Motivation
How to Seek Self-Improvement but Reject Hustle Culture
How to be growth-oriented without ascribing to values that aren't yours.
Posted November 2, 2025 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
When I chat with readers, most of them aren't interested in hustle culture (no billionaire or girl boss worship) or stereotypical self-care (no bubble baths or candles). They don't need a makeover or a glow-up.
They have a drive to grow and to better understand themselves, to become more effective problem solvers, and to become more insightful. They care about high standards and high performance, but they have complex lives that don't revolve around just themselves or any one goal. They're seeking a less cringy era of personal growth.
The external culture of self-improvement might be hard to change, but everyone who seeks to grow has the opportunity to create their own internal culture of self-improvement that doesn't follow the external one. Here are three ways to develop that internal culture so you can be growth-oriented without ascribing to values that aren't yours.
1. Explicitly Reject the Assumptions of Hustle Culture
In building our internal culture of growth, we can reject any external assumption that creates more stress than benefit. Let's track through an example.
A recently popular concept is that all our actions are identity votes — votes for the person we want to become. An apple becomes a vote for becoming a healthy person. This can feel empowering and helpful until it starts to feel like being on trial, like we're in an identity courtroom trying to prove our worthiness.
In a previous post, I introduced the character of Nicola, who is attempting to qualify for the 2028 Olympics but feeling crushed by the weight of optimizing every single choice. Dialing in all the variables that might help her succeed—like sleep, exercise, diet, self-talk, and focus—can become a worthiness-proving project. Being consistent becomes equated with doing something constantly. If she's not casting votes for her goal every minute, it feels like she's not worthy of attempting it. She's not taking it seriously enough. She doesn't deserve to exist on elite starting lines at races.
We don't have to accept every productivity assumption du jour. We can cherry-pick. When a framework feels helpful, we can use it. When it doesn't, we can reject the fundamental assumption, for example, reject that every action proves or threatens our identity. We can adapt assumptions so they work for us, rather than adapting ourselves to them. Nicola can go to dinner with friends where the meal is just a meal, not evidence for or against her Olympic dreams.
2. Don't Conflate Success and Efficiency
The following is another assumption you can reject if it doesn't fit your desired growth culture.
Hustle culture often designates someone as more successful if they do something faster. For example, earning your pilot's license after 40 hours of flight time (the legal minimum) is viewed as more successful than taking 100 hours. Some of this is about cost (since hiring a plane and instructor is expensive), but it's also about ego. Fast is seen as a badge of honor.
When we move away from equating faster with better, it helps avoid the trap of premature optimization (trying to pursue perfection or efficiency before basic functionality or progress is established).
The internet is obsessed with optimization, but it should be secondary to just doing the thing successfully. Premature optimization can make new endeavors feel like a minefield of potential mistakes. Hallmarks of it include: becoming obsessed with tool selection, trying to be efficient before we've started, attempting maximum effectiveness before basic functionality, focusing on secondary features before core ones, and skipping progressive milestones.
Hustle culture trains us to chase fast results, which can distort how we plan and act. A longer time horizon can help fix that. Being a safer pilot after 100 hours of flying is more important than whether you pass your test at 40 or 100 hours. Likewise, I'm far more interested in what my 5K running time will be in 5 years or 20 years than next year. Experiment with how shifting your mindset away from the fast or immediate affects your habits and mental health.
The next time you find yourself seeing speed as essential or better, or as a sign of your success or worth, remind yourself that speed is hustle culture's metric. It doesn't have to be yours. There doesn't have to be greater kudos or ego gained from doing something faster. You might still value efficiency for various reasons, but without making it the most important measure of success.
3. Don't Turn Self-Improvement Into Self-Robotization
Self-improvement does not need to resemble becoming a better robot. A central thesis of my book, Stress-Free Productivity, is that we can become more successful through valuing our human qualities.
Our growth goals don't need to include achieving more robotic consistency by eradicating features of our humanness like the up-and-down nature of our energy and motivation, the variation between our best and worst work, or our personality quirks. That's unnecessary.
We can learn to better utilize our unfocused mind, rather than seeking unfaltering focus, we can explore the hidden upsides of qualities usually viewed as negative, and we can improve our resilience through activities we only dabble in, without ever aiming for consistency.
Crucially, we don't need to accept the notion that we need to be productive every day. Having some unproductive days is inconsequential for our overall success.
Create Your Own Culture of Growth
You don't need to buy into hustle culture to pursue self-improvement. You don't need to fit the stereotype of a high performer to be a high performer.
We can create our own model of high performance rather than emulating someone else's. You don't need to buy into hustle culture's metrics, like optimization or robotic consistency, if those aren't important to you.
Trying a new approach can feel risky when it doesn't match the conventional way, but creating your own internal culture of self-improvement means you get to decide which assumptions serve you and which ones don't.
