A word that once meant to swindle became the highest compliment in startup culture.
The English word hustle entered the language in the late seventeenth century from the Dutch husselen, meaning to shake or toss, as in shaking coins in a game of chance. By the nineteenth century, it had acquired the sense of aggressive energy and, in American English, the specific connotation of fraud or swindle. A hustler was someone who deceived others for money.1
The rehabilitation of the word began in hip-hop culture, where hustling described the resourcefulness required to survive and succeed in economically hostile environments. By the 2010s, "hustle" had migrated from street culture to Silicon Valley, where it became a term of praise for entrepreneurial intensity.2
"Hustle culture" described an ideology in which relentless work was not just a strategy but an identity. Sleep deprivation became a status symbol. Side projects were moral obligations. The boundary between work and life was treated not as a problem to solve but as an obstacle to overcome.3
The phrase gained traction alongside the rise of the gig economy, where workers without traditional employment benefits were encouraged to frame their precarity as freedom and their exhaustion as ambition.
A backlash emerged in the late 2010s. The term "toxic productivity" appeared in workplace psychology. Burnout was classified by the World Health Organization in 2019 as an occupational phenomenon in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).4
The Dutch verb husselen, from which hustle derived, originally described the physical act of shaking lots or coins together. The earliest recorded use of the English word, around 1684, meant to push or jostle roughly. By the early nineteenth century, American slang had connected the jostling to deception.5