Burnout
Inspired by Ryan Holiday’s “Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control”
I have never used the term burnout to describe myself. As a swimmer, I would hear other swimmers say “I was burnt out”. This statement was usually followed by “so I quit.” To me, burnout was an excuse used by quitters to justify their decision to end their swimmer careers, often prematurely. It wasn’t until recently that I learned burnout is an actual psychological condition. The stages of burnout are important to recognize for people with a proclivity to push themselves too hard.
I have wanted to discuss burnout for quite some time. Starting in college, I had a multi-year period where I suffered from clinical depression, and now I know it was due to burnout. I alluded to some of the challenges in my 2016 post “Dedication is easy.” I was deep in the stages of burnout at that time, but I did not know it.
Ryan Holiday is one of my favorite authors. In his latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, Holiday explores the virtue of temperance. As part of the book launch, he recently sent out a newsletter titled “The Secret to Avoiding Burnout”. In this post, Ryan describes a piece of advice Olympic mountain biker Kate Courtney received from her coach when she was pushing herself too hard in practice. “Do you want to be fast now,” they asked, “or later?” Meaning, do you want to win this workout or win the race?
It has now been several years since I traded in my Speedo for a MacBook, but this advice rings eerily close to home for me. Instead of coaches, I can relate this advice to my interactions with managers.
Typically managers view their role as getting the most out of their employees. At least that is what I once thought it meant to be a manager. Books I read and blogs I follow often show managers asking how to increase employee productivity. How can I push them harder? Help them be more focused? Improve the quality of their work?
This productivity maximization risks pushing people past the brink of burnout. There are entire industries that have been built by extracting the most work out of the highest potential employees over the shortest period of time. Whether it is investment banks, law or consulting firms, or startups, the company’s short-term goals for an employee do not support the employee’s ambitions to build a long-term career.
The first time I worked with a manager that was truly great at managing me, he wasn’t one of those bosses. He focused our conversations not on the work I was doing but on how I was doing. He called me out when he caught me lurking in Slack while on vacation. Whether he consciously knew it or not, his role was not to push me harder, but to make sure I didn’t push myself too hard.
Most sports have well-known protocols that advise coaches and athletes how to train, and more recently, how to recover. The recovery part is not something that was well understood when I was a competitive swimmer, but I did know how to train. I often pushed the limits of overtraining, but I knew that pushing too hard would bring injury.
Swimming has two seasons — winter and summer. Elite swimmers take at most one or two weeks off between those seasons. Each season has a structure. At the beginning of the season, you focus on technique. Then you start to ramp up the yardage and intensity.
Swimmers start to compete even as the intensity increases. In college, we would have some Fridays where we would swim a full practice in the morning, hit the weight room immediately after, and have only a short break to grab breakfast before heading back to the pool for a meet. Even if we were swimming against our Ivy League rivals, we would not relent. The winter season for college swimmers reaches its climax over the holiday break. Like many universities in colder climates, my team would take a two week winter training trip to Miami, Puerto Rico, or Hawaii. This sounds delightful, but this is the period of the most intense training of the season. My freshman year I actually called my mom crying at night, more than once, because I was so wrecked by the training.
Even during this most intense period of training, the actual hours in the pool are closely monitored and limits are not to be exceeded. NCAA regulations state that athletes are not allowed to train more than 20 hours per week. For swimming this means nine or ten 2-hour workouts over six days, usually with Sundays off to recover. The two week training trip is special, however. We had two workouts a day with only one afternoon off and one full day off for recovery. Even still, my coach always found a way to make sure there was ‘active recovery’ on that day off. The training was so intense we had to make sure our nutrition was on point. Even the frati-est of frat boys didn’t drink during this period. These were definitely not the workouts they could show up to while still drunk or hungover.
After training reaches its peak, swimmers taper down the yardage while maintaining the high intensity over the last month of the season. This allows them to be both rested and in peak condition for their championship meet at season’s end.
I hear people say they want their work hours to be more quality than quantity. I am that guy that says ‘why not both?’ After a few years running my own startup, I am still getting used to the perks of working for a more mature tech company. At Stripe, I get more paid vacation than I know how to use, plus paid holidays. As I write this, I am on a generous parental leave after having twin girls. I genuinely struggle to take and enjoy the time off, but I am starting to see the value. Just as athletes know the harms of overtraining, I am trying to avoid the damage of overworking.
Actually, I used to be critical of the way big tech companies pamper employees. I still think they can go too far, but as someone who wants to be a top performer over a career and not just in a given two or three year sprint at a company, I do know I need to measure my efforts. I have used intense periods of weeks or months to demonstrate outsized impact, but I also want to learn how to taper down and rest in order to reset and prepare myself to build upon my previous work in the next cycle.
