The Truth About Hustle Culture and How Jay Broke Out of It

If you have ever built a life that looks powerful from the outside yet still feels quietly constrained on the inside, this conversation will help you meet the word success with a different kind of honesty. It is for the woman or man who knows how to push, produce, and perform at a high level, who can architect results on demand, yet feels a subtle ache beneath the surface that keeps whispering a simple question. What is the point of all this if I do not feel free.

So many of us were taught to trade our time, our nervous systems, and our dreams for the illusion of security. The good job. The steady paycheck. The title that sounds impressive at dinner. We learn to normalize exhaustion. We learn to normalize being busy. Somewhere along the way, busyness becomes our identity and freedom becomes a fantasy reserved for other people. That is the doorway this conversation opens. Not just a doorway into new strategy, but a doorway into a new definition of success itself.

This episode with Nigerian born entrepreneur and consultant Jay Adewole begins with a story of ambition and migration and slowly reveals the deeper choice underneath it. A choice between a life that is predictably safe and a life that is purposefully free. It is not a story told from theory. It is a story lived in the body of a man who left Lagos for New York, walked away from a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar salary, and was willing to drop to forty thousand in his first year as a founder in order to build something that actually belonged to him.

The Moment You Realize Security Is Its Own Cage

Jay shares that his journey did not begin with a glamorous leap into entrepreneurship. It began with programming that sounded familiar. Go to school. Get a good job. Work until you die. In Lagos he had already been a builder. He launched a fashion house, a modeling agency, and the West African Fashion Awards. He moved through cities like Cape Town, Accra, and Abidjan as someone who understood hustle and creativity. Yet even in all that movement there was a knowing that he wanted more than busyness. He wanted impact. He wanted agency. He wanted the power to shape his own life.

When he settled in the United States and began working inside a consulting firm in New York, the numbers looked right. The salary was high. The role was respected. He was leading operations and carrying the weight of the work. On paper it was a win. Inside, something felt off. He could see clearly that ten years of that path would add up to a few million dollars and a life that did not belong to him. He started to ask a different question. If I can help someone else build this, what would happen if I gave that same devotion to my own vision.

Eventually he said yes to that question. He left the comfort of his role and started Point of View with Jay. The first year hurt. The income dropped. The doubts got louder. The gap between what he believed he was capable of and what his bank account reflected stretched wide. That contrast is where many people turn back. It is where he chose to get honest.

The Power Of A One Month Pause

One of the most profound parts of Jay’s story is not the climb to seven figures. It is the pause in between. At the point where most people would double down on effort, he did something counterintuitive. He turned off his phone for an entire month. No calls. No emails. No social media. He stepped out of busyness long enough to see what was really happening.

During that month he did what so few high achievers give themselves permission to do. He reviewed everything. His offers. His positioning. His systems. His niche. The way his business model was structured. He stopped assuming that because he knew how to run operations for someone else he automatically knew how to build and market his own thing. That pause was not laziness. It was strategy. It was humility. It was a reclamation of his ability to choose differently.

When he came back, he did not come back as the same man. He refined his market. He tightened his structure. He shifted his focus from simply replicating what he had seen to building what truly fit him. That is when revenue jumped from forty thousand into the range of eight hundred and fifty thousand to one million. The money was a byproduct of something deeper. It reflected a man who stopped confusing constant activity with progress. It reflected the power of a pause that most people are too afraid to take.

Redefining Success As Freedom, Not Just Money

As the conversation deepens, Jay shares a definition of success that will land differently for anyone who has ever chased numbers and still felt empty. He no longer sees success as the size of his bank account alone. He sees it as the ability to live free. Free in time. Free in choice. Free in purpose. To him, a business is successful when it works even when he is not there. A life is successful when it allows him to show up for his family, his health, his impact, and his truth without needing permission from a boss or a paycheck.

We speak about the way so many people are living what he calls a modern form of slavery. Not only in America but globally. People trapped in cycles where missing a few days of work can mean losing a home. People who believe they are secure because they have a job, while forgetting that the same job can release them with an email. The heaviness you may feel reading this is not an accident. It is your nervous system recognizing a truth you have probably sensed for a long time.

This episode does not glamorize recklessness. It does not tell you to quit your job tomorrow. It invites you to interrogate the story you have been told about what deserves to be called success. It asks you to consider how much of your life force is being spent sustaining an identity that does not match your soul.

Busyness, MetaBusiness, And The Choice To Be Free

Throughout the conversation we return to the word busyness. How similar it looks to the word business and how easily the two get confused. Jay speaks about seasons where he was so busy that he had no time to create a solution. Wake up. Work. Collapse. Repeat. There was money. There was motion. There was very little freedom. Erin shares how that pattern is at the core of why MetaBusiness exists in the first place. To help people rise above the surface level of doing and into a higher blueprint that honors soul and strategy at the same time.

We explore the way society keeps people ignorant of their rights, their options, and their spiritual authority. How many are never taught to negotiate with landlords, banks, or courts. How quickly fear can make us cling to situations that are quietly draining the life out of us. And how powerful it is when one person decides they will no longer be a slave to systems that do not see their full humanity.

What This Conversation Means For You

If you recognize yourself in Jay’s story, know that you are not alone. Maybe you are the one everyone points to as proof that success is possible. The one with the title, the income, the house, the lifestyle. And yet you wake up with a quiet dread in your chest. You feel grateful and trapped at the same time. You know how to perform competence while secretly wondering when your own life will start to feel like it belongs to you.

None of that means you are ungrateful. It means your soul is ready for a more honest relationship with success. It means your inner wisdom is asking new questions.

This conversation will not hand you a simple formula. Instead, it will invite you into deeper inquiry. Where in your life are you confusing movement with progress. Where are you hiding behind busyness because you are afraid to pause and see the truth. Where are you trading freedom for the illusion of safety.

You will hear how an immigrant from Lagos navigated fashion, consulting, and podcasting while holding a vision of impact bigger than any one job. You will hear how a one month pause did more for his income and his alignment than another year of grinding ever could. You will hear two leaders reflect on the difference between being owned by your work and being the conscious creator of your life.

A New Way Forward

As you sit with what is shared in this episode, notice the places inside you that tighten when you imagine making a different choice. Notice the places that soften when you picture yourself free. Notice the identities you are afraid to release and the dreams you are afraid to claim. Your relationship with freedom is not abstract. It lives in the tiny decisions you make every day about how you spend your time, your energy, and your courage.

Jay’s journey reminds us that transformation does not always begin with a dramatic external event. Sometimes it begins with a quiet decision to stop, breathe, and tell yourself the truth about the life you are living. Sometimes it begins with choosing to step out of busyness long enough to remember who you are beyond your title and your to do list.

This conversation is for every person who is tired of measuring their worth in hours worked and income earned. It is for the woman and man who is done carrying a version of success that drains your spirit. It is for the leader who is ready to build wealth and impact without sacrificing freedom at the altar of achievement.

Connect with Jay at his website www.winnerscirclewithjay.com, his podcast, and Instagram,

Let’s stay connected! If this conversation resonated with you, make sure to follow along on Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts for more episodes that blend Sol, strategy, and healing. Your support helps us spread these messages even further, and I’d love to keep this journey going with you.