Well, the first step is realising that you need it. You realise that you've been cruising complacently through life, taking the successes and the failures as they come and hoping to be rewarded by your superiors for your hard work.
You then have an epiphany where you realise that you can be responsible for your own destiny, follow your dreams and create your own wealth, thus freeing you from the shackles of mediocrity and your "career".
After this epiphany, you start to see the world differently. It's ripe for the taking. You will begin to see opportunities where you saw nothing of consequence. You will begin to see how almost everything can be leveraged in some manner to help you pursue your current goals. Your passions will lead you to do socially ostracising things such as quitting your job to work full time on your own projects for six months before you make a single cent in profit, but you won't care. Your passions and the freedom to pursue those passions are more important than anything now.
This is how it was for me, anyways. I'm about to hit the one year anniversary of jettisoning my programming "career". :)
Well put. Hustle is not principally about hard work, rather it's about resourcefulness- encountering an obstacle or finding yourself stuck in a rut, and having the mindfulness, wit and unabashed boldness to hustle your way out of it. The "epiphany" is what it's all about, once you realize that we build artificial walls and barriers everywhere in our own lives, it is so empowering to plow right through them.
So here's the short version of how I got my hustle. My life used to suck in the sense that I wasn't living the life I wanted. I wasn't good at lying to myself, I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was. After months and months of soul searching, I finally figured out what was truly important to me. I realigned my life in this new direction and all that pent up energy caused things to just take off.
If you try to hustle through a wall, it feels like you're standing still, but once you try hustling around or over it, things start to move. I'd say identifying your wall is the hard part, but getting around it ain't no picnic either. That being said, nothing compares to running free on the other side.
It does sound silly ("Millionaire Fastlane" pff), but this book is actually quite amazing for realizing what it takes and how you can hustle your way to real success (not necessarily just financial success)
http://www.themillionairefastlane.com/
Being covered in a blog/website/magazine/paper etc is a privilege, not a right. Just because you’ve created a fantastic new [insert item here], doesn’t mean it has to be covered.
When approaching, think about the benefits of your [insert item here] brings to the users.
Geek tl;dr does it get someone laid, make their life better, bring comfort, protect themselves or loved ones, Save them time (time is $$$) etc.
People are selfish, they want to know how [insert item here] benefits them in some way. They alas do not care about you. They want to know how it benefits them.
I know at first it may seem obvious how your [insert item here] will obviously do [insert benefit/s here] but people don’t always ‘get it’. You must spell it out to them.
When approaching people to write/talk about your [insert item here], you only get a small percentage of someone’s time/day. So you must speak the benefits of your [insert item here] and quick to grab their attention.
Along similar lines, here are some links relating to actually getting coverage in the tech press (rather than sending nasty e-mails as mentioned in this post):
It reminds of a 3rd year undergrad I met. She complained about the difficulty of getting a research assistant position because there's lots of competition and she had to fill in lots of forms and applications. Since getting into grad studies require some kind of RA experience, she was getting anxious for not having one at the end of her third year. The disheartening part though was she never actually applied to any of these positions. She just assumed they were too hard to get.
It's like praying to God to win the lotto but never buying a ticket. How do you expect to win if you don't have a ticket?
Wait, I'm confused. They quoted figures of 8000 boxes at $4 each, but on Fred Wilson's blog post the quote indicates it was 500 boxes at $40 each. Which one was it?
I'm always amazed at the capacity people have for yelling at you when they are asking for a favor. What is going on inside someone's head? It's like "you need my help, don't make me hate you!".
No doubt it's better to be lucky than good, but it's even better to be good at being lucky. Hustle hard enough and you make your own luck.