The Corporate Carnival: How Hustle Turned Precious

Imagine, if you will, the grand entrance of The Hustlers, striding into the corporate ring, the sharp scent of ambition hanging in the air like gunpowder on the Fourth of July. They came not from business schools or think tanks but from the streets of pure, unadulterated need. Somewhere, a problem existed—a problem that demanded the kind of feral energy you only find in people who have been kicked around enough to know that the only way forward is to build something that others need now, not in ten years, not after a marketing meeting. Now.

These are the kinds of people who look at a busted pipe, a broken market, or an underserved niche and see not failure but opportunity. Let’s call them The Grit Brigade, because nothing so grand as “visionary” was ever applied to them when they started. They were the ones who did, the guys and gals who hustled before hustling was a LinkedIn buzzword, back when that term meant you were clawing your way out of a basement office, not looking for VC funding. And by God, did they deliver. The market applauded. Customers handed over money. The company grew. Grew and grew—until it became a towering beast of departments, processes, HR meetings, and… retreats.

Ah, the corporate retreat, a carefully orchestrated ballet of trust falls and kumbayas. If you’re lucky, you’ll see grown adults—CEOs, CFOs, and “Senior Vice Presidents of Strategic Initiatives”—all lined up like students at summer camp, pretending that playing capture the flag in the woods is going to “synergize” their strategies for Q4. You can almost hear Wolfe chuckling in the corner, cigarette dangling from his lip, his white suit gleaming in the afternoon sun as he watches a 50-year-old man earnestly fall backward into the waiting arms of his colleague, Barry from HR, a man who can barely lift a printer, let alone “catch” your trust.

What in Zeus’ name is going on here?

Here’s where the absurdity begins to unfold. These people—the very same ones who built a multi-million-dollar company out of sweat, failure, and grit—have now convinced themselves that they are experts. Experts! Look at them! They’re no longer the people who built something out of necessity and drive; now, they’re the self-styled Corporate Gurus who talk in TED Talk tones and speak about “market positioning” and “brand storytelling” with all the faux wisdom of a 22-year-old life coach on Instagram.

And so, these masters of the universe (yes, you can hear Wolfe’s mocking phrase slide in) take their corporate retreats, make their five-year plans, and engage in team-building exercises that would make any sensible person question their life choices. All the while, they cling to their roles—Marketing Heads, Chief Strategists, Sales Directors—like precious relics, unaware that the very thing that built their company (the hustle, the drive, the failure) has now been replaced by preciousness.

Enter Hunter S. Thompson, riding shotgun through this carnival of misplaced confidence, grinning like a madman. He sees it all for what it is: a chaotic, awkward attempt to avoid the truth. What truth, you ask? The fact that none of them really know what they’re doing anymore, but they can’t admit it. The whole game has changed, and here they are, thinking they’re on top of the mountain because they filled one hole in the market, not realizing that they’ve plateaued and don’t know how to climb any higher.

“These people!” Thompson would shout, “They built the thing! The real thing! And now look at them, bringing in consultants, hiring marketing experts who can’t market their way out of a paper bag, all because they think they’ve earned the right to sit at the top and act like royalty! And let’s not forget the damn ping-pong tables. Ping-pong tables in the office! What kind of madness is this?”

The ping-pong tables. The casual Fridays. The internal wellness programs. These are the distractions, the things companies do when they no longer know how to grow, but they’re too proud to admit it. Instead of admitting that their expertise may be outdated—that what worked for them five years ago isn’t going to cut it now—they distract themselves with wellness programs and corporate bonding, hoping that somewhere in the middle of a game of foosball, the magic will return.

But the magic’s not coming back.

What they don’t see—what Wolfe would gleefully dissect with his scalpel-sharp wit—is that these retreats, these new “culture initiatives,” these consultants—they’re all just masks. They’re covering up the fact that the people who built the company are no longer the ones who should be running it. They’re precious about their roles, clutching their titles as though their identity depends on it (and let’s be honest, it probably does), even as the company stagnates.

“See here,” Wolfe would write, with that cool, detached air of the social anthropologist in a sea of human folly, “the man who once figured out how to sell widgets to middle America now believes he can teach you the art of marketing itself, though his only credentials are that the market once rewarded his good luck.”

Thompson would break in, less restrained, more visceral, maybe with a beer in hand, “They’re fighting like rats in a cage, thinking their positions mean something. When the truth is, it was never about their so-called expertise—it was about the hustle. And now, they’ve forgotten how to hustle.”

And this is the central tragedy. These people were once warriors—scrappy, innovative, unafraid to get their hands dirty. But success has made them soft. They no longer know how to adapt, how to look around and say, “We need something different now.” Instead, they cling to what worked before and refuse to let go.

But wait! Here’s the kicker, the real punchline that Wolfe and Thompson would seize upon with gleeful irony: everyone thinks they’re still geniuses. Oh yes, Barry in HR is still convinced he’s the best HR manager in the game because, hey, he’s been there since the beginning. Never mind that he’s never studied HR beyond what he’s done at this one company. Never mind that the only reason he’s here is because he happened to be Barry, the guy who was willing to answer phones and do payroll back when no one else would. Now, Barry’s running the show—Barry thinks he’s an expert.

And this is how it goes. Everyone in the company, from the marketing lead who’s still using tactics from 2010 to the sales director who’s been selling the same pitch for a decade, believes they are irreplaceable. They have become precious—precious about their jobs, their titles, and their perceived expertise. They’ve forgotten that the very thing that built the company was not their expertise, but their willingness to get things done.

“Hustle, man,” Thompson would write in that jagged, rapid-fire prose of his. “The only thing that mattered was the hustle, the grit, the willingness to fail. Now, look at them, clutching their corporate titles like they mean something, like they weren’t just lucky to be there when the market had a need.”

And Wolfe would close with that signature smirk in his prose: “And so they play their games, hold their retreats, and bring in their consultants, hoping that the magic will return. But the real magic? The real magic is in letting go of the preciousness, in being humble enough to admit that maybe, just maybe, they’re not the experts after all.”

Welcome to the Corporate Carnival, where everyone’s an expert, and no one’s willing to admit they don’t know what they’re doing anymore.