1. We get a lot of emails from men lamenting the fact that they feel stuck in neutral and asking for advice. Many of these men have great aspirations, but that’s all they have. Aspirations. Many don’t have any results to show for all their ambitious goals in life. Some are on year seven of a four year degree, and others are stuck in a job that’s going nowhere. Maybe you know a man like this. Heck, maybe you feel like this.<br />Unfulfilled goals, of course, can lead to frustration, depression, and just a general dampening of your man spirit, which only makes it harder to get unstuck. When we dig a little deeper into the lives of these “stuck” men, a few commonalities appear.<br />First, there are the excuses. “The economy sucks.” “I’m not naturally smart/athletic/gifted.” “I don’t have enough time.” You get the idea.<br />The second thing we often see is that they’ve just been doing the bare minimum to coast along in life. A lot of them think “showing up” constitutes real effort, and that the chips of their dreams will magically fall into place.<br />We usually respond to these gents to stop with the excuses and start busting some [butt]. Some of these men take the advice to heart and get going. The others often counter with another excuse and ask for another way that doesn’t involve so much work<br />These guys will never understand a very important truth: the world belongs to hustlers. <br />Now, I’m not talking about hustling in the pulling-a-scam-on-the-naive-newbie sense. (Although it never hurts to have a little Fast Eddie swagger). I’m talking about the work-your-[butt] -off-while-your-competition-plays-Rock Band kind of hustling. Hustling=doing whatever you have to do, for however long as you have to do it, until you reach your goal.<br />Teddy Roosevelt Hustled and So Should You<br />“Things may come to those who wait…but only the things left by those who hustle.” - Abraham Lincoln<br />Looking at the men that I admire from history, they all have one thing in common: they were hustlers. Theodore Roosevelt accomplished an insane amount of work because he lived the strenuous life, i.e. hustled. Thomas Edison patented thousands of inventions and perfected the light bulb because he spent all day hustling. Frederick Douglass was an orator, diplomat, newspaper editor and author because he hustled. And pretty much every self-made man has the same story.<br />The interesting thing is a lot of these great men who succeeded through hustling weren’t born with natural talent or abilities. In fact, they were usually dealt a crummy hand from the beginning of their life. T.R. had a sickly disposition that weakened him as a child and plagued him the rest of his life. He had to hustle more than others to gain and maintain his vim and vigor. Edison was smart, but there were plenty of other men out there who were smarter. He just worked harder than the naturally smart guys and then hired them to work for him. And Frederick Douglass was born a slave, lived in a time of extreme racism, and yet still beat the odds because he hustled.<br />Here’s the deal. Most of us are average. Average intelligence, average athleticism, and average looking. And most of us have had some setbacks in our life that can serve as a disadvantage. In short, we’re pretty much on the same playing field as millions and millions of people. And yet despite our average minds and builds most of us believe deep down that we are destined for something extraordinary, that we’re special. But most men really aren’t. But not because they’re average. Because they won’t hustle to get what they want.<br />A man’s reasons for not hustling run the gamut from laziness to fear of failure. I think a lot of time men think, “I want what that guy has but I just don’t have his x,y, or z.” But while we don’t have any control over the number of natural talents and gifts we were born with, we do have complete control over how much we can hustle. You can’t control where you were born, how crappy or nice your parents were, or how homely or handsome you are. But nobody determines how hard you hustle but you. Wherever you are in life, you can hustle to get where you want to be.<br />