What if the biggest lessons in business and life came not from classrooms, boardrooms, or balance sheets, but from disco lights, devastating knee injuries, and hard-earned second chances? Life isn’t a straight line to the top. It’s a hustle.
From NCAA lacrosse champion to Studio 54 regular to public company CEO, Don Kurz has moved through wildly different worlds and carried a lesson out of every one of them. In Do the Hustle, he takes readers on a high-energy tour through the wins, wipeouts, and late-night detours that shaped his philosophy on work, passion, and resilience.
Blending humor, heart, and hard-earned insight, Kurz shows how to turn failure into fuel, trust your instincts even when they shake, and reinvent yourself every time the beat changes. Whether he is building a billion-dollar brand or rebuilding himself after a fall, his message is constant: Success is not a straight line; it is a dance. And every step counts.
Inside you will learn about:
- The "Sunk Cost" Trap: Why your gut is smarter than your lawyer and how to know when to fold a business, end a marriage, or walk away from a "sure thing" before it destroys you;
- The "Can’t Will It" Principle: Why you can’t force an outcome and why chasing a goal you’ve lost passion for is a recipe for disaster;
- Grit Over Genius: Why outworking everyone else beats outsmarting everyone else every single time;
- The Art of the Pivot: How Kurz went from devastating knee injuries ending his lacrosse career to a disco dance instructor and from a corporate consultant to an entrepreneurial leader—and how you can find your own defensible advantage; and
- Managing Catastrophe: How to handle true crises—like the tragic recall of 100 million toys—with integrity, empathy, and a level head.
Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned executive facing burnout, or someone looking for the courage to start your next chapter, this book is your permission slip to let go of regret.
Life is unfair. The market doesn't care about your plans. But if you can learn to accept reality, embrace the chaos, and trust your gut, you won't just survive the dance—you’ll own the floor.
Stop fighting the tape. Start doing the hustle.
Don Kurz is an entrepreneur, former championship athlete and dance instructor. He has been a senior partner in a major international consulting firm, successfully taken a company public on Nasdaq, started a hedge fund, and currently is the executive board chair and principal shareholder of leading creative agency Omelet LLC.
Don served for 12 years on the Johns Hopkins University board of trustees and subsequently was elected a trustee emeritus for life. He was awarded the Johns Hopkins Heritage Award for exceptional life long service to the institution, and he has endowed the Kurz Family Scholarship to provide tuition support for low-income students.
He was a key player on the first Johns Hopkins University NCAA lacrosse championship team in 1974, though two serious knee injuries prematurely ended his lacrosse career in 1976. Don is currently an active mentor of student-athletes at Hopkins. He was voted the Outstanding Athlete at Elmont Memorial High School his senior year and has recently been inducted to the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
Don was a dance instructor for Arthur Murray Dance Studios and was a regular at New York iconic disco Studio 54 in the late 1970s.
He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from Columbia University.
