Historian Walter McDougall has written about the duality of the American term "hustle", which means both "being a go-getter" and "scam". He's writing a whole three-volume history of America from this perspective that I keep wanting to find time to read: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/free-to-be-you-and-...

That's always had resonance for me, especially here in startup culture, where the line between the two is at best hazy, and is often willfully erased. Just today in Jean-Louis Gassée's article on Theranos, he quotes an old Silicon Valley joke about a pitch that shows both kinds of hustle: "It’ll work because it’d be cool if it did." https://mondaynote.com/theranos-could-have-been-stopped-9670...