The Recognition Trap

On hustle culture and the selves we abandon to succeed.

At sixteen, I stood in a field somewhere in Ireland, surrounded by hundreds of strangers, doing the thing that frightened me most: talking to them.

My dad had found me the job. The owner ran a games shop. Computer games, Dad assumed. It turned out his company, Fun & Games, exhibited at fairs, carnivals, festivals and all manner of outdoor events all over the country. Crazy Cans. Slam Bank. Fat Cats. Darts. Pay a pound, play a game, win a soft toy.

Up to that point I had been known, labelled really, as a shy, withdrawn child. The boy who hadn’t yet come out of his shell. I never put my hand up in class. The idea of sharing my thoughts out loud scared me; the world seemed an odd place, and I took solace in video games. Now here was a job that demanded the opposite. Not just serving the customers who approached the stall, but calling out to the ones sitting on the fence. Coaxing. Performing. Delivering a spiel. That first summer, I was overwhelmed.

The second summer, something shifted. I remember the thought clearly: I’ll never see any of these people again. I might as well start talking.

So I did. I built a persona, and the persona worked. I became good at the job, very good, the best among my peers. People close to me said I’d finally come out of my shell. The recognition felt wonderful, and I wanted more of it. My future suddenly seemed obvious: I would be a businessman. An entrepreneur. Someone who hustles.

Here is what I couldn’t have known at sixteen: I wasn’t coming out of my shell. I was building a second one, shaped to fit what the world rewarded and climbing inside it.

I think this is one of the most common stories there is, though we rarely tell it this way. Somewhere along the line, most of us learned to perform a version of ourselves that worked. It got the grades, the job, the promotion, the praise. And here is the trap: nobody applauds you for staying true to your nature. They applaud you for overriding it. The applause feels like confirmation that you’ve found yourself, when often it means you’ve found a more marketable replacement.

Hustle culture is the industrial-scale version of this bargain. Push through the discomfort. Lean in. Time is money. Recently, I found myself annoyed by a Tony Robbins post on my feed preaching exactly this — posted, apparently, from a yacht in St. Tropez, which the comments were quick to point out. But what struck me more than the hypocrisy was who was cheering: wave after wave of early career people celebrating the message, while the pushback came mostly from people a decade or more older. I can’t know that pattern holds for certain, but it matched something in my own life. The hustle drove me hard through my late teens and twenties. It took years and a closer look at the absurdities of corporate life that I now can’t unsee before I started asking what it had cost.

Because there is a cost, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough. Decades spent going against the grain of your own nature don’t show up on any invoice. It shows up later as exhaustion no holiday fixes, as burnout, as the quiet sense of having been mis-sold a dream. We revere the slog right up until we crash. Looking around at rising levels of mental ill-health, it isn’t hard to see why. Even AI, which might have promised us slower, more human lives, is being handed to us as a competitive tool: speed up some more, or get left behind.

My parents got me working at fifteen, and I’m glad they did. I’ll encourage my daughters to do the same. But I’ll be more careful than anyone was with me about one thing: what the work asks them to become. I can’t judge my sixteen-year-old self harshly, how was he to know? What I can do is tell my daughters the whole story. That stretching yourself is good, and necessary. And that there is a difference between stretching and abandoning. Between growing out of your shell and being talked out of your own nature.

Coaching, my profession now, is largely founded on the idea of change. Growth. New behaviours. But some of the most important work I do with people runs the other way. Helping them notice which of their behaviours were never really theirs. Which parts of the “successful self” were built for applause and what it has been costing to maintain them.

So let me leave you with the question I keep returning to: what did the applause cost you? What’s one behaviour you adopted because it was rewarded, that you now suspect was never really yours?

I’d love to hear it in the comments.