"Many of my students are not the unluckiest, but neither have they been that lucky. They are willing to work, but too tired to hustle. And that used to be enough," community college English professor Nicole Matos wrote in the closing lines of her expose titled "Too Tired to Hustle" published on Inside Higher Ed's website today.
Matos is referring to the job market, and the preponderance of students seeking safe, "public" jobs with set hours and a respectable rate of pay rather than taking entrepreneurial risks and attempting to break through in more loosely defined fields.
The former pathway "used to be enough," according to Matos, but today's realities require job seekers with more creativity, more drive, more motivation, more capacity for risk, and, to colloquially sum all those qualities, more "hustle."
Even as the standard of community college student has risen, it hasn't, apparently, equaled the pace of the demanding job industry. Those attempting to become nurses, teachers, policeman, etc. are having an increasingly difficult time finding immediate work. Many have to wait years before they get their coveted job.
As someone who currently writes for a living and is just a few years out of college (but not a "recent college graduate"), I've experienced the reality Matos describes firsthand, even if I never attended community college. Having a little "hustle" is an especially important quality in the writing field, given the explosion of professional and personal websites and the corresponding need to establish one's self or site among the fleet of emerging writers and content.
Several months ago, I channeled a chance brush with a New York Times bestselling author into a minor moment of "hustle," only to discover how much more hustle was necessary to truly break into the field.
Basically, one of my former cross country teammates from college (he won so many national titles I can't remember if the final number was seven or eight) was featured in the recent bestselling book, "The Sports Gene." By chance, the author, David Epstein, had used a quote I'd given to a local newspaper in a piece about my teammate. With that as a preface, I shot Epstein an introductory email along with some questions about the industry. He replied back quickly and enthusiastically about how he broke into the field and what it takes to make it as a writer. What he described -- finding stories no one else is writing about and pitching them to editors -- sounded exactly like the loosely defined career path outlined by Matos and avoided by her students.
To summarize the issue in television shows (at least we are in the golden age of something), the job market as preferred by Matos' students goes something like the strictly defined themes of a CBS or ABC sitcom (I didn't use NBC because I didn't want to make a "Community" comparison) whereas both the industry and the job market are closer to the more nuanced (and better) shows seen on AMC, HBO, Showtime, and now even Netflix. A forgotten HBO show that literally represented the "hustle," but ran for just a few years was "How to Make it in America." Check it out. It could be inspiration for the weary.
