You gotta hustle, right?
Well…yes and no.
People eager to hustle sometimes move too fast. Packing in appointments, the salesperson fires off impersonal proposals. Details get missed; questions go unanswered. The client asks, “Is this really what we talked about?”
For clients, the hustle can feel like a form of theft because as Seth Godin puts it, “our time, the irreplaceable thing we all are given, was taken.”
When you bring care and respect to your work, it often looks like the opposite of hustle. It’s work done with sprezzatura, not with a transaction in mind.
I love how Godin describes spezzatura:
“This is an archaic Italian word for being able to do your craft without a lot of visible effort. It’s a combination of elan and grace and class, sort of the opposite of loud grunts while you play tennis or a lot of whining and fuss when you help out a customer.
Many people are unable to put their finger on it, but this is a magnetic trait for many of us. We want our lawyer, dentist and waiter to demonstrate sprezzatura, but of course, not particularly try to. This is one of the secrets of Danny Meyer’s top-rated restaurants in New York. It doesn’t have to be flashy, it doesn’t even have to be the very best there ever was, but sprezzatura is enough to get us to return. As long as this light-footedness is scarce, it will remain valuable.”
