What I Learned From Burning Out — Part 2

When I was a kid I had the attention span of a mosquito. I would jump rapidly from one activity to the next, not having enough time to even clean up after myself. Half way through building a lego spaceship I would be out in the yard digging a hole, just to realize that what I really wanted to do that day was spray paint flames on a matchbox car. I rollerbladed, skateboarded, played basketball, soccer, golf, skied, took drawing lessons, played the trumpet (to my parents dismay), built model airplanes, played video games and generally got into mischief (e.g. throwing beanie babies into the fan of my bedroom), all while attending 3rd grade; full time. There were more activities to do than I had time for. Thinking back, being a kid was probably the busiest I ever was as a human, I didn’t even have time to walk, I would literally run from one activity to the next. I had an insatiable curiosity to try new things. My childhood is bathed in positive memories. I was lucky enough to grow up in a situation that allowed me to just be a kid, and I was truly a happy kid.

Becoming an adult and entering the real world was fun and exciting, but at some point between 3rd grade and my life as an adult, my list of activities narrowed. I became more focused on a few specific things and let other interests wither and die off. Sports slowly faded from interest until weight lifting was the only physical activity left, because of girls and sex, obviously. I stopped drawing, packed away my legos and tried my best to stay out of trouble. This trend continued throughout my 20’s until I reached the most extreme end of the spectrum: I had carved my life down to one thing; work. It was the only thing in my life. Everything I did, said and thought, revolved around work. I dressed the part, I dated based on who fit my image, not on who I liked. I changed the way I spoke. Even leisure activities where specifically so I could recharge my batteries just to go back to work. My one joy in life was bragging about how busy I was at work. I wore fatigue like a badge of honor. My day was pretty straightforward: Wakeup, drink as much coffee as I could stomach, go to work all day, go to dinner, drink enough to forget about the day, go home, sleep, repeat. Even on weekends I didn’t have enough mental capacity to do anything more than a few brunches and drink alcohol. Work was all I had time for.

This brings us to the first lesson. One that I already knew as a child but forgot as I became an adult, and that is balance is a fundamental human need. Life requires a variety of activities that stimulate, challenge and reward us in different ways. Nature provides a perfect metaphor for the human need for balance in crops. If you plant the same crop over and over again eventually the soil will stop yielding as it is depleted of essential nutrients that one specific crop requires. If, however, you rotate two or three complimentary crops through the same soil, they will replenish what the others crops deplete, increasing yield and creating a sustainable ecosystem for the soil. Humans are the same. You cannot endlessly deplete creativity, will-power and positivity. You have to replenish. You have to balance. The word balance is used to describe this phenomenon just as it’s used on a scale, the two sides needs to counterweigh each other. 7 days holiday to 358 days of work is not balance. 70 hour work weeks is not balance. Replenishing yourself is a daily activity. Take care of your soil and it will continue growing healthy crops. Deplete it and eventually nothing will grow, no matter how hard you try. Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal says it perfectly in a post about creativity.

“A friend once told me that creativity is like breathing, when you make stuff you are exhaling. But you can’t exhale forever. Eventually, you have to breathe in, or you’ll be dead.” — Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal)

Short and sweet, balance or die.

My first paying job out of college I made $100, paid under the table, with no work visa or contract for a private equity firm in Vietnam. I was an illegal immigrant. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I made ends meet, but I’m still here today, so I survived. My second job I got a 500% raise and a free place to live, then my third jump bumped me up to $750 a month and they actually gave me a work visa for the first time. Starting with such a low base put my career trajectory on a nearly vertical line.

My third job I consider the beginning of my formal “career” as you’d say, and I slowly worked my way up, ticking off promotions and pay raises quickly. Every 4–5 months I was moving forward, it was rewarding and addicting to see my net worth growing so rapidly. After two years, my company had relocated me to Singapore and I was making enough money I didn’t have to think about it anymore. I stopped budgeting. I was making more money than I could reasonably spend in a month and was actually accumulating savings, accidentally. I was travelling twenty days out of any given month with all my expenses paid. It was the first time I tasted true financial freedom. I rented a nice room in the city, I bought all new clothes and a new set of golf clubs. I ate every meal at a restaurant. I would sign bills in a bar without ever looking at the total amount. I thought I was the world’s coolest 25 year old. It was the most financially comfortable I have ever been in my life and I was damn proud of myself.

Beneath my pride and self-indulgence, a question started to emerge from my subconscious, “Now what?” Now that money was no longer a worry there was a vacuum that I struggled to fill. Money gave me a freedom I had never had before. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and with my own money. Nobody told me to prepare for this moment. No college course every covered what to do with freedom. Freedom is a word we throw around regularly, but the reality is freedom is scary. as. fuck. I wasn’t ready to answer that imperative question we hear in interviews, “If you woke up tomorrow and could do whatever you want, what would you do?” Every weekend gave me an opportunity to answer that question, but I filled my waking hours with consumption: spending, drinking, smoking, distracting myself; afraid to face the gravity of that terrifyingly deep question.

This brings us to the second lesson: Money is a means to an end, not the end. As we have heard many times before, money does not create happiness, which is true. Money creates freedom, and freedom is simply the opportunity to create your own happiness. But, freedom is a vacuum. It can be filled with both good and bad. As we have seen countless times in the news, freedom is just as much the opportunity to complete destroy your life as to create happiness. By definition, freedom is agnostic of good and bad, it is the ability to do anything, and that is powerful and scary — and dangerous. I was taught in school to chase success, chase wealth, but what I wasn’t prepared for was how to deal with freedom. What would I do if I actually had the freedom to do what I wanted. I had no answer. Worse, my answer was an existential crisis. I was a dog chasing a car, not sure what I would even do if I caught it. The ability to know exactly what you would do with the freedom wealth affords you is more important than wealth itself. Focus on answering that question first, and you will have a powerful, guiding light that will lead you to wealth and subsequently, the freedom to do exactly what you want.

Define your freedom first and wealth will come.

If you curious how dangerous freedom can be just look at literally anyone who has won the lottery. Generally not the model of well-rounded, happy humans.

My senior year of college I thought I knew everything there was to know. What I failed to realize was I would soon be a life freshman; brand, spanking new to the real world, and would enter one of the scariest, most confusing periods of a young persons life. Looking back I was a goldfish, getting ready to be haplessly dropped into an ocean full of sharks. My university education prepared me 0/10 for the real world, but that’s another story for another time.

Enter 22 year old Tyler.

I was sitting in the Turkey Lounge bar of the Angus Barn in Raleigh, North Carolina with my family, drinking whiskey because I thought it made me look cool, proudly sharing my post-grad plans with my cousin Sarah, who is a little older, and a lot smarter than me. At the time I was the president of my fraternity in College and it had become a big part of my life and identity. Because I enjoyed it so much, I was planning on joining the national office of my fraternity and traveling around the country as a consultant, doing chapter visits, launching new chapters, and generally just extending my college lifestyle by a few years. I still remember the look on Sarah’s face when I told her my plan, she looked at me with a familiar mixture of disapproval and disbelief, the same look a parent gives a child when they did something so unbelievably stupid the parent can’t decide whether to laugh or be angry. She told me flat out my plan was stupid, “move on, go do something new. Leave college behind and go discover the world and find yourself.” I was shattered. She tore my identity to shreds with one well placed sentence. To this day it is some of the most meaningful advice I ever received. It’s the reason I changed my plans and decided to move to Vietnam after graduating instead, and it’s the reason I am where I am today.

The reason why this advice was so powerful to me was because it revealed how I truly felt deep down inside. Her advice resonated with me because she said something out loud I was too afraid to say myself. I didn’t want to keep being in college. I desperately wanted out. I wanted to go experience the real world and figure out who I really was outside of the college bubble, but I was scared. I had resorted to doing what I thought those around me would approve of and she called my bluff. This brings us to the last lesson I learned: be careful who you take advice from.

Humans have a natural tendency to seek advice because it gives social validation to our actions. Having someone else tell you what to do makes it easier to swallow, less scary to take a course of action than to go out on your own. It creates a scapegoat to fall back on if things go wrong. The problem is there’s an endless amount of bad advice out there, and it is difficult to navigate. I don’t think advice is ever given to be intentional bad, but advice is relative, absolute. What worked for someone could actually be bad for you, and what someone else tells you is the “wrong way” my be exactly what you need to do. If you always rely on outside advice in tough situations you will never develop the problem solving skills and confidence to act on your own. You will always be crippled by tough situations and rely on someone else to help you cope. After a while the milestone decisions in your life will be a smattering of other peoples advice, hobbled together into your life. Looking back it may not ring true to what you actually wanted in life. Building the confidence to make decisions alone is one of the hardest challenges I face as a young adult but I believe it is 100%, 10/10, 5 star rated the most important ingredient to living a happy, fulfilling and successful life. Look at any well-known successful person and you will see not only did they refuse to listen to others advice, they often went directly against the advice of very intelligent people, because they believed in their own decision making power and had the confidence to act on that belief. You are the captain of your own ship, and while it’s useful to learn how to drive from others, you should be the one that decides where to go. Seek guidance from others, use it to test and nurture your own ideas, but be relentless in determining your own path. The world has enough people that follow advice blindly, what it needs is more people who do things their own way.

I will leave you with one last lesson that is encapsulated inside this post itself, and that is to always be learning. Good experiences are opportunities to learn, bad experiences are ever better opportunities to learn. Always stay hungry, alway reach farther and always stay humble. When we become self satisfied is when we stop asking question and stop growing.

Lastly a quote from the great Mary Oliver that encompasses the entirety of my feelings towards life at the moment:

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver

Part 3 — Getting Life Back On Track — A Functional Guide (coming tomorrow)