#TheUnknownHustle: 9 Stories to Fuel Your Grind

LaBeouf crafted a stunt to try and land himself an agent: He opened up the Yellow Pages, dialed an agent, put on a British accent and pretended to be a manager who repped a child client they would absolutely die for.

Diesel said, “One day I was driving by the Four Seasons Hotel when I saw one of my favorite actors walking into the hotel: Morgan Freeman. So I pulled over, popped the trunk and ran after him to give him my short film.”

Imagine if Childish Gambino was your college dorm’s resident assistant?! Twitter user Dominique Ariel Toney, or @domtoney, posted, “All this Donald Glover talk reminds me of that time when he was an RA in my freshman year dorm at NYU. My roommate Marisa & I used to sneak into his programs bc he always had good snacks. Was impressed back then, and impressed to this day. Go Donald.”

The Rock tried to make his football dreams come true. On a salary of $300 per week, he was the newcomer in the Canadian Football League (CFL) with what one teammate described as a “yoked-up” frame who ended up playing second fiddle to the team’s all-star defensive line. His football dreams never came true.

The actor’s big break came from approaching a casting director at a bar...

Jared Leto always believed in himself. Once he was able to move to Los Angeles, he “ended up sleeping on Venice Beach,” he told FilmInk. “But I was young and healthy, and I knew that it was just for a short period of time. I was intent on making a new life for myself. I ended up staying in a crack motel for a few nights, and later in a youth hostel; eventually, I got an apartment.”

Before he became an NBA mogul, Mark Cuban had a job laying carpet. He was horrible at it, so he tried his hand as a short-order cook. Next, he was a server at an upscale restaurant, but every time he would open a bottle of wine, reportedly chunks of cork would get into it.

Early in life, Walt Disney attempted to become a cartoonist for his local newspaper, but his attempts were consistently rebuffed. Once he finally made it on staff, the legendary animator was fired by a chief editor in 1919 and told that he’d never be a cartoonist because he “lacked imagination and good ideas.”

For Hussle, music was a catalyst to provide actual value and change in his community. Improving his community’s accessibility to resources absent in most South Central neighborhoods was always a hallmark of his vision. Injecting much of his wealth back into Crenshaw, he founded several businesses dedicated to fostering black entrepreneurship and creating educational opportunities like Vector90, described as “a ’hood version of WeWork...with an emphasis in STEM for young people of color.”