Every Tuesday at 12 p.m. WAT, Zikoko will share the hustle stories of Nigerians making it big in and out of the country. With each story, we’ll ask one crucial question in several ways: “How you do am?”
Hustle is a brick, solid word that chased me through childhood. Whoever was hustling was someone to be like. They were grinding, “putting food on the table”. The hairdresser with the matchbox shop behind my house was a hustler. Each month when I went for my hair retouch, her shop was full of women who had problems with their hair or their men — and they all paid for her time. The barber across the street that married my aunt was a hustler. He was one of the first to get a Tiger generator on the street.
Hustle is a word that grows with you. Once it’s big enough, it climbs on your lap and holds tight, forcing your attention on it. “You must do me,” it says. Because you’re an adult now. And it knows what adults do to feel like adults. You must hustle.
I felt the weight of hustle for the first time after university. I’d just graduated with a second-class lower, unsure what to do next. I knew what I wanted. I’d felt my mouth water when I found a good sentence in a book enough times to be certain my life would revolve around books. But with a dad at home waiting for the fruits of his 20-year-old labour and a degree that questioned my last four years, I didn’t know what my next step was.
You’ve probably had a phase where you didn’t know what to do. Deciding what to have for breakfast, whether to chase a master’s or stay at your job, japa to an unknown country for better alternatives or stay where you’re comfortable.
Tega was thinking about this problem when she decided we should talk to people who were having trouble making career decisions — who specifically didn’t know what to do when they were interested in a field or wanted to move to a new one.
How do you start a food business in a new city? How do you become a Nollywood star? We’re speaking to people who’ve done it and creating helpful guides using these conversations, for you.
Hustleprint stories will drop biweekly from today, Tuesday, January 31st, 2023, at 12 p.m. WAT, and Hustleprint guides will drop in the interim weeks.
So you can follow each drop, Hustleprint will be published in our money newsletter.
