessons I’ve learned and the things I struggled through to help you find the balance between living and achieving, being and doing, presence and hustle, and rest and work. What I’ve come to find out is that there is room for both, and work is good but too much of a good thing is always bad.

I know all too well what an unhealthy relationship with work looks like. It tricks us by disguising itself as a good thing – work harder and life will be better. There is some truth to that statement but there is also destruction to be found in that statement. A healthy relationship between work and achievement is possible and here I will share with you how to create that for yourself, how to put the weight down, and begin moving forward in life with boundaries, self-respect, love, and grace. In no way am I promoting laziness or saying that you need to put your dreams on the shelf and develop a habit of laziness and passivity. But maybe you need more balance. Maybe the work culture has pushed you so much into a state of frantic hustle and anxious work that you can hardly see what you even want out of life.

There are books and podcasts and conferences and courses all designed to help you reach your goals, work harder, work smarter and achieve more, trust me I’ve sought them out, found them, read them, and spent a lot of time studying success. But what I want to share with you is that all of life is designed for a purpose, not just life after you’ve got a certain number of accomplishments on the shelf. I’m here to tell you that your worth doesn’t come from your status or your title or how much you can achieve by a certain age.

You are worthy now, loved now, and important now and maybe it’s time for you to make balance a priority in your life over accomplishment and stop associating your achievements with your worth.

Part One

The Hustle

1

Hustle Culture

Hustlers, overachievers, boss babes, self-starters, young professionals, entrepreneurs, millionaires, bloggers, YouTubers, influencers, content creators, top producers, high-achieving businessmen, and women. At one point I identified myself with several of those titles and if you’re reading this, you probably have too. Our society and culture are overflowing with the above. Within this culture, phrases get thrown around like sleep when you’re dead, the grind never stops,  don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done, and you can have it all if you work hard enough,  good things belong to those who work their butts off for it. Countless resources have pushed the dynamic of putting work over health.

If an influencer we follow on Instagram posts about their ‘routine’ of at 4:00 am, taking an ice-cold shower, reading a personal development book, and working out for 2 hours, we feel compelled to do the same thing, even if that lifestyle doesn’t align with us because we are conditioned to believe that we will have the exact results they have. That, in large, is responsible for the hustle culture that you and I currently reside in. Maybe you are naturally an achievement-oriented person; you like to hit goals, stay productive, work on large projects, accomplish things, and you have a big vision for your future. Or maybe you developed into the kind of person who feels pressured and compelled to make your life look a certain way, to have certain things, to have a certain status, to look a certain way because of what you are consuming on social media. Or maybe it’s both.

I, like most, have a strong work ethic when it comes to what I’m passionate about. I love hitting goals and moving up. But that combined with the toxic side of hustle culture, the results were destructive in my life. It caused me to think that I wasn’t good enough or worthy unless I was achieving something huge and out of the ordinary. I was trapped comparing myself to those I followed on Instagram. I thought there must be something wrong with me if my life didn’t look like theirs or if my business wasn’t blowing up like theirs was. My willingness to burn myself completely out left me in an unhealthy lifestyle and I was lost.

If you’re like me, I didn’t want to accept the fact that there is an unhealthy side to hustling. I believed that if I did anything other than grind and hustle, then I was being lazy, wasting time, and I’d never hit my goals or have the life I desired. Resting, taking time off, passing up opportunities, or limiting the things I was involved in felt like a failure to me. However, I shared the same mindset with many people: overworking is the only way to become successful. The workaholic lifestyle, the obsession with striving, performing, working, grinding, and achieving was the only option for making it in life. Why does this happen?

Our culture praises and idolizes the people that sacrifice their health for productivity.

Overworking is worn like a badge of honor, further pushing us to work harder, longer, and more than the last person. It has become a competition of who can wear themselves out the most in the name of success. This is toxic because it creates beliefs in our minds that counteract the productiveness of our work, in turn, causing burnout, loss of energy, and loss of inspiration for working at all. One of the most prominent beliefs in our minds is that which says our self-worth is solely dependent on our ability to get stuff done. How often have you felt like your worth was dependent on your ability to achieve? How often do you tear yourself down for not being productive enough? We set unrealistically high standards for ourselves and demand ourselves to keep going. Then when we inevitably hit a wall, intrusive thoughts come in like I’m worthless, I’ll never hit this goal and I’m not good enough, when it had nothing to do with your worth, but everything to do with your approach and mindset.

Maybe for you, this unhealthy hustle pattern was caused by the dynamic in your childhood. Maybe you were punished for not getting good enough grades or performing well enough in sports. Or maybe it stemmed from a need to make everything a competition because you feel most acceptable and admired when you’re winning ... or maybe you can only accept yourself if you’re winning. Or it crept in when you saw others living in the life that you’ve prayed so hard for and you think that if you had that life too, you’d be as happy as they looked on the surface. Or maybe it came from the people you follow on Instagram who mean well in their advice but pressure you to sustain a workaholic lifestyle that doesn’t serve you. These are all very real causes for dysfunction in our work life.

Hustle culture creates toxic productivity; the need to be doing something, anything, as long as you feel like you’re being productive. Even if that thing serves no purpose in helping you in the long run. It’s more of a feeling of productivity that is being chased, if you can’t think of anything to do, you’ll make something up and get started so you’re not ‘wasting time’. This drives us to burnout and if that burnout is not handled properly, it will wreak havoc on our physical, mental, and emotional health. This is because when you are continually pushing yourself to go at every moment of the day, day after day, your body, your mind, and your spirit is getting worn out – it needs rest.

The only way to get rid of burnout is to cease work, and intentionally rest and recover. It will not go away on its own. You may think your body has succumbed to this way of work and life, but it has actually become sustained burnout. And sustained burnout can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Like, but not limited to, over-indulging in things like alcohol to take the edge off, overconsuming caffeine so you can force your body to keep going, eating empty calories and unhealthy food,