I’ve come to learn that creating the appearance of hustle while actually not doing that much work is the route to go. You have to be a ruthless self-promoter for it to be effective but it’s easy to just pretend to be busy all the time and talk up the very few things you do achieve. I’ve built a 20-year career from this, so I don’t believe it has a limited runway. I plan on riding this lazy train all the way to an exec role (director now so I don’t actually do much other than delegate anyway).
The whole thing is a fucking scam in the end. Hard work doesn’t pay off — pretty much every working-class person works 10x harder than me for 1/10 of the pay. The lazy person who can bullshit really well is always going to make more and burn out less.