Hustle Life Quotes

When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It's hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.

When one has come to explore the ' instant moment ' and one has chosen to savor the delights of life, which are hidden behind the curtain of haste and superficiality, then ' mental time ' is replacing ' sequential time '. So ' here ' and ' now ' are keeping hustle and impatience in check. (" Just for a moment ")

Living a connected life ultimately is about setting boundaries, spending less time and energy hustling and winning over people who don’t matter, and seeing the value of working on cultivating connection with family and close friends.

The universe might respect the law of attraction, but it respects a good hustle even more.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

It is good to stay in a peaceful poverty than to stay in a painful wealth.

Don't save your best for when you think the material calls for it. Always bring your full potential to every take, and be on top of your job, or they will replace you.

Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.

Some roses grow through concrete. Remember that.

Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9:35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. Forever.

This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.

Trouble cannot be avoided, you either go looking for it or it will come looking for you.

Being active has nothing to do with being sexy, sculpting a six-pack, or fitting into a smaller size. It’s about making sure your body can keep up with your hustle.

Your thoughts become your BELIEFS. Your beliefs become your TRUTH. Your truth becomes your STORY. Your story IS your REALITY.

Boxing is a glorious sport to watch and boxers are incredible, heroic athletes, but it's also, to be honest, a stupid game to play. Even the winners can end up with crippling brain damage. In a lot of ways, hustling is the same. But you learn something special from playing the most difficult games, the games where winning is close to impossible and losing is catastrophic: You learn how to compete as if your life depended on it. That's the lesson I brought with me to the so-called "legitimate" world.

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present.

Sensuality is the hustle to always be at the leading edge of your glamour and enchantment.

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.

A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.

Everyone has some kind of mantra he or she lives by. Mine just happens to be that I see this life as a game, or as some would say, 'the game of life.

In the fall of leaves, In the hustle of breeze, In the curve of streams, I foresee, Nature keeps more concealed, Than it lets us peep!

Choose to hustle now, to work hard now, to make all the sacrifice now. So that you can enjoy your tomorrow. Whatever it is that you suppose to do now. If you don't do it now, it will affect you badly for the rest of your life.

What if we can't be anything we want to be? What if the goal isn't to hustle but to be faithful? What if the magic of life is found in the mundane, and it comes when we're faithful?

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.

Consummation Of Grief I even hear the mountains the way they laugh up and down their blue sides and down in the water the fish cry and the water is their tears. I listen to the water on nights I drink away and the sadness becomes so great I hear it in my clock it becomes knobs upon my dresser it becomes paper on the floor it becomes a shoehorn a laundry ticket it becomes cigarette smoke climbing a chapel of dark vines. . . it matters little very little love is not so bad or very little life what counts is waiting on walls I was born for this I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

I hear nothing but the hustle and bustle of the city. Cars with flashing lights zip past me. People talk, some loud, some quiet. I whisper to myself. “This is what it’s like to go unnoticed.” I take in a deep breath and inhale the freezing air. It smells like ice here. Ice and cigarettes.

New Orleans, the storm, Perry, the river: they all reminded me not to take anything for granted. It all washes away, and we are all washed away with it. So when then ground is steady and the sky is clear, we should breathe deep until our lungs inflate against our ribs and hold in that one breath until we are lightheaded with the privilege of being human. The absolute privilege of being human.

Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.

Who told these people with dreams, goals and ambitions they could take time off?

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie.

Don't befriend your competitors unless you're using them for your advantage.

The goal of following Jesus isn’t to do a bunch of things. It’s to become a type of person.

success isn't supposed to feel comfortable

And we will meet in the woods far far away from this hustle and bustle... and share love and sunshine.

Take a leap of faith on your dreams, not for me and not for the society, just for yourself.

I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird – that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day.

Spoiler: I didn't win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be "The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!" instead of having the word "Death" in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars?

I want us to understand that nuance is freeing and freedom. There is no such thing as cookie-cutter healing. Everyone brings with them an origin story, a history, and identities that are interconnected. There is room to rest in the freedom of managing your own deprogramming journey. It is never either/or and always both/and. You don’t have to grind, hustle, accept burnout as normal, and be in a constant state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. You don’t have to kill yourself spiritually or physically to live a fruitful life.

We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other’s garde.

Got dreams in my mind that got me hustling all the time.

Be not afraid of going slowly. Be afraid only of standing still."   ―CHINESE PROVERB

It is essential to our health and happiness that we dedicate ourselves to some kind of mission or purpose that transcends the mundane hustle and bustle of daily living.

The bottom line is, we can’t research or think ourselves to a better version of ourselves

Keep your mind off when you feel disrespected by someone who is not even close to your worth.

I’ll even say it a little more plainly for those in the back: we as humans are the summation of our repeated practices and rituals. Humans aren’t made. We are formed.

To follow Jesus we need to not just follow his teaching, but also follow his way. His process. His cadence. His demeanor. His spirit. His very essence.

Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born.”8

Life curses some poor people with the love of luxury, while it blesses some with the very same thing.

Success is personally defined. It's subjective and it's what YOU decide it will be.

The mere fact of Vegas, its necessity, was an indictment of our normal lives. If we needed this place--to transform into a high roller or a sexy swinger, to be someone else, a winner for once--then certainly the world beyond the desert was a small and mealy place indeed.

Wabi sabi teaches us to be content with less in a way that feels like more. Less stuff, more soul. Less hustle, more ease. Less chaos, more calm. Less mass consumption and more unique creation. Less complexity, more clarity. Less judgment, more forgiveness. Less resistence, more resilience. Less bravado, more truth. Less control, more surrender. Less head, more heart.

The big difference between chaos and shalom is rhythm. Chaos is unpredictable and unrhythmic. It has no set cadence. But shalom is more like a dance that depends on the rhythm in music.

I wanted the rattle of New York around me, I wanted stink and strangers and the sour dank air of the IRT clutching me to its bosom. I wanted hustle and bustle. I wanted to know that millions of lives were playing out at my doorstep, and not one of them gave a damn about my little problems.

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him?

Work jumped from being a means of “material production” to being much more about “identity production.”3 In other words, work used to be about making things. Then all of a sudden, work was about making us.

Putting work in for your business is good. Your business needs you to put that work in. But don't exhaust yourself because if you drain yourself to the point of exhaustion then you become a liability to your business.

Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world ... and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood.

Knowing that life is a marathon and not a sprint is important. Conserve your energy. Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. Passing one obstacle simply says you’re worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it. Which is good, because we get better with every attempt. Never rattled. Never frantic. Always hustling and acting with creativity. Never anything but deliberate. Never attempting to do the impossible—but everything up to that line. Simply flipping the obstacles that life throws at you by improving in spite of them, because of them. And therefore no longer afraid. But excited, cheerful, and eagerly anticipating the next round.

But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I've no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn't have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn't automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah. Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family, I think of them living in places where they can't work, where they can't speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and things herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right? ....... I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

Whatever exists is inevitably flawed. Buddha, in his detachment from the world, finds all its hustle and bustle ridiculous because he has nothing to do with it. A cynic finds the feelings of his fellow human beings ridiculous because he has no feelings himself. Someone who does not play soccer thinks it ridiculous to chase around after a little leather ball for hours at a time. He doesn't bother to ask whether this game might be a lot of fun. All he sees is the ridiculousness of grown men playing like little boys. People who do anything will no doubt appear ridiculous to people who do nothing. A person who acts can always make a fool of himself. A person who doesn't never runs that risk. We might even say that life is always ridiculous but death is never ridiculous.

Busy’ is worn as a badge of honor these days; the busier we are, the more important we feel. But busy doesn’t mean important. Busy just means you are preoccupied. And often it means you’re distracted. It doesn’t mean you are esteemed, fun, smart, worthy, valued, loved, appreciated, excited, or happy. Busy likely means you are not paying attention to the current moment but instead are hustling around in a fog of things you ‘have’ to do. Busy isn’t special. We are all busy. So why label yourself something so common? You’re better than that.

Noah didn’t walk, he stalked and I loved the mischievous glint in his eye when he stalked me. He placed his hands on my hips and nuzzled my hair. “I love the way you smell.” I swallowed and tried to reign in the mutant pterodactyls having a roller derby in my stomach as I dared to think about a future for the two of us. The moment Aires’ car rumbled beneath me, I’d known that I needed Noah in my life. Aires’ death had left a gaping hole in my heart. I thought all I needed was that car to run. Wrong. A car would never fill the emptiness, but love could. “I hope your future includes me. I mean, someone has to continue to kick your butt in pool.” Noah laughed as he snagged his fingers around my belt loops and dragged me closer. “I was letting you win.” “Please.” His eyes had about fallen out of his head when I’d sunk a couple of balls off the break. “You were losing. Badly.” I wondered if he also reveled in the warmth of being this close again. “Then I guess I’ll have to keep you around. For good. You’ll be useful during a hustle.” He lowered his forehead to mine and his brown eyes, which had been laughing seconds ago, darkened as he got serious. “I have a lot I want to say to you. A lot I want to apologize for.” “Me, too.” And I touched his cheek again, this time letting my fingers take their time. Noah wanted me, for good. “But can we hash it all out some other time? I’m sort of talked out and I’ve still gotta go see my dad. Do you think we can just take it on faith right now that I want you, you want me, and we’ll figure out the happy ending part later?” His lips curved into a sexy smile and I became lost in him. “I love you, Echo Emerson.” I whispered the words as he brought his lips to mine. “Forever.

We live in a patriarchal world—a system that aids and abets inequality. In this system that has gatekept financial information and tools from marginalized groups, it is an act of protest to be financially independent. It is an act of protest to overcome negative beliefs about money in order to save, pay off debt, invest, and find fulfilling work. It is an act of protest to prioritize rest instead of hustle, abundance rather than scarcity, and generosity in place of stockpiling. In a world that actively works to keep us playing small, it is an act of protest to be stable, content, and powerful.

One of the few good things about living this life is nothing is taken for granted. There is beauty in everything and inspiration in anything if you just take the time to listen. Most people either don’t have the time in their life of hustle and bustle or they simply don’t think it’s anything to take notice of.

To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no business, here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I am here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life!

Glossa Time goes by, time comes along, All is old and all is new; What is right and what is wrong, You must think and ask of you; Have no hope and have no fear, Waves that rise can never hold; If they urge or if they cheer, You remain aloof and cold. To our sight a lot will glisten, Many sounds will reach our ear; Who could take the time to listen And remember all we hear? Keep aside from all that patter, Seek yourself, far from the throng When with loud and idle clatter Time goes by, time comes along. Nor forget the tongue of reason Or its even scales depress When the moment, changing season, Wears the mask of happiness - It is born of reason's slumber And may last a wink as true: For the one who knows its number All is old and all is new. Be as to a play, spectator, As the world unfolds before: You will know the heart of matter Should they act two parts or four; When they cry or tear asunder From your seat enjoy along And you'll learn from art to wonder What is right and what is wrong. Past and future, ever blending, Are the twin sides of same page: New start will begin with ending When you know to learn from age; All that was or be tomorrow We have in the present, too; But what's vain and futile sorrow You must think and ask of you; For the living cannot sever From the means we've always had: Now, as years ago, and ever, Men are happy or are sad: Other masks, same play repeated; Diff'rent tongues, same words to hear; Of your dreams so often cheated, Have no hope and have no fear. Hope not when the villains cluster By success and glory drawn: Fools with perfect lack of luster Will outshine Hyperion! Fear it not, they'll push each other To reach higher in the fold, Do not side with them as brother, Waves that rise can never hold. Sounds of siren songs call steady Toward golden nets, astray; Life attracts you into eddies To change actors in the play; Steal aside from crowd and bustle, Do not look, seem not to hear From your path, away from hustle, If they urge or if they cheer; If they reach for you, go faster, Hold your tongue when slanders yell; Your advice they cannot master, Don't you know their measure well? Let them talk and let them chatter, Let all go past, young and old; Unattached to man or matter, You remain aloof and cold. You remain aloof and cold If they urge or if they cheer; Waves that rise can never hold, Have no hope and have no fear; You must think and ask of you What is right and what is wrong; All is old and all is new, Time goes by, time comes along.

Diner Customer 1 (Kyle): …I’ll give you one piece of advice, on account of I like you and I don’t want to see you get hurt. First time I went to Vegas, I thought It was the most beautiful place in the world. All lights and neon. And the women --- well, the WOMEN… Anyway, didn’t take me long to figure out the whole place was on the hustle, that none of it was what it looked like, and if you’re not real careful, a place like that can kill you. Bill: Asgard ain’t Vegas, Kyle. Diner Customer 1 (Kyle): No, sir. You’re absolutely right. It isn’t Vegas. ‘Cause in Vegas, even guys like you and me can win once in a while. (Kyle leaves the diner) Diner Customer 2: Pay no attention to him, Bill. A man loses two hundred-fifty dollars on the slots, and he thinks it gives him wisdom. Biggest mistakes I ever made were in listening to guys like that, instead of listening to my own heart… what my granddad used to call “The Tyranny of Reasonable Voices.” Mistakes you make can always be worked out. The mistakes you don’t make because you do nothing, because you don’t try, you don’t risk, those are the ones that haunt you when you get old. Regret, that’s the real killer. Go where your heart leads you, Bill. Life’ll take care of the rest. It always does. - Thor #10 (2007)

A reckoning with burnout is so often the reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?

It is impossible to express the experiences you have below the surface with words, when water gently caresses your face and body, the pulse decreases and your brain relaxes. You are immediately cut off from the stress and hustle of everyday life when you are below the surface – there are no noisy telephones or SMS messages, no inboxes full of mail, no electrical bills, or other trivialities of everyday life taking up time and energy. There is nothing connecting you to the surface but the same withheld breath that connects you to life. There is only you and a growing pressure on your chest that feels like a loving hug and the vibrations from the deep quiet tone of the sea. It is quite possible that this deep quiet tone is none other than the mantra Om, the sound of the universe, trickling life into every cell of your body.

The story of the rapper and the story of the hustler are like rap itself, two kinds of rhythm working together, having a conversation with each other, doing more together than they could do apart. It's been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it's built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it's the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies. No matter what other sounds are on the track, even if it's a Timbaland production with all kinds of offbeat fills and electronics, a rap song is usually built bar by bar, four-beat measure by four-beat measure. It's like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a rhythm that never varies and never stops. When you think about it like that, you realize the beat is everywhere, you just have to tap into it. You can bang it out on a project wall or an 808 drum machine or just use your hands. You can beatbox it with your mouth. But the beat is only one half of a rap song's rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow cops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn't like time, it's like life. It's like a heartbeat or the way you breathe, it can jump, speed up, slow down, stop, or pound right through like a machine. If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow. Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling, for me at least, live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there's a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style. Even when we recognized the voices, and recognized the style, and even personally knew the cats who were on the records, the content didn't always reflect the lives we were leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap's signature style - the relentlessness, the swagger, the complex wordplay - and the substance of the songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow. It had to come home.

As a kid I never knew,I'd have to hustle just to make it through so I found myself skippin' school 'cause the gurl don't think I'm cool

If you want to be successful at anything in life, you have to take action.

I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.” ―Rita Mae Brown

THE PROMISE: how your hustle will change someone’s life THE PITCH: why they should purchase or sign up now THE PRICE: what it costs to purchase or sign up (and how to do it)

I’m finally learning to accept myself as I am. Learning to like myself as I am. Learning to like and accept my life as it is. Learning to stop begging people to want me or love me or make me feel like I'm ENOUGH. And learning that it’s okay to stand up and say: I’ve had ENOUGH. I’ve had enough of hustling for my worth. I’ve had enough of groveling to people unworthy of me for scraps of love or time or attention. I’ve had enough of keeping people in my life who diminish me. And I’ve had enough of trying to be anything other than me...because I, in all my imperfect, messy glory, am perfectly ENOUGH.

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.

We continued our strolling, for that is exactly what it was: strolling. This was not something I did in real life, either. It was always more like "rushing," or "hustling," or "guy-walking-like-weird-Olympic-walker.

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.

Stop talking about creating something awesome. Instead, go and do it. Release it to the world. Didn’t go viral? Try again. You’ll get better. There is no silver bullet. Fear, inaction, and failing to try one more time are your biggest obstacles.

In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her. "I loved what I missed most from my life at home: my family and friends; the sights and sounds of my own country; the hustle and purposefulness of Americans; their fervid independence; sports; music; information--all the attractive qualities of American life. But though I longed for the things at home I cherished the most, I still shared the ideals of America. And since those ideals were all that I possessed of my country, they became all the more important to me.

Women are taught to sacrifice, to play nice, to live an altruistic life because a good girl is always rewarded in the end. This is not a virtue; it is propaganda. Submission gets you a ticket to future prosperity that will never manifest. By the time you realize the ticket to success and happiness you have been sold isn’t worth the paper it was printed on, it will be too late. Go on, spend a quarter of your life, even half of your life, in the service of others and you will realize you were hustled. You do not manifest your destiny by placing others first! A kingdom built on your back doesn’t become your kingdom, it becomes your folly. History does not remember the slaves of Egypt that built the pyramids, they remember the Pharaohs that wielded the power over those laborers. Yet here you are, content with being a worker bee, motivated by some sales pitch that inspires you to work harder for some master than you work for yourself, with this loose promise that one day you will share in his wealth. Altruism is your sin. Selfishness is your savior. Ruthless aggression and self-preservation are not evil. Why aren’t females taught these things? Instead of putting themselves first, women are told to be considerate and selfless. From birth, they have been beaten in the head with this notion of “Don’t be selfish!” Fuck that. Your mother may have told you to wait your turn like a good girl, but I’m saying cut in front of that other bitch. Club Success is about to hit capacity, and you don’t want to be the odd woman out. Where are the powerful women? Those who refuse to play by those rules and want more out of life than what a man allows her to have? I created a category for such women and labeled them Spartans. Much like the Greek warriors who fought against all odds, these women refuse to surrender and curtsy before the status quo. Being

Happiness is your inherent nature. In the hustle and bustle of life, you have forgotten a part of yourself, and looking for it outside. Fill this void with happiness that is sustainable, not transitory; that illuminates your life and that of others, that is life giving and so natural.

No, Steppenwolf's look penetrated our whole age. It saw through all its hustle and bustle, all its pushy ambition, all its conceitedness, the whole superficial comedy of its shallow, self-important intellectualism. And sad to say, his look penetrated deeper still, well beyond the mere deficiencies and hopeless inadequacies of our age, our intellectualism and our culture. It went right to the heart of all things human. In a single second it eloquently expressed all the skepticism of a thinker—and perhaps of one in the know — as to the dignity and meaning of human life as such. He look seemed to say: ' Don't you see what apes we are? That's what human beings are like, just take a look!' and all celebrity, all cleverness, all intellectual achievements, all humanity's attempts to create something sublime, great and enduring were reduced to a fairground farce.

You know what your mum might be?' 'You're not really asking, are you? This is rhetorical, isn't it?' 'A real life desperate housewife. Maybe your mum's hooking and she -' "What are you, drunk? There's a five-year-old in the back seat. And, PS, you're not helping. All she said is that she's at the station. Not in jail. Now, I don't want to talk anymore about it. Mark and I spend the remainder of the car trip in silence. Emma, on the other hand, takes it upon herself to sing every verse of It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp. Next chance I get I'm gonna confiscate her copy of Hustle and Flow and change her computer password from GEELOVE to MONOBROW. - Cat

spiritually thin and malnourished. Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite spiritual thinkers, said about his experience with silence and solitude: “Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born.”8 It’s not a therapeutic place. It’s where you go to die.

I spent most of my time floating on an inflatable raft in the pristine Mediterranean waters, my big belly curving toward the sun, reading (incongruously) The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It rocked me to my core. Malcolm’s story opened a window onto a reality I had ignored. But the greatest revelation the book brought me was the possibility of profound human transformation. I was spellbound by his journey from the doped-up, numbers-running, woman-beating, street-hustling, pimping Malcolm Little to a proud, clean, literate, Muslim Malcolm X who taught that all white people were the Devil incarnate—to his final, spiritual transformation in Mecca. There he met white people from all over the world who received him as a brother, and he realized that “white,” as he had been using the word, didn’t mean skin color as much as it meant attitudes and actions some whites held toward non-whites—but that not all whites were racist. At the time of his murder, he was anything but the hatemonger portrayed in the American press. Somehow, through the horrors that had been his life, he had become a spiritual leader. How had this been possible?

What if we are attempting to exchange wisdom for shortcuts? One requires years of life experiences, while the other simply requires a Google search. Today, we face a huge gap between who we are and who we want to be simply because we can actually see that gap better than ever before. By just opening Instagram or reading Facebook posts, we see a different, perhaps ideal, self we wish we were.

The rumble is in our everyday lives whether you are rich or poor. Whether you hustle or work a nine to five. There is always a rumble going on in everybody’s life, some people just refer to it as trials and tribulations or even a testimony and just like everybody else; I have one too. We all going through it because it’s rough out here and the only thing we can do is do what we have to do to survive.

This is the way it ought to be, he thought to himself, to be able to dance with a girl you like and really get a kick out of it because everything’ on an even keel and one’s worries are of the usual ones of unpaid bills and sickness in the family and being late to work too often. Wh can’t it be that way for me? Nobody’s looking twice at us. Nobody’s asking me where I was during the war or what the hell I am doing back on the coast. There’s no trouble to be had without looking for it. Everything’s the same, just as it used to be. No bad feelings except for those that have always been and probably always will. It’s a matter of attitude. Mine needs changing. I’ve got to love the world the way I used to. I’ve got to love it and the people so I’ll feel good, and feeling good will make life worthwhile. There’s no point in crying about what’s done. There’s a place for me and Emi and Freddie here on the dance floor and out there in the hustle of things if we’ll let it be that way. I’ve been fighting it and hating it and letting my bitterness against myself and Ma and Pa and even Taro throw the whole universe out of perspective. I want only to go on living and be happy. I’ve only to let myself do so.

Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who’d been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base. The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous. Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin’s world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, “Moscow is silent,” the man told Putin. Putin’s boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government’s weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be taken away. In Putin’s mind, the Soviet Union’s fatal flaw was not that its authoritarianism was unsustainable but that its leaders were not strong enough or brutal enough to maintain their authority. The lesson Putin learned was that power must be guarded with vigilance and maintained by any means necessary.

While we might not all be able to take a year off work, the question that haunts me is, do I trust God enough to do it? Do I think he’d actually take care of me if I did it? Isn’t that what most of our activity and busyness is about anyway? Trying to hedge our bets, saying we are Christians with our lips, but living as spiritual orphans who need to claw and grasp for every last crumb of provision. Do we actually believe God will provide? That he can be trusted?

Passing one obstacle simply says you’re worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it. Which is good, because we get better with every attempt. Never rattled. Never frantic. Always hustling and acting with creativity. Never anything but deliberate. Never attempting to do the impossible—but everything up to that line. Simply flipping the obstacles that life throws at you by improving in spite of them, because of them. And therefore no longer afraid. But excited, cheerful, and eagerly anticipating the next round.

Well, imagine you are alone in a room. The lights are down low, you’ve got some scented candles going. Soothing New Age tunes, nothing too druid-chanty, seep out of the hi-fi to gently massage your cerebral cortex. Feel good? Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That’s the gift of being alone. Then a bozo in a CAT Diesel Power cap barges in. What’s the chance that you are the best, most special person in the room now? Fifty-fifty. If you both were dealt two cards, those would be your odds of holding the winning hand. Now imagine ten people are in the room. It’s cramped. You’re elbow to elbow, aerosolized dandruff floats in the air, and the candle’s lavender scent is complicated by BO tones, with a tuna sandwich finish. What are the chances you’re the best, most special person in the room? If you were handed cards, you might expect to be crowned one time out of ten. People, as ever, are the problem. The more people there are, the tougher you have it. Just by sitting next to you, they fuck you up, as if life were nothing more than a bus ride to hell (which it is). But what if you moved to another seat? Changed position? Your seat is everything. It can give you room to relax, to contemplate your next move. Or it might instigate your unraveling.

Taunja Bennett kissed her mother good-bye and said she was off to meet a boyfriend. She disappeared from sight in the direction of a bus stop, her Walkman plugged into her ears. Lately the twenty-three-year-old high school dropout had been listening over and over to “Back to Life” by Soul II Soul. She carried a small black purse. Taunja was mildly retarded from oxygen deprivation at birth. She’d been a difficult child. In a cooking class at Cleveland High School, she assaulted a classmate in a quarrel over a piece of cake. Addicted to alcohol and drugs, she was committed to a state hospital for six months. At twenty-one, she frequented northeast Portland bars like the Woodshed, the Copper Penny and Thatcher’s. She hustled drinks, shot pool and got into trouble with men. She was petite and pretty—five-five, with glistening dark brown hair, liquid brown eyes, a trim figure,

I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing “hustle,” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about. I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.

The sun tapped at the window pane, softly but firmly he was calling my name. He said rise, let me place this crown upon your head. I said, it's the weekend everybody's still in bed. This isn't for them, the sun made himself clear. Do you understand, LaNina, or should I call you Lear? I'm up, I replied throwing my diamond in the sky. Through the all seeing eye, he re-energized my life. Now you're, ready, the sun said, as I no longer felt heavy. It's time to hustle, LaNina, I mean Lear, you know this grind stays steady. I know, I remarked soaking up the energy from the sun. Lightly lifted from the ground, closed my eyes, stretched my arms until my refill was done. Let's get it, I yelled as my feet touched the floor. The sun said, wait, I'm going to fill you with more. I gave thanks for the new day & love for God from the core. I'm ready, I said while the sun filled me. I opened my eyes to a different side of life, but much better I could see. I'm free. He said, go ahead but work with you isn't done. I know. However, it was a pleasure coming face to face with 'The Son'.

Clark Air base in Angeles City is a hub of commerce. The streets teem with industrious Filipinos hustling to make a living. Rusty cars and trucks clog narrow streets and honk their horns with abandon. Jeepneys ferry passengers around town for only a few pesos and serve as public transportation. The jeepney is the official vehicle of the Philippines. Jeepneys are long, open-sided jeeps and have bench seats for passengers. The best jeepneys are very ornate, their hoods festooned with a multitude of fancy chrome horses and ornaments, multihued streamers, and hand-operated rubber-bulb horns. Safety standards are third-world-relaxed in the PI, and jeepney drivers casually smoke cigarettes while they sit with plastic containers of gasoline nestled between their feet. The clear plastic jugs have a tube that connects to the engine and serves as the jeepney’s improvised gas tank, making it easier for the driver to monitor and conserve fuel. Jeepneys are not the only transportation available. Small, sidecar-equipped motorcycles called tricycles, also serve as cheap taxis, crowding the streets near popular establishments. The alleys are lined with side-by-side food stalls, and street vendors occupy every corner.

Life was well enough, she thought; well enough, and a gay enough business for those who had the means to make it so, and the temperament to find it so. Life was no great matter, and nor, certainly, was death; but it was well enough. We come and we go; we are born, we live, and we die; this poor ball, thought Rome, serves us for all that; and on the whole, we make too much complaint of it, expect, one way and another, too much of it. It is, after all, but a turning ball, which has burst, for some reason unknown to science, into a curious, interesting and rather unwholesome form of animal and vegetable life. (…) Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilization, as if it mattered much, as if civilizations had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history, and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life. The brief pageant, the tiny, squalid story of human life upon this earth, has been lit, among the squalor and the greed, by amazing flashes of intelligence, of valor, of beauty, of sacrifice, of love.

Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly. People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along, when it had only been luck and muddle. A pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear Jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it. Hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches. Bl*wj*bs from women of stunning beauty. Restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right. The lamb or duck in tureen sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy gleaming in your manicured hand below the broad cloth cuff and mother of pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith. But the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo. Though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of 12-year-old scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the hair cuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for, and always had paid for. Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth, cloth that was itself the color of money, could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts. But on the table with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there, it had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.