Founders and executives work incredibly hard, but burnout is almost never caused by workload alone.
Workload matters. If expectations outpace resources, namely budget, time, and people, you will be running constantly. That’s tiring. But burnout doesn’t show up until you have a high workload and a disconnect in the reward loop.
Sometimes that is because you are accountable without authority. Sometimes it is because you are playing a game that cannot be won. Sometimes the outcome no longer matters to you. And sometimes the work itself drains you, even if the outcome is worth it.
Those are four different problems. Most advice on burnout doesn’t work because it treats every problem as “too much work.” Here is how to diagnose where burnout is coming from, and how to fix it - either for yourself or for your team.
This plays out when people are accountable for outcomes but do not have the authority to make the decisions they need to make to win.
Examples:
Antidotes:
Warren Buffett once said, “When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”
The book Flash Boys famously highlighted the lucrative game of high-speed communication between Chicago and New York, where financial firms could leverage discrepancies between options markets in Chicago and equities markets in New York. Companies spent enormous amounts of money building direct fiber lines from New York to Chicago, digging straighter lines, blasting through mountains, buying out private property, routing under rivers, and ultimately shaving milliseconds off transmission time.
Then microwave/RF communication changed the game.
It turns out that radio signals traveling through direct line of sight can beat a light beam bouncing back and forth through a fiber-optic cable routed between the two cities. So top firms started building microwave tower networks, and the fiber routes became obsolete.
The fiber builders were not stupid. They were brilliant. But they ended up optimizing the wrong thing in the end.
This happens inside companies all the time. A team keeps trying to build the best version of the old answer. Better sales process. Better dashboard. Better roadmap. Better operating cadence. Better performance management.
But if the market has shifted, the buyer has changed, the technology has changed, or the economics have changed, then the winning move is not to improve the old system.
If you are stuck in an old game, you have to ask a few existential questions:
The point is not to casually pivot every time something gets hard. Most worthwhile games are hard. The point is to notice when the game has changed and you need to adjust.
If the result does not mean anything to you, the wins do not provide the level of reward necessary for the hard work to be worth it.
It could be because the outcome never mattered to you. Or it could be because something changed. Maybe the work used to stretch you in a positive way, but you aren’t learning anymore and now it just feels like a treadmill. Maybe you joined because you believed in the mission, then realized the company mostly cares about financial engineering.
High workload plus an outcome you do not care about eventually turns into burnout.
Changing this means thinking broader:
If you are in a flow state when you are by yourself, with your headphones on, solving a technical challenge, and your job requires you to be at conferences every week, that’s not a great fit. If you get a rush from talking to customers and getting outside the building, but your job is to stare at your computer screen while working from home, that’s not going to work either.
I highly recommend running an energy audit. Go through your calendar for the past two weeks, record your activities, and identify what gives you energy, what drains your energy, and what patterns you notice. You will likely find patterns that are obvious in retrospect but you haven’t taken the space to observe. I have a brief video on how to run an energy audit if you want detailed guidance.
Then adjust your calendar. I find that changing even 10% of your calendar by removing draining activities and replacing them with energizing activities is life-changing.
That is 30–60 minutes a day. It is challenging, but achievable. I am not claiming you can shift 50% of your schedule overnight. But you can often shift 10%, and 10% may be all you need to get out of burnout mode.
The pattern across all four disconnects is the relationship between effort and reward.
A sports team that wins a championship is not burned out after they win. They are exhausted, but they are also exhilarated because the effort paid off. In every disconnect, the reward loop is not strong enough to justify the effort, so you slowly, or quickly, grind down.
It is especially painful when you are losing for reasons outside your control. Beating burnout is partly about managing workload, but it is also about fixing the reward loop.
Final note: there can be a tiny difference between operating at a sustainable pace and operating on the threshold of complete burnout (read: low performance).
Professional cyclists, for example, have a concept of FTP, or Functional Threshold Power. FTP is the power, measured in watts, that you can put out for 60 minutes during an all-out effort. Workouts are often measured as a percentage of FTP. You might push at 50% of FTP during a warmup and 120% during an interval.
The amazing thing is that at 90% of FTP, instead of burning out in 60 minutes, you can last two to three hours. Just by taking off 10%.
Biking at 90% intensity means you are still going really fast, but your body can last. Even more importantly, your body can recover from that effort so you can train again the next day. At 120%, you stop sooner and need a rest day before you can do it again.
Life is the same. Boost the reward loop by 10% and reduce the intensity by 10% and you just might find a sustainable rhythm. Then when the sprints come that you can’t control, you will have the energy in the tank to handle them.
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