Hustle with Jon Acuff Thursday April 2nd

Startups experience first hand the demanding, exhausting hours that is required to go into their work. New York Times Bestelling Author Jon Acuff visited the EC near the beginning of Project Music to share his insight on the importance of listening to your customers and getting out of your comfort zone. Encompassing his message is theme of hustle. With as many different definitions on hustle, Acuff describes it best in this post.

Jon: I think that one of the phrases I often talk about is that hustle is fuel, it’s the fuel that makes you actually do the things you want to do. So you can have the best intentions, the best hopes, the best dreams but unless you actually do them, they don’t matter. So I kind of look at a dream like a car and the most amazing car that doesn’t have fuel is a really amazingly heavy well-designed paper weight. For me that’s what hustle is and it’s that fuel. Sometimes, I say it’s doing the important things others don’t to enjoy the results others won’t. That’s kind of how I look at hustle. Again it’s about focus, not frenzy. I think sometimes we think it’s become a workaholic and that’s not what it is at all.

Jon: At the end of the day business is about serving people. And if you don’t interact with people, you’re just guessing. I think you see that happen all the time where business launch and you can tell they just guess and the market doesn’t respond to it the way they thought they would. So for me, as a speaker, as an author, the more time I spend around people, the easier it is to serve them, and go, ‘oh! that’s a problem they’re challenged with right now.’ I have an idea that matches that versus ‘I’m going to sit in a room by myself for ten hours and try to guess what people need in a book. And then create something that is so far from what they really need.” So I’m trying to do more face-to-face, ask more questions, create ideas out of a need versus just ‘I want to create an idea.’

Hear more about hustle at Jon Acuff’s Do Over book release party THURSDAY APRIL 2 • 7:00-9:00 PM. It is free and open to the public. Free parking outside of the EC. Space is limited. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER. 

This interview was provided by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company that connects buyers and sellers of business technology through meaningful relationships. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.