What We Can Learn from William Coltharp About Hustling
In the summer of 1916, William Coltharp had a problem. He was a Director for the Bank of Vernal. So, when the small-town bank was ready to expand and put up sturdy and safe brick walls, it fell on William’s shoulders to secure materials for the new bank building. This material was heavy to move and prohibitively expensive to ship. You see, Vernal was a small town about 125 miles from Utah. But the road from Utah to Vernal was rocky, crooked, and dangerous. This means that an independent shipping company would be expensive to hire, especially to deliver William's heavy bricks for the two-story bank. In fact, shipping became bottlenecked for most Vernal businesses by 1916. Growth would also become limited to what could be carted and who could afford the high shipping cost.
What puts William apart from the other business in town? None other than his eye for detail and his willingness to hustle. While some of the companies might be willing to pay parcel posts for a few bags of concrete to be trucked into town, nails, or a bit of lumber, William decided to pay for the bank to be shipped in. By pouring over the new US post office shipping cost and regulations, William saw an opportunity to get a jump start on his new bank, a way to get the bricks he needed for half the cost of private shipping using cheaper, local fire bricks. But William had to act fast before his bank scheme opportunity window closed. Ultimately, this effort would get a truck flipped and send a blaze that convinced the US Postal Service to change their rules on partial packages forever.
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When I say the word hustle, you probably imagine one of two things - a busy day full of stacks of paperwork and bills, missing breakfast, rushing around in a minivan, and arriving to work with coffee stains on your shirt. OR you’re picturing a lucrative side gig that earns you huge stacks of cash, one that will eventually let you quit your day job to pursue your real passion full-time. Whichever hustle you're imagining, we want to help you with it. We want you to be rested, balanced, and capable of tackling the day-to-day hustle. We want to help you jump in the hustle of life to get moving on your goals before they get stale on your vision board. So, that's our topic today - the hustle.
Myth 1: Goals, right? All we need to get into a hustle is to have a goal in mind and go for it. It's as simple as that.
We covered that in our episode about Dan Fogelberg about measuring our success, and we talked about a study that discussed how imagining goal success could trick your brain into thinking you've already reached them. Overall, just thinking that you won can release levels of dopamine, making your brain interpret it as you achieved them, especially if you get feedback. For example, if all of your friends and family say that you can achieve a goal (like losing 10 pounds), that positive feedback can actually make your brain think that you've already accomplished it.
We're going to reference a Harvard study that talks about how 83% of the US population does not have goals, and less than 3% write down their goals. So first off, we want to say that goals are very important. If you have them, you are 10X more likely to succeed than if you don't have goals, especially if you write them down. If you're listening to this podcast, please write down your goals. However, the bigger part of it is making sure you don't just fantasize about achieving your goals because fantasizing about it can trick your brain into thinking that you have already done it.
We're also going to link to an article where Jeremy Dean, a psychology researcher at UCL, talks about the problem with positive fantasies. In a nutshell, the problem with positive fantasies is that they allow us to anticipate success in the here and now, but they don't alert us to problems that we're facing along the way. For example, imagine yourself having lost 10 pounds doesn't actually give you the skills to do it. You literally have to go through the pain of whatever you're trying to accomplish to know the process. The process is actually more important to the goal than the goal itself.
With that as our base, we're going to talk about keystone habits. If you are looking to set goals or looking to accomplish something, incorporating keystone habits is something that statistically holds true across the board. Keystone habits are habits that will help you rearrange your brain and lifestyle, which offers positive effects once you start adopting them in life. It's not just a self-help nonsense thing; this has been researched to death to work. Again, a keystone habit is something that triggers people to start adopting better habits around it. It involves patience as well, as this change does take some time to become instilled in your day-to-day lives. But once it does, it starts cascading other things you do.
An example would be exercising or meditation. It makes you restructure what you're thinking and reframe/contextualize what you are doing, which is effectively what meditation is for. By doing this, you are likely to accomplish the things you want to do, including meditation, if you plan out your day first as well. Even getting enough sleep at night could be a keystone habit that could influence other areas of your life, as it sets you up for peak performance.
Myth 2: The key to success is stability. That's why we need perfect harmony and timing if we're building good habits, starting a new workout regimen, or trying to surpass our boss at work.
Believe it or not, stability and success do not necessarily go hand in hand. What makes someone successful is their willingness to grow, develop, and ideally cope with the stresses that go along with it. Being stressed and overwhelmed can lead a person to fail because they are not in the right mindset anymore. If this happens, you have to take a step back, evaluate it, and find an outlet to overcome.
To succeed, a lot of what we have to do is decontextualized. We have to reframe the way we think of what we're doing because we have to recognize when it's external versus internal pressures. Evaluate what is actually a demand on us versus what is a demand from our bosses, and what they're looking for and what they want. Instead of trying to do all of it and burning out, take something out of a box or an emotion, label it, and then identify it in third person.
Another one is speaking to the positive, meaning eliminating adversities from your vocabulary. I have also heard that not having a future tense apparently helps. Instead of saying, “I'm planning to lose weight,” just say, “I'm losing five pounds.” It's an impressive trick, but one that works. I have not had enough experience with that to try it myself, but it seems to be effective across the board. Future tensing yourself is kind of like putting it off for future you to deal with instead of tackling it in the present. You're not going to be ready for that. So, don't push it off on the future you, as future you will not be able to handle these things any better than you right now. In the end, be present, stay mentally balanced through meditation, exercising, etc., and master transforming chaos into your own power.
Myth 3: What is the so-called ‘immigrant work ethic?’ Why are 25% of new companies started by immigrant entrepreneurs, and what makes these businesses more likely to survive long-term?
Why do immigrants open businesses at a higher success rate? First of all, I married an immigrant, and I had a business that was all immigrants, so I know their work ethic. I've got nothing but love for how hard they work. This is how much of our industries make up immigrants: textile is 36%, agriculture is 33%, food manufacturing is 30%, electronic production is 27%, and of course, construction is the other 25%. So, a lot of administrative support jobs were developed by immigrants.
Have you ever heard of the I think it's 11 nations of America? It's the idea that we didn't arrive in America as immigrants and form a melting pot; we actually separated into basically a tossed salad. It is saying that immigrants arrived in America and then split off into their own separate cities. Teddy Roosevelt had a famous speech that he gave to Unions and he called them ‘hyphenated Americans.’ He said that Americans are ‘Irish American’, ‘German American’ or something else like that. He said we needed to stop hyphenating every American, but it's completely true. Even if you're not a first-generation immigrant, you come from that at least.
You know that joke about how you go to a hotel and there is always an Indian person there? Well, there's a reason - 50% to 60% of the hotels owned in this country are established by Indians and they're all loosely associated or related to the same Patel family. Different immigrant groups tend to associate with different businesses, and I'll go to Koreans. There's a lot of restaurants, and the two that they are very heavy in are dry cleaners and convenience stores. As for Hispanics, they dominate roofing, agriculture, and landscaping.
The Russians/Ukrainians tend to do a lot of car reselling, running dealerships, and rebuilding cars. They also do a lot of finished carpentry work and construction work. So, about 50-60% of hotels in the US are owned by Indians. Now, they were asked why they were so attracted to this when they could do so many other things. They said because it's easy to run. You don't have to speak perfect English, and if you're willing to work long hours to make it successful, you have a place to live as well. So, you don't have to have a separate residence. Isn’t that clever?
As a disclaimer, I may not be aware of the science behind the stats on immigrant work ethic and their success rates, but I want to go through a little bit of it and cover the data. This comes from a Harvard Business School paper, and they talk about how foreign-born people make up 13% of the US population, which isn't the bulk. However, they make up 25% of new companies. A quarter of all new businesses are immigrant businesses. And there are certain states that are called ‘Gateway States’ for new businesses. Now, Wyoming is not going to be booming with immigrant businesses. It's actually New York and California that make up 40% of new businesses led by immigrants.
You're wondering why immigrant entrepreneurs make up 25% of new companies. It's not always that it's it. The reason for their success really tends to boil down to their skill, education, and work ethic. They have to do something that will make money with their skills because their education and socio-economic background do not necessarily translate. All in all, they hustle hard, set goals, and make it work. That is something we should all take a strong note of.
Final Thoughts
Goals are an overall positive thing to keep, and you're even more likely to achieve them if you write them down. But there is one sure-fire way to hit your goals faster and experience a net positive impact on your life - keystone habits. Picking up keystone habits have been proven to affect the rest of your day-to-day behavior in a beneficial way, like exercise, meditation, and sleep. These keystone habits may not feel as sexy as visualizing yourself as a billionaire entrepreneur, but they're part of the hustle you can start achieving today right now.
Chaos can be a ladder, but only for the folks ready to climb. Take it from Navy Seals, reframe your thoughts, speak to the positive, and give yourself those physical and social boosts you need to stay in the hustle. Overall, staying in the hustle is harder than the initial jump-in. So, make sure you're prepared mentally for the long haul. Finally, if your new hustle is a small business, investment, or a self-run operation, never forget that thinking outside the box doesn't necessarily mean discovering a new method all on your own. But if you like William Coltharp, it might mean being more dogged and audacious on what you're willing to do to get what you need. After all, if God closes the door, do you have the guts to ask him to FedEx you the window?