The cost of hustling

I run a small cleaning business that brings me in some passive income, but when i was at the start i had this client that i eventually refused to do work for because he wasn&#x27;t worth the hassle. The bill for a months cleaning of his office was £500-ish. The guy was part of a family that owned an Oil and Gas equipment company that must turn over hundreds of millions of pounds per year, and that guy REALLY REALLY didnt want to pay his £500 bill for an office clean. He must have spent about 10+ hours going back and forth through emails and phone calls querying 2-3 hours here, the cost of cleaning supplies, complaints about the cleaners i&#x27;d sent, just to get his bill down, in the end his bill was down to around £400 and he eventually paid it, but he&#x27;d wasted his own time and the same amount of my time.<p>Now i consider 10+ hours of MY time to be worth WAY more than £500 due to what i can earn doing my usual consulting and also because i dont want to deal with douchebags like him, and what i make per year is insignificant compared to the company that he helps to run, so i never understood why the hell he&#x27;s kicking up shit over a damned cleaning bill. Infuriated me to no end.<p>Now i only have clients that pay their automatically issued invoices every month without issue, they&#x27;re happy and i&#x27;m happy, i get my beer money and i can concentrate on my consulting instead of my side business.

It looks to me that the author himself doesn&#x27;t value his own time enough, yet, since he &quot;conceded and said (he) would fix the bug&quot;.<p>If you are bootstrapping something, it is critical to be able to say no at this point and not follow along, since so many things can eat your time.

There&#x27;s a very big difference between &quot;asking&quot; and &quot;refusing to take no for an answer&quot;. The first one rarely has negative effects - but the second one often can.<p>Some level of social skill and empathy is also required for the &quot;asking&quot; portion, too...

<i>This went back and forth four or five times until I then reminded him that I had made it very clear that I was not available, and that he was losing my time and his own by sending these constant emails.</i><p>The real problem is that you kept continuing the conversation, even though you said no. That probably gave the individual some sort of hope that they could convince you otherwise.<p><i>I let him know that I had set up a filter to route his email address to trash and that he would never hear about me again.</i><p>I personally would recommend against doing things like this. Don&#x27;t tell them you&#x27;re going to do it, just set and forget. ;)

<i>A good hustler must consider that–if he has nothing to lose by asking–it might be because his self worth is nothing.</i><p>That&#x27;s quite a harsh judgment - I think the hustler is generally aware that they are on the losing end of the power dynamic, and that is what requires the hustle (partly to prove their eagerness&#x2F;enthusiasm), but their self worth is definitely not zero as this would cause them to just shut up and not bother. I see hustle as an attempt flex muscle by the weaker person in the negotiation.

It doesn&#x27;t seem like hustlers, at least in the sense of the article, have low self-worth. It&#x27;s fairly easy to put people with low self-worth off.<p>Hustlers are, I think, more like those really pushy boyfriends who you go out on one date with and then they try to call you 15 times an hour. Same sort of behaviour -<p><i>&quot;ME ME ME, MY WANTS OVER YOUR RIGHT TO BE LEFT ALONE! LISTEN TO ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!&quot;</i><p>I suppose you could consider that a form of insecurity. But if it is, it&#x27;s insecurity coupled with incredibly strong selfishness.