Treat effort as a permanent condition of the work, not a phase you graduate out of.

principle — attributed to Brian Feit

Feit describes the hustle as something in his blood rather than a phase he moved past once BMF grew past a hundred staff and blue-chip retainers. The anxiety of the West Village apartment, knowing this month and next month were covered but not the third, has not left him, it has only scaled alongside the company. He treats that discomfort as a permanent operating condition rather than a problem success is supposed to resolve. The lesson is that effort sustained past the point of necessity is not a stage of a career, it is the mechanism that keeps generating the next opportunity.

For operators who expect the hunger to ease once the company stabilizes.

effort, hustle, persistence, identity