An exciting project offered Kate Turk an incredible opportunity—but taking it meant turning down all other work for more than two years. Here’s what happened when she put all of her eggs in one basket.

As all recovering workaholics know, there was a time when hustle culture was just culture. The decade between the Great Recession and the pandemic was a time of entrepreneurship as spectator sport, where 70-hour workweeks were a flex and the only acceptable answer to “How’s it going?” was “So busy.” To be sure, Americans are probably still too consumed by their work, but there was something particularly obsessive about that time—just ask Kate Turk.

After a few entry-level design jobs, Turk was living in Arizona in the early 2010s and had pivoted into corporate marketing. Even though it was going well, she got a second job styling at J.Crew. “I was working 12-hour days, because I felt like I had to—you just had to hustle, hustle, hustle,” she says. Four years, one cross-country move and three kids later, she got her design business, House of Turk, up and running in Philadelphia. A lot had changed, but she was still driven by an impulse to stay busy at all costs.