Last week, I was doing a BaZi consult with a client trying to engage in some strategic career pivoting. The consultation was not going so easy because he had a number of other criteria that needed to be satisfied beyond purely deciding on what he should do next.

He had come well prepared for the consult, having given me 4 different career options he had been prepared to consider, and also, indicators on what he wanted to be able to achieve in the next 10 years of his career (he’s 40.)

We were discussing the options and how each of them did not necessarily satisfy his requirements – of course, this was a challenging situation because there were many factors to balance: career satisfaction, career advancement, family (which a consultant cannot ignore) and financial aspirations. As we went around on the topic, many times it occurred to me that life would be so much easier if clients only had one particular goal! But of course, it’s never like that.

For the last 4 weeks, I’ve been working on and off editing MONEY NEVER SLEEPS, my Wealth video class. So a lot of the ideas that I had explored in that class were also bouncing around in my head when I was doing the consult.

So after picking out what I considered to be his best career option that satisfied all the different risk buckets and ambition buckets, I was not very satisfied. I felt that the options presented were not ideal. That everything was just a little bit too safe, and had no upside. (the chart had good quality IW pillar but not strong, and had strong Friend Star, with a lot of IR. However the Luck Pillar was difficult and not optimum).

Suddenly, the question popped into my head:

“what’s your hustle option?”

Now you might be thinking – what the hell is the hustle option?

Firstly, for most people, a “Hustle” either sounds like a dance or a conman.  I am not referring to the dance but I am referring to what would be considered by some people to be a borderline conman scenario.

A Hustle option can perhaps be best described this way. You enter a business situation or a client situation and in theory, they have not asked to see you. In the course of the meeting (which you have obtained by whatever means necessary), you manage to convince them that without your services or a specific skill you have, they will effectively be in deep shit (or terrible disaster, take your pick). You then convince them to pay you money to do something you are good at doing (and a bit more which you have sold).

Let me be clear: under none of the above circumstances are you offering to perform a service that you cannot engage in, or utilise skills you do not have (or cannot procure). But what you are effectively doing is what they call, writing your own job description. You pitch an idea or a service, and fill a need, that wasn’t actually there until you invented it (not that it’s not real, it is).

In a career context, a hustle option is in effect, a job you create for yourself that someone else will pay to do. It’s a role that doesn’t exist, but because of your unique mix of skills, can be created for you (if someone sees the value in it, or if you manage to make them see the disaster of not having you).

In reality, many unique corporate roles or established businesses started this way. The best example of this is the famous sports agency IMG, which began when Mark McCormack saw an opportunity to partner sports with brands. Now, prior to McCormack and IMG, the role of the sports agent did not exist. Talent agents mostly represented movie stars. But what McCormack did was effectively create an industry for himself by being the first person to do something (not that unique, but simply applied to a different world). Risk management, which is now a very established practice within large businesses, is also something which started as a specialist field, and no doubt has now become mainstream.

Why does everyone need a hustle option? And when do you activate a hustle option? And what Star is the Hustle Option?

Firstly, the Hustle Star is Hurting Officer because it involves gap filling in a creative/imaginative way. And also, Hustling involves the Hurting Officer Star because one has to effectively kick down the door at the business, invent a reason for being hired (in light of the non-existence of the role) and in a sense, convince the business that the service is needed.

What is the value of a Hustle Option? Sometimes, if you want to unlock the potential of an Indirect Wealth Star, but you also want to give the person safety of DW (because DW is not present), it is difficult to find a conventional job or role that offers this option.It is particularly difficult if the idea also is to help the person to pivot (move out of an area that they are already in) or expand their capacity.

Sometimes the person is not thinking out of the box, or is waiting to be offered the “perfect job”. And this is just not forthcoming because perfect requires ticking too many boxes that a conventional business would not offer necessarily.Sometimes, the person has a great personality and could convince people to hire them on the basis of that, and so what they have to do is break the mould and literally, find a job they want or create a job for themselves.  By asking the person to come up with a Hustle Option, the idea is to ask the person to effectively take control of the situation. To search, rather than wait to be found. To create, rather than waiting for the thing to be made.

In this case, the chart was a Xin 辛 DM, with a 乙未 pillar that I wanted to utilise. So by asking the person to come up with a hustle option, I was trying to essentially force a 亥 into the equation. But this of course was unique to the circumstances of the case.

To me, I think a Hustle Option is increasingly something that every person, at the cusp of career advancement should consider. In today’s world, people have more and more commitments of a personal nature that require more than just a job. They need time, or flexibility, but they also want upside, and the opportunity to participate or own in the success of a business (if they have such a chart or such ambition). So the conventional job where you earn a salary and plod along will not work for some people (in the same way it is ideal for some).

The Hustle Option however is not an easy option to implement. For starters, the BaZi consultant cannot come up with the job for you (although we can provide some parameters to ensure you don’t try to write a perfect job description that ends up emphasising areas that are not your actual skills because it is normal for people to delude themselves on this). A smart consultant will be able to give you a sense of what this option might be if they are familiar with your skill set. For example, in the case of this client, I suggested a godfathered or grandfathered Start Up – in effect, a start-up that has wealthy backers already in place. These setups usually pay competitive salaries to attract talent but also typically give rise to more opportunities for management independence as well as a sandbox for someone to expand their skill set to become more generalised.

But even when the BaZi consultant offers the Hustle Option, it is up to the individual to find the opportunity. In other words, I can define the parameters of what the ideal option would be and even know it exists, but it is for the client to kick the door down and make the sale that closes the deal.

The thing about the Hustle Option is that it forces the client to think out of the box, when the options in place are basically sub par or never going to actually offer opportunities to fulfil the power of a particular Luck Pillar. The standard assumption is that starting one’s own business is the Hustle Option is passe. Solutions need to be more sophisticated than going out and being own’s own boss because not everyone has the chart for that (nor the stomach for necessarily a certain grinding existence either). Thus, the Hustle Option. A third door as it were, that is designed to prompt or prod the client into a more focused purpose but also, to seize control of their own destiny.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?