35. Four Things I Learned Burning Out

Since the company I help found fully imploded six months ago, I’ve finally had a chance to talk to a lot of friends about how much work has effected them.

Yeah, I know my last piece was about this too, but hear me out.

Also, yes, I have a bit of a sampling bias since: A. I work in tech, so easily half of my friends have started their own companies, and B. I live in San Diego, which is the world’s best city to live in but has a tremendously small number of well paying jobs. This leaves people into figuring out how to work remotely, or starting their own businesses too. I’m awash in a sea of consultants.

With that said, we seem to have come to the same following concusions:

• Everyone’s terrified. In fact, everyone’s so afraid to talk about their fear of failing because of the fear that they’ll be perceived as failing, that everyone just keeps everything destructively bottled up inside.
• It’s fun until it isn’t. The entire idea of being an entrepreneur is that you get the ability to do things your way but the issue is that it’s only like, half true, as in reality, you end up having to please everyone.
• The first things to fall apart aren’t the things you’d expect. You don’t start performing poorly at work. You start drinking more, sleeping less, being snippy with the dog, eating less, arguing with your spouse. You become so focused on making work succeed that you let every other aspect of your life fail.
• Five years is the point when the wheels come off. You can go all out for about five years, then you just fail. That’s how long a human can go all out.

I think a buddy of mine put it pretty well when we were talking today:

“Dude, for the last five years all I’ve thought about was the next five years. The next day, the day after that, the following quarter, and every possible permutation of how each of those things could could possibly play out. I lived in such a state of fight-or-flight that I’m surprised I haven’t yet had a stroke. How is that sustainable? How is anyone possibly capable of functioning normally when that’s what your ‘normal’ becomes?”