REINVENTING THE HUSTLE PLAY

Seth Godin had some great insights yesterday about the Archetype to which we belong. In short, our jobs have titles and those titles may sound a lot like something we’d love to do (i.e. Nursing). But the truth is we are often misaligned and I’ll take it a step further. It’s not by accident. You can be playing out of position, so-to-speak, and not know it but I doubt such ignorance. The truth is that no one probably knows more quickly than you that you are being PLAYED out of position. But what are you going to do about it?

There’s a fine line between a proper appeal to be used in one’s area of strength and a ploy to exalt oneself due to deluded ambition. I’m talking about doing the former not the latter.  If you are a competent teacher who enjoys crafting and creating lessons that will effectively communicate and aid students in some discipline, check your job description against your daily activities. You might find a mismatch. The rub is that should you find you are being played out of position, that your title is light years removed from who you really are, then the hustle play must be reinvented.

We learned to hustle in P.E. and on sports teams growing up and all that diving on the floor for loose balls in centered on one principle: TURNING A BROKEN PLAY INTO AN OPPORTUNITY. So what happened? Someone or some people figured out that you were valuable and commandeered your greatest attributes to serve their archetypal construct. In other words, they got you to join their team as a small forward when really you’re a shooting guard. That’s a broken play. If you don’t know what it is you do well, what makes you come alive, what you’d do for free, then the ball is loose and you haven’t gone after it. The hustle play reinvented could be working two jobs: the first to make ends meet and the second to make occupation and calling intersect. Hustle to salvage and hustle to redeem the time. Otherwise life is just a series of motions.