Jamie Dimon Doesn’t Know What It Means To ‘Hustle’

I try to stay above the proverbial fray.

For four years, I dabbled in social media engagement, before ultimately giving up on tweets (other than links to articles) a few months back. I’ve never had a Facebook page. (I tried to create one a few years ago for fun and it turned out to be a somewhat unnerving experience — they asked for my driver’s license). At some point a decade ago, I had a LinkedIn profile. (But someone managed it for me and I can’t seem to find it now.)

“Engagement,” the engine of social media, is increasingly a misnomer, unless by “engage” you mean low-brow verbal combat. With no real capacity to fact check or otherwise vet what’s posted, social media companies have largely allowed their platforms to devolve into an ongoing, daily melee, characterized by more fiction than fact, more propaganda than information and infinitely more vitriol than debate.

Virtually everyone on social media (including media outlets) has the same raison d’être: To “trigger” someone from the “other side,” where “other” can mean a political party, ethnic group, religious affiliation or a rival gang. Unfortunately, “trigger” is no longer just a metaphor. There have been countless instances of violence stemming from antagonism on social media in the US and, I imagine, all over the world.

My disposition isn’t generally amenable to that. By virtue of what I’ve described as “pathological selfishness,” I’m mostly immune to “triggering.” In the simplest possible terms: I’m indifferent to what random people have to say because their sarcastic quips and various musings have absolutely no relevance to me. I’ve cultivated a similar indifference to what virtually anyone has to say over the last half-decade, which produces awkward moments on the rare occasions I’m compelled to interact with other humans. (Yesterday, abridged and paraphrased: “I come here every weekend with my dog, it’s so nice.” “It is.” “Are you local?” “I am.” “Well, I’m Chelsie — and you are?” “Trying to buy these mussels so I can get out of this store and go home. Enjoy your evening.”)

And yet, try as I may, every now and again a soundbite comes across my radar which does “trigger” me (strictly in the figurative sense, of course, because God knows we have to be cautious about making that explicit these days). On Tuesday, I ran across the following passage from a Bloomberg piece on the future of work-from-home arrangements:

While companies from Google to Ford and Citi have promised greater flexibility, many chief executives have publicly extolled the importance of being in offices. Some have lamented the perils of remote work, saying it diminishes collaboration and company culture. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon said at a recent conference that it doesn’t work “for those who want to hustle.”

Dimon’s remark came earlier this month at a Wall Street Journal summit, during which he suggested he was “about to cancel all my Zoom meetings.”

In the full quote on remote work, Dimon claimed,

It doesn’t work for young people. It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.

That (all of it) is debatable, but the bit about “those who want to hustle” struck me as particularly asinine.

Let me put this as plainly as possible: Jamie Dimon doesn’t know anything about “hustling,” not in any modern sense of the term and certainly not in the sense that many minorities have to hustle to survive. I like Dimon (I’ve made that pretty clear in these pages over the years), but on this point, he’s totally out of touch.

Jamie (and his many fans) would surely regale you with his life story and claim that, by contrast to someone like Donald Trump, Dimon is the genuine article — a consummate “hustler” if ever there was one. But the idea that Dimon would presume to lecture young people about what it means to “hustle” in the modern economy, where gig work is increasingly seen as providing more lucrative opportunities for those willing to work around the clock, is patently absurd.

There’s probably still a tiny subset of business school students who dream of working their way up through the ranks, as Dimon did, in American finance. But the vast majority of ambitious twentysomethings are likely to get physically sick at the prospect of meandering around an office all day trying to figure out which asses to kiss and which backs to stab while embarking on what will ultimately be a decades-long Machiavellian assault on a handful of upstairs offices.

For someone busy building the next Google, or innovating in the cryptosphere, or making millions as a YouTube influencer, or (I don’t know) getting in on the ground floor of the push to turn psychedelics into a booming legal industry à la cannabis, Dimon may as well be wearing a contrasting white collar and suspenders. He’s a relic. He’s the guy you go to when you want to take your hustle public on the way to conjuring his entire net worth out of thin air — like Whitney Wolfe Herd did earlier this year.

This isn’t a defense of work-from-home arrangements, by the way. People can work from home or go back to the offices in droves tomorrow morning. It makes no difference to me. Americans have been out of the office for a mere 14 months. The last time I saw an office, the top result on an internet search for “President Trump” would have been an Oprah interview.

Admittedly, I’m cherry-picking a single soundbite (from Dimon) on the way to making a mountain of a mole hill. But isn’t that what being “triggered” is all about?

I wouldn’t know, but that’s what the twentysomethings tell me when they’re not busy “hustling” up several Jamie Dimons (plural) trading Ether or becoming richer than he was at a comparable age by reviewing cars on YouTube or getting paid by corporate sponsors to model shoes on Instagram.

If you want to know what it really means to “hustle” your way to a billion, don’t ask Dimon. Ask Shawn Carter.