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The "No BS" version of how startups are really built, taught by actual startup Founders who have lived through all of it. Hosts Wil Schroter and Ryan Rutan talk candidly about the intense struggles Founders face both personally and professionally as they try to turn their idea into something that will change the world.
TST EP312_Burnout Is a Treatable Injury
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joint, as always, by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will, Schroeder will. Today we're gonna talk about something that is not a, maybe, it's not an if, it's a when, and that's burnout, right? Sometimes the silent co-founder in the relationship of the startup, and definitely part of the path, I think for pretty much everybody.
So let's talk about like why it happens. Does it matter, right? Should we pay attention to it? What? What do we need to do about this, this beast?
Speaker 2: You know, you said it's not if, it's a matter of when, and I I think there's another side of it. It's how often for a lot of founders they associate burnout as like the end of the story.
The like, okay. And then I was burnt out and then I went to go something else. And look, that's possible, right? It is possible to have a, a terminal burnout, right? But I think what we'll talk about here is that no burnout's going to happen. It's tough. It's going to happen. Here's how you need to diagnose it.
Here's what you need to do to treat it, and here's how you have to plan to get [00:01:00] past it, because that's the key. I would say in my career over 30 plus years, I've had four seminal burnouts, seminal burnouts, where I was just like, I gave everything I had. I couldn't have one more step in the marathon. I had nothing right, left.
And also when I look back at those, this was fascinating because I did a little bit of chronology on, on when those things happened, Ryan, the last time that happened to me, like a, like a, just like a hardcore burnout was right before I started, uh, startups.com. Which was pretty long time ago, actually, you know, almost 15 years ago.
But like, you're getting better at this. Yeah, I've been running five companies at the same time, which guarantees burnout and I was so fried and I was like, I never wanna do this again. That doesn't mean starting a company, it meant like I never wanna be this fried again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I learned about pacing myself, which I'm still not great at, but uh, you know, uh, I learned about pacing myself, but when I look back to my first burnout.
When I was just like, basically had nothing left. I was 19 years [00:02:00] old. I'd just come off a six month bout of mono, I was in bed. No, that'll help it three and half months. Ryan, at the time, figure, I'm, I'm 19 years old. I'm in college at the time, I think I went into mono weighing like 160 pounds. I came out of mono weighing 130 pounds.
Speaker: Wow. Can
Speaker 2: you imagine that? That's,
Speaker: that's not
Speaker 2: exactly a
Speaker: healthy fighting weight for you,
Speaker 2: bud. Oh my God, I, I, I, I'm a buck 90 now. Just like put it in perspective, right? I mean, it literally drained the life outta me. I couldn't eat, I couldn't, you know, whatever. And I'm saying that to say like, that is the most physical burnout you can have.
Like everything in your body is gone. But when I came back from it, when I, you know, recharged and renewed, that's when I, you know, started my first company. It was amazing that those reset moments had such an incredible rubber band effect for me. And I think, you know, we'll talk about this as we go, but if you look at famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, like Musk, et cetera.
Yeah. You know, built these empires. [00:03:00] Same thing. They all had this like rubber band from it. Yep. So I think we'll talk about, you know, what burnout means and, and had to diagnose it and everything. But we'll also talk about the value of getting past it.
Speaker: And I think that's something that does get overlooked, right?
Which is one that you can get past it. That it isn't, it isn't terminal. I'm burnt out, right? Yeah. And it's a permanent state, right? It's not, it's not, it doesn't have to be, it could be, it probably isn't a permanent state, but it can lead to permanent consequences for your startup. And I think that's where we have to be, be very careful.
There's something else that's interesting and you said, you know, as, as physically drained or as physically burn out as you can possibly be. Um, me like the, the, the mono period. But there's something else that was pretty interesting as I've gone back and thought about some of my periods. My burnout wasn't always physical exhaustion.
There were times where I still had plenty of energy. The burnout was something different, and it was, and it was, it was just like I had the energy and I was doing this stuff and I was still throwing it at work at it, and I just, it was almost as if like, it just didn't care whether it, whether it happened or not.
It was like, I'm there. I'm gonna keep doing this because I have to, but I [00:04:00] actually didn't really care. There were periods where that happened for one reason or another, and, and that was really tough. And so I think that there was, there's another side of burnout where you can still have plenty. I had plenty of physical energy, right?
I just did not have emotional energy for what was going on in the startup at that point. And that was tough. And it was, it was interesting, and I'm, I'm sure I have plenty to say about this, but it was leading up to. A period where then that first company was acquired. Yeah. And I'm very thankful that I came out of that before we entered into those negotiations because had I not, I think that would've gone like way, way differently if I had still been in like burnout mode and somebody walked up and was like, I got a five or You want out of this thing?
I'd be like, hell yeah. Like in fact, you can keep
Speaker 2: that five high five.
Speaker: That's all I need. I'm
Speaker 2: out. Okay, so stick with that though. 'cause you're talking about this hidden cost of burnout. Okay. For a lot of us, like here's the cadence that we're used to. We work really hard at a startup and over some period of time, 5, 7, 10 years, we become burnt out.
Now of course you are [00:05:00] because you are a professional athlete in the startup sense of the word being on, on the court, and we're gonna use these, we're gonna beat the hell sports analogies 'cause they're so apropos here. But you're on the court nonstop. Okay. Yeah. Even LeBron James has to come off the court at some point.
Correct. But, but we don't realize it is. Us staying on the court is the worst thing for our startup because LeBron James in the fourth quarter, right. Exhausted as hell and everybody running past him Yeah. Is an impediment to the success of that team. Yeah.
Speaker: You're playing exhausted. You're playing, you're, you're playing frustrated.
You're, you got four fouls, right? Like it's just everything is against you at that point.
Speaker 2: What ends up happening is we end up getting gassed cashed out. At a time when maybe the startup needs us most. So we're, I think you and I tend to see this is with founders that are in the, they're like series B, C, and D and beyond venture capital routes.
Yeah. Where they have been in this mix for like 5, 7, 10 years, [00:06:00] which in regular employment years isn't that many years. Startup years. Each one of those is like a decade of, of taking, uh, minutes off your life. But the second thing is they're at a point where the most exciting things are happening to their startup.
Right? Like the startup technically needs them the most. They're at a point where they're the most gassed. Again, they're LeBron James fourth quarter that can barely run at a time where they're trying to win a championship. That's a problem.
Speaker: Yep. And I think this is another one that's like there, there can be a huge disparity between like kind of the state of the startup and the state of the founder.
Right? They may. They may. So they've gone from being inside the rocket ship to being strapped to the front of it. Right. It's a much less comfortable ride at that point, and it's like it may still still be on the trajectory. It's still doing all the things it needs to do. The founder is just struggling because it was their emotional energy, their physical energy, their everything.
They got it to that point. Now, it may be in some version of it, very few times, times their startups and cruise control, but like it may be moving [00:07:00] pretty well on its own and now the founder's just gas and just beaten and burnt. Yeah, I think that can actually make it feel worse. I think that's where the, the founder goes like, well, I feel guilty feeling bad.
I feel guilty admitting that. I feel bad now. That's a great way to put it, man.
Speaker 2: The guilt of indifference. The guilt of indifference. Yes, exactly right. Yes. Where I, I show up at work and I'm not engaged. I'm not disengaged. I'm indifferent. And so like, I'm here, but I'm just pushing papers, so to speak. Right.
And all of a sudden, uh, the startup could be at any one of a few different inflection points. The startup could be at the point where it's about to take off. It could be at the point where it's about to tank. In both cases, we are very much needed at the wheel. Yes. But we're burnout. And I don't wanna burn out to sound like it's some version of weakness.
More than like running a marathon. You are going to tire out. You just can't run forever.
Speaker: I'd say actually flip that on its head for a minute, man. It's the opposite of weakness. It's overexertion in a lot of cases in different ways, [00:08:00] right? You've overexerted yourself. You have proven exactly how strong you were.
To your own detriment. Right? Right. There is a cost to physicality. Yep. To emotionality, to mentality. Right. These things all have bills that come due at some point. And burnout is when all those bills come due at the same damn time. Often at the worst time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. And it, when we think about, Hey, I'm burnt out.
Again, we're often thinking about, let me get out of this. Let me hit the eject button. Yeah, yeah. Let me stop doing startup because startup caused burnout. Ergo, right? In order for me to get rid of burnout, I have to stop doing startup. There's some truth to that, but it's, it's a vast oversimplification. One of the things that I think folks don't realize, dangerous oversimplification as well.
Great way to put it. Great way to put it. One of the things I think that, that folks miss is, Hey, I need to come off the court for a second. Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't mean the startup has to, to change. The startup has a trajectory, has a life, and maybe things aren't going well. Okay? So the other side of it, maybe things aren't going well.
Maybe that's all the reason more that I need [00:09:00] to come off the court, right? Which is hard to do when your startup's not doing well, but, but I'm saying all the reason more that I need to take this seriously because maybe my startup is going to go on to become a great company, but I am in the wrong position at this very moment.
To do something about it, and I think that is a very difficult thing for folks to assess, particularly internally.
Speaker: I think that even if a founder is self-aware enough to see that. I think it's extremely difficult to act on because to your point, if your startup's about to take off and everybody can kind of see there, you feel that way, right?
Yeah. It's hard to tell when that's gonna happen, but you feel that way or it's about to tank or it's already starting to tank. Something's coming unhinged. Even if it's the right decision, and even if you're self-aware enough, which that can be a challenge in and of itself because you might be feeling awful.
You may not be associating it with burnout, and you may not be willing to admit that because why? You're too busy looking to how to keep the bolts screwed into this thing or, Hey, we're about to take off and this thing's about to go, you know, ballistic. Yeah. You need to make sure it's pointed in the right direction [00:10:00] before it does that.
That's a really hard time to say to anybody else, even if you can say it to yourself, even if you're self-aware enough as a founder to go like, I'm in that spot where I need to do something about it. Man, I, I just, I don't see enough founders just coming up with that idea of themselves and going like, I need to do something about this.
Speaker 2: I hear it almost never, and I'm pointing to myself as much as anyone else I have had in my life. And you've witnessed this, a very bad habit of only running until failure, right? Like, just like I have no idea what a, like a preemptive vacation or rest to prevent burnout or prevent getting sick for, for a very long time.
My entire routine, and I'm not bragging about this, this, is this the point of how. Bad. It was, I would just run until I got sick over and over and over again. Every quarter I would get sick. I would get a sinus infection, especially when I was traveling a lot and I'd always be out for like a couple weeks.
Speaker: Yeah, you're running the immune system down, running the energy levels down. Yep. You know, not, not getting enough physical activity, not getting enough sleep, not getting enough anything, and all of a sudden the body's like, Hey, [00:11:00] Jacko, I got something for you. I think you were pretty, you nailed it, man. I think you, you literally had like a.
Quarterly mini burnout episode that was usually related to some physical illness that your body was blessed you with to point.
Speaker 2: When we look back at it, we're like, man, how could you not see that? But I'm telling you at, at the time, it, it doesn't feel that unusual. And, and I had conditioned myself to operate like that.
Then years ago, I remember coming to, to you guys as a team and saying, Hey, uh, this is a little unusual for me, but I'm gonna take the month of December off, uh, the whole month. Yeah. And I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. I'm just, I just know that I'm so fried and I don't like the fact that I don't like how I'm operating.
Like, I, I don't like, you know, my ability to score points, so to speak. And I
Speaker: did that when you told us, I just immediately went to, like, the minute you told me that I went to Game Spot and I was like, what's releasing? Like what is, is a new sieve coming out? Like what, what is, what is happening, right? Is there a new fallout?
Like what is Will doing with this month? Like where, where's it gonna go? Because you didn't have the House project at that point. You didn't have. [00:12:00] Some of the things that you have that are keeping you busy now?
Speaker 2: I had no idea, but you know, what happened was I took that time off, which is a luxury, uh, it's, it's a luxury to be able to say to the team, Hey, I'm gonna go do something and have nothing.
Break while you're gone.
Speaker: Yes and no. I want to push back on the luxury piece of it because I think there was also some necessity to it. Sure. Yeah. And, and we certainly saw some things. So if we go to the, the other side of that, like when we look at then what came out of that, there was a much better version of you that came back after that month.
Speaker 2: That's what blew me away. Yeah. And I started to realize, and I, and I say this in case some folks that are listening have this same pattern right now as we're recording this, we're heading into almost a Q4 of 2025. That's not possible. I have learned. That by the time I get to Q4, I have typically run myself toward exhaustion.
And again, I, this is me publicly saying I'm well aware of what's happening. Right. I'm just not great at managing it. And I know that over the next couple of months, my productivity, my output, everything is about to plummet, not 'cause I want it to [00:13:00] be, like you talked about this moment ago, my energy level hasn't necessarily changed.
Yeah. But my output, my mental ability. Yeah. To just be in the zone because I've pushed and pushed and pushed.
Speaker: You're just, you're entering, you're literally entering that. And back to the sports knowledge, you're in the fourth quarter now and you haven't been out yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, quite literally in the fourth quarter.
Yeah. Uh, and, and every single time this happens, I'm like, okay, now I know that I've got this like baked in respite that I do every year. You know where I, I take December off. Funny thing, you can attest this. I usually work more in December than, than I do the rest of the year. Yeah, yeah. Just not on startups.com stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, I, I have a feeling this year in particular, given the stage of the House project and the, the plans coming up, this will be a December to remember, but it is not going to be a restful one. I'm actually, I might start some kind of an office pool around what you look like in January, like in terms of like, where you're like, oh, I'll be skiier.
That's for sure. Yeah, Will's doing all of his meetings horizontal for January. Oh my God, man. Just gonna roll with it. It's, it's cool. It's cool. [00:14:00] I'm,
Speaker 2: um, right now, uh, just give kind of a moment in time, a bit of a timestamp. Right now I'm working 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Uh, you know, for folks listening, I'm in the process of building a house.
I'm an obsessive carpenter, so I'm actually building a house. I'm not just like watching someone else build it. I'm out there doing stuff. Um, but I also have my, my full-time responsibilities here, which I love, uh, frankly. Yeah, I was thinking about this, uh, the other day. My responsibility here. Break. Like I cannot wait to come back to my job here because my back doesn't hurt, my neck doesn't hurt.
Every part of my body doesn't get a little bit of a
Speaker: breather.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker: I can attest this man. You are, you are. I I am six hours ahead of you, uh, in Madrid and you are living on both my time zone and your time zone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At this point, um, like you were, you were working both times zone
Speaker 2: and I love it, to be honest.
I, I love it. It's, it's hard, but I absolutely love it and I'm doing it 'cause I want to do it. However, yeah. There is a cost to it. There, there's an actual cost there. Sure is. I, I, I can only run at this pace for so long on the [00:15:00] weekends because I have no, I can just focus on being physical. I'm burning an average of 4,000 calories a day with 20,000 steps a day.
And you're
Speaker: my, you're my 7-year-old.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Still on a Wednesday. And that's just nonstop labor all day long. I never take breaks, whatever. And I say this to say, I'm well aware that this level of. Mental, physical, emotional effort has a burnout factor. There ain't no way I'm gonna be able to maintain this. Uh, and I'm no spring chicken, so it's like I've got unlimited energy, right?
So, so I have to realize, let's look at this. I have to realize that I'm actively injuring myself. I'm actively burning myself out, and I'm about to create an injury. And I don't think a lot of folks see burnout. As the injury that it is. You know what I mean?
Speaker: No, they don't. They don't treat it as something acute and necessary and as in necessly treated.
[00:16:00] Right. Right. It has to have a treatment. Right. Right. There has to be something, but let's, let's talk about burnout as the injury. Yeah. Right. I think part of the reason that it's hard to see burnout as an injury, unlike a lot of other injuries, it, it doesn't, like, I think you've, you've analogized to some things like, you know, breaking your ankle or, or tearing your ACL.
Yes. But it tends not to come on that suddenly, right? Like it's hard to see I, if I'm a, if I'm on a soccer field and I tear my ACL, it's not like maybe something happened or maybe something didn't, like, it's pretty obvious. I'm a, I'm in a heap on the ground and I'm, I'm waiting to be carted off the field.
It's more like an overuse injury, right? It's like tendonitis. It builds up, it starts to bother you a little bit. It starts to have some level of impact. Then it gets to the point where like the, the really acute symptoms set in and it's, it's more obvious that it's an injury, but I think because it sneaks up on us a little bit, although I'd be interested, did you ever have any periods where you went from like zero to burnt
Speaker 2: out really quickly?
No, but you know what I did do every time, Ryan, is I always blamed my startup or my [00:17:00] work for the. Let me build on that for a second, because I think it's, it, it, it ties into a lot of what we're gonna talk about, which is I would be like, oh, I'm burnt out so I need to exit my startup and go do something else.
I basically said that it's not me causing the injury, it's the startup environment that's causing the industry or the injury. And while that, obviously there's correlation. Sure. I think the part that we have a hard time decoupling is that I can work at the same startup. Get injured and recovered. Injured and recovered.
Injured and recovered, and the startup remains the same. Here's a better way to say it. There's not a version where I go to work for a startup and I never get injured. I'm just always just unlimited energy.
Speaker: It happens. That's what he said. It's not if it's when, and I think that's part of where that misplaced correlation comes in.
Right? It's kind of like saying, well, if they just didn't make stupid soccer fields, I could never get a soccer related injury. Right? So I just have to never go on a soccer field, right? Implying that I will never get injured in any other ways. I'll just go back to doing jiujitsu [00:18:00] full-time instead of soccer.
That'll keep me safe. Right. Then I won't get injured. Right. So I, yeah, there's, there's a huge fallacy there, and I get it like. Look it. It's not that. It's not causal. Yeah. Right? Yes. Because you were doing the things you did in the context of the startup, you burnt out. Yes. Yes. That is, it. Is there, had you not had that, you, you might not have or you might have.
Right? It's not as if startups have, you know, some sort of exclusive license on, on burnout. I know plenty of people who've burnout in medicine, corporate world, academia. Right. You can do it anywhere. Right. I, I think that the, yeah, the field of play isn't the challenge here. It's how we treat it and the fact that we don't treat some of those early symptoms.
So the ACL one's a good one, right? Because I know a lot of people who've had, you know, the, the full ACL knock on, knock on wood has not happened to me. But there were usually. Things leading up to that. Yeah, right. There were other preliminary soreness, light injuries, other stuff that led up to the, the full blowout.
And I think it's the same in my case, it's why I was asking you if you'd ever had kind of like the, the instantaneous [00:19:00] blowout, in my case when, and look, I was never particularly good at seeing it coming. Yeah. Or, or counting up the accumulations and going, oh, we're getting near to that point where the injury happens or where I recognize it.
But in hindsight, I was always clearly able to go back and see like, oh, four months ago when this happened. Right, right. When that happened, I'll give you the, the more recent example for me, and this, I'm gonna, this, I'm gonna couch this one under like partial burnout. I didn't fully go there and I, I think I did catch this one a little bit, a little bit early.
This one was a great example of that second category, the emotional burnout for me. I was not physically burnt out at all. This goes back two years now, and I think we've talked about this before on the podcast, but. I was doing a ton of office hours a week. I had 40 available office hour slots of 15 minutes each, so you know, it could have been up to 10 hours.
Plus it's a lot of office hours, it's a lot of gear changes, and man, if you go back in time, you remember this period, this was not a great time for startup companies, right? The funding had taken a downturn, [00:20:00] layoffs were happening. People had stopped buying fear in the economy was out there, and so. I was talking to founders who by and large were all burnt out themselves.
They were burnt out. They were scared. Yep, yep. It was just dragging on everybody. And a couple months into it, I was just like, I started feeling really awful. I just like, I was sad. I was like starting to get to push. It was just weigh me down. I realized, I was like, oh God, it's because I'm, I'm carrying water for all these other founders and I have to figure out something to do.
And so. That's what it was. I realized I had injured myself by just playing in. In that case, I wasn't just in the fourth quarter of one game. I was in the fourth quarter of like everyone's game. 150 games at the same time. Yeah. And it was. But it was a slow build. It took me four or five months to get to the point where it really broke, and then I had the course correct.
Speaker 2: You know something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already [00:21:00] exists. You may just not know it. But that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do.
We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all dayLong@groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do, let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it. A while back, not that long ago when you came back to the States and you got your, your, your folks set up.
Right. You, you were getting your folks set up, uh, in a new house and that that was a lot. And then, then there was some ous injuries while that was happening, uh, to your wife and to your mom. And like,
Speaker: they literally ended up looking like sports injuries for both of them, right? Like as if my mother was a linebacker and my wife was a fullback.
Speaker 2: So I bring this up to say at that time, as someone that, that's worked with you for a long time and, and, and has a great relationship with you. I thought to myself, there's no version where this isn't gonna affect Ryan in some way. Right. Yeah. As well, it should. Right? So I need to make sure that I'm not putting undue pressure on him.
In other words, I [00:22:00] think partners in a business, I think even just like, like, you know, when we talk about our, our team, et cetera. Yep. We need to be cognizant of where and how injuries happen. If we overlook them. Right. If we overlook them, that's a weak leadership move.
Speaker: Yeah. 'cause it's not just founder burnout, right?
The, the entire startup or pieces of the startup individuals teams burnout can spread through the entire organization. Or it doesn't necessarily spread either. It can just happen to pop up here and there, right? It's a very individual thing.
Speaker 2: So, so my whole and I, I just bring this one up to say like, it would've been easy for me or someone else in that situation to just ignore what just happened.
Hey, sorry about your luck. You know? Um, make sure you get it, uh, whatever done. Right.
Speaker: Make sure those TPS reports are on the desk by Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2: I'm like, to me, and, and I'm, I'm zooming out beyond just ourselves. I think our job with the folks that we work with every day is to help assess. When those burnout moments are happening.
Yes. Not just full burnout, like, you know, at the, the moment of, of, of explosion, but just the kinds of things that drive burnout. [00:23:00] And by the way, they tend to be personal things that happen to people.
Speaker: I was getting ready to go here and this is interesting because if we back up a couple of podcasts you and I were talking about.
How friendly should we be with the team? Right? Like, should we be friends with the team? Should we be in people's personal business? Yeah, and there's a really interesting double-edged sword to that, which is that there is such a thing as over involvement and, and people may not wanna start. We, there's a whole podcast in this, guys.
Go back and check it out. It was about seven or eight podcasts ago. But, and, and I think that what kinda where we landed was that there is a line that you don't want to cross with that. But I think that the further you are from that line, the harder this is because you're. Absolutely right. The major contributors to burnout and or I'm just gonna say this, even if they're not contributing to it, 'cause work could be the entire reason you're burning out.
But I think a lot of the things, like a lot of the manifestations, the early ones, start to show up more in personal life than work life because we continue to push, we continue to make sure we're doing the job. This is exactly why we burn out. As [00:24:00] founders we're, we're gonna continue to do as team of the founder, right, as people who are working for the startup team.
They may want to push through and get things done Right. I'll, I'll, I'll figure it out, I'll do it. Where that typically then manifests is things start to fall off. On the personal side, they're not going to kids' games. They're not doing all the things that they should be doing with their friends. They're, they're not having dinner, they're not, whatever it is.
Right. Whatever the things that were part of their social life, their, their personal life start to fall off. And so I think as founders, it's, it is tough when we don't have that level of visibility into personal life.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so sometimes. Let's say a salesperson, uh, because they have a very binary output, their sales drop, well, sometimes, you know, just they're doing everything they can in their sales drop, but other times there's, there's almost always a story behind the story, right?
Yeah. There's always some other reason. And to your point, we can only take it so far, you and I have a great relationship, so you can share things like. Like that with me. Um, my point to it was I can just proactively say, okay, now's not a good time to press super hard. There's plenty of times that will be now.
It's just not one of them. I've dealt with this issue [00:25:00] myself many times, and you've given me the same courtesy where like, something's happening in my life and you're like, you know, dude, you, I got the wheel. Just do your thing. Right? Yeah. Like every dec, every December, and I, I point this out to say, if we're not even good at diagnosing it within ourselves, imagine what it's like to have an entire team of folks.
Yeah. That are in some version of burnout. Again, going back to the sports analogy where we've pushed everybody to the fourth quarter and everybody's struggling, but no one wants to say it and we pretend like it's not happening and we just wait for this. Yeah. Like, you know, apocalyptic moment to address it.
I think for, for founders, for for leaders, we have to be able to look at the organization and say, I can't push forever, and when I do push, I have to come up with an equal pull. Right. If I push somebody on the court, I need to pull 'em off the court. Yep. Right. In order to, to recharge them. And, and I think if you only rely on the team saying, Hey, I'm burnt out.
I need to be pulled off the court, you're gonna miss nearly every time because I, I think people are bad [00:26:00] at diagnosing it and they're worse at admitting it.
Speaker: A hundred percent. Yeah. I think it, it often does take a third party eye to say like, Hey, we, we all sort of see this coming. That's where it goes back to like, do you have the visibility?
Can you spot those optics when they're happening? Another question here, like I, I'm thinking back through, through history and trying to recreate some of these scenarios like. In your experience, your remembrance, do you feel like there were times where your burnout preceded burnout for the rest of the team or the team?
Burnout individual or, or widespread contributed to your burnout, or has it always been sort of a, a, a very personal thing.
Speaker 2: I have rarely seen a moment in my 30 plus years where I was completely burnt out. The team was just on fire. I always saw, and that could just be a perception thing, but I've always seen, having worked with lots of different teams, I've always seen that if I'm not like on my a game, the team, whether deliberately or in, deliberately follows, right?
Yep. So if, if I'm pushing [00:27:00] and pushing really hard, like anybody, a coach or anything like that, the team has, has like an impetus to do it. But if I'm not pushing, I've never seen the, the team just like go bonkers. While I'm screwing off. Right. I just usually, I, I, I, I see an effect to it. And, and, and that's what has always made it hard for me to slow down because I realize it, it's not just me that it affects, that it affects everybody around me, which is dangerous.
Speaker: It is. And I think, but that it actually. When you look at it that way, it makes a really strong case for actually doing something about it. So let's talk about treating the injury. Yeah. Yeah. Because it, to, to that end, right? Like, so if, if you do know that this has not only there is a, there's a clear and a negative impact to you as the individual suffering with the burnout, but you know that this hasn't.
Impact on the rest of the team. It's one of these like, and there's so many of these decisions as as founders, there's so many of these little moments in time that are so, so leveraged, right? Like deciding to take some time as a founder to heal and recover from this injury that is burnout. It isn't [00:28:00] just about you regaining that energy, it's about re restoring momentum.
Yeah, man. And balance the entire team. It has a huge, huge potential. ROI done. Right? Right. And yet again, we'll still look at that and go, oh, probably next week, right after, after I break my other ankle then, then I'll come off the field.
Speaker 2: I think in treatment is different for everyone. I think this is super important.
Typically, we associate not being burnout with not working. And, and I wanna be very careful with that sometimes. That is exactly the prescription. Okay. It's just not the only, but that is the hard part, right? Because
Speaker: treating it feels like the very opposite of what your startup needs, even if it's what you need, right?
It feels counter to everything that you're supposed to be doing there at that moment.
Speaker 2: Personally, I have what I would consider the constant in my life is a certain amount of energy that I need to put somewhere. The, the variable is where it gets put. If I put it in startup for too long, it burns me out.
It just does. I, I've been doing this forever at a very [00:29:00] sustained pace and I'm well aware of, of, of that outcome I have. I'm just kinda like ballparking. I have eight to nine months out of the year. That I can operate very well and very consistently and kind of like, you know, have, have great output. But the other four months, let's say, I cannot, I simply cannot.
There there is again, we're gonna, this like fourth quarter, there is some point where my output will just need to be recharged. That's it. I, you know, like I, I've got a habit now. Again, for me, my treatment plan is always put that energy somewhere else. In this case, like I've said it over and over, that I'm building a house, and that is a phenomenally therapeutic place for me to put my time.
Yeah,
Speaker: yeah.
Speaker 2: It's exhausting, but, but not in the way that I'm getting burnt out. Right. Like I'm not getting burnt out, which I think
Speaker: it's, it's important to note that, right? So again, burnt out doesn't just mean you're out of energy. That's not correct. Right. We, we did an entire podcast on this too, which is like, as founders we need hobbies and generally we need hobbies that are as demanding as our [00:30:00] startups.
Yeah. 'cause if we don't have something as as demanding as our startup, we're probably not gonna be fully there. Right? Yeah. We're gonna, we're still gonna be somehow like one foot or maybe more than one foot in this startup while we're doing this other thing. And I think that the same thing when we're looking for the burnout antidote, I think there has to be something that is pretty starkly contrasted.
Also very consuming in the same way that the startup is,
Speaker 2: again, what I said earlier is that I think that being able to take time away is a luxury because it implies that you have people that can Yeah. Back fill you and do those things. For sure. So let's talk about like the different buckets of treatment, if you will.
One bucket, let's say is go do something else that, yep. Where you can invest your time differently. And I think part of that, Ryan, build house. Build house, right? It's regain your passion. So if you do the same thing over and over and over every single day and it becomes totally rote and you lose your passion, which is a dangerous thing to lose.
As a founder, then you're thinking, well, I wanna go do something else, like some other [00:31:00] startup. 'cause I've lost the passion in this one. And that might, that may be entirely true. Yeah. But you may have also just lost your passion to do anything else because you just keep doing this one thing over and over.
The place that I reset my passion right now is I do carpentry, right? I love to build stuff. However, if you were to say, cool, now, just go do that full time, I would say in less than four weeks, I would hate that job. Yeah.
Speaker: Becomes
Speaker 2: full-time then, then
Speaker: it just becomes a job. Right? It's then I'm right back to where I started of interest.
It's not something Yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting because the, just last week, the week before there was a, a discussion on LinkedIn that I was part of and burnout was, was the topic. And, and there was a pretty hot debate around it that somebody was saying that like, isn't even real, and then burnouts just bs.
And it's like, yeah, okay, let's, let's beat this up a little bit. But I said something to the effect of, burnout isn't about how much work we do, it's about why we're doing it. And when you lose that, why? Then it becomes right when it, when, when the work you're doing becomes disconnected from the why and the, and the, and the, and the outcomes and the transformation you're trying to create, [00:32:00] it really does start to weigh on you.
I think that, and, and we look at, you know, modern knowledge work, which is what most startups are engaging in it at some degree. It, it severs the primal link back to that work, right? So there's a reason you can go and do hard work if it's directly connected. It's like building house, like when you spend an entire day will, and your back hurts and your knees hurt, and your hands hurt.
Is there ever nothing that you can look back on and just see like physically some, some shit changed every time you do that. Like there's new stairs, there's new cabinets, there's new something. So you're very viscerally and strongly and primally connected to those outputs. Right, right, right. But when we're doing knowledge work, right, it doesn't feed us.
It doesn't warm us. It doesn't shelter us. Then it can start to feel like it doesn't matter when you're not feeling that progress. And I think that's where that like lack of why lack of passion can jump in. But we've said this earlier in the podcast, like, but this, this normally is a, a temporary state, right?
This is why we have to treat it as an injury. Not as a terminal illness.
Speaker 2: Let's build on [00:33:00] that a little bit because I, uh, what I wanna talk about is another bucket, which is what's causing the burnout. Sure. In other words, within your role, within what you do every day. Yeah. If you could pinpoint and sometimes you can't, but if you could pinpoint it, is there some something you're doing it, for example, you mentioned, Hey, I'm doing 40 office hours a week.
Right. That is burning me out. Okay. Yep. How about we not do that or have someone else pick up and do that? That's, that was the treatment plan. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it doesn't, like, we don't necessarily have to have you stop working or sell the company or any of these things. Right,
Speaker: right. Like, Ryan can't handle office hours anymore.
Uh, we're gonna fire, sell this thing. Exactly. Say sell
Speaker 2: the company. Right. Find out what it is that is burning you out and address that. Yep. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes it's like, I hate my investors. I absolutely can't stand my investors. They're, they're driving me insane, et cetera. And the only way to sever that relationship is for me to not be there.
Sometimes. That's entirely true. Sometimes that is entirely true.
Speaker: Yep. Sometimes
Speaker 2: couples therapy doesn't work. That's why divorce exists. Right, exactly. [00:34:00] So sometimes that is entirely true. However, there are a lot of different ways to address where, uh, that burnout's coming from. Sometimes people will do a mini sabbatical.
Yeah. Sometimes people will do a role change. Sometimes people will start to spread the, the work, right? Like, hey, for example, for, for me, the, where I see burnout most acutely is from creative work every week. Yes. Uh, you know, I sit down and, and I, I brainstorm whatever topic we're gonna cover. I write an article about it that we send out to a few hundred thousand people.
The complexity, I should say that the challenge of doing that. In January versus June versus December is dramatically different.
Speaker: Interesting how that goes, isn't it? Yeah. As that particular battery gets worn down throughout the year, there's that period where it just needs that reset, which by the way to all of you lovely podcast listeners, is why we don't do podcasts in December.
Speaker 2: We need the reset. So with that said, that is acutely where I feel it the most. [00:35:00] I don't feel it doing CFO stuff like our financials. I don't feel it doing like our workshops and stuff like that. Yep. There's a lot of things that like, actually I don't hit what I call blinking cursor syndrome. Blinking cursor syndrome is, is a term I think I made up.
That simply means I'm, I want to type something, but all I can do is look at a blinking cursor and that's the, like nothing will come out. When I get to that point, I know there is no solve that's called, well, let me just work more hours. Right. The problem is, at its core, something I've injured something.
It's literally pouring gasoline on the fire. That point. Exactly. And so, uh, what I'm gonna say is this, this next bucket is about finding acutely what is driving the burnout the most, and looking to, to reset what that is. Sometimes that just means take a break from doing that. But I think the biggest thing is doing nothing at all is a plan.
It's a bad plan. It's a plan.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Just continue. You're like, Hey, we've been running the same plan for a while and it's clearly created some burnout and I don't feel, well, [00:36:00] I should probably keep doing the same thing. It's, let's keep running this playbook.
Speaker 2: It's, when I hear about Elon Mustang, I want everybody to do a hundred hour a week, uh, work weeks, bro, you couldn't do that.
Like a week, two weeks, three, four weeks tops. Okay. At that point. I would, I would argue doing it at all is a waste of time. But I would argue that like, once you know you're gonna run people as hard as they possibly can until you break, what did you really achieve? Like what are you doing? Yeah. Is this a social
Speaker: experiment or work?
Speaker 2: Like what, what do you actually, I do want them to work with you anymore. Like,
Speaker: do you want, you want run out their output Also, like, do you want, go back to the sports analogy for a minute. If, if you've. Played LeBron. Let's just say there's, you had a triple header that day. Yeah. It's not a thing, but let's just pretend that you did and now we're in the fourth quarter, the third game, the guy doesn't come out.
Would you even want him in the game at that point? He's no longer the same version of me. He's not the best player on the on, on the court at that point. There's a bunch of fresh legs. Why would you even want what output is coming at that point? You have beyond squeezed the juice out. This is [00:37:00] just, yeah.
You're just now putting effort in and getting subpar output at that point at best. If anything,
Speaker 2: that's a, and so that's what I'm saying, when you look at your whole team and you're like, huh, I didn't really know if my team's burnt out. I, I should probably dig in and, and, you know, impose a little empathy and find out, you know, where people stand, recognizing that, that, that, that they're gonna be guarded.
That they're gonna be guarded about, about that answer. 'cause there's a lot of consequence in their mind. And we've talked about this, the sign of weakness,
Speaker: right?
Speaker 2: Right, right. And we've talked about this in, in previous episodes, where showing your own vulnerability is a great way to like, you know, level set Yes.
To say, Hey, it's okay. Like, I'm, I'm feeling the same way, but I, but I think our overall purpose for ourselves and for the team should be getting people back in the game. Get, get everybody, like, in order to get them back in the game, you gotta healthy get them outta the
Speaker: game and get back in the game. Yeah.
It's, it's exactly it. To get back in the game, you have to leave the, you have to leave the court first. Yep.
Speaker 2: You, you do. And, and again, like I said, the treatment plan's different for everybody. Some people just need time off. Right. Some people like just want to like, put their toes in the sand and just relax and, and, and I get, I'm not one of those people, but I certainly understand and apparently the rest of the world does too.[00:38:00]
But I look at it and I'm like, okay, when I hit burnout, and I think this is critical when I hit burnout, it is a moment in time. It's not the end of my startup. Oh, I'm burnt out, so my startup can't go on. No, I'm burnt out and my startup has its own lifespan. Right. If I'm burnt out or my team is, I need to address that separate from, like I said, let's get, let's, let's fire sail the whole thing because I'm burnt out, which is ridiculous.
Yeah, exactly. I think for, for a lot of us, we should think of ourselves more of as like a professional sports franchise. I think that the athlete analogy absolutely, uh, makes sense here. And I think we need to think of ourselves as coaches. Um, number one, we gotta make sure the coach is okay, so the coach needs to do, to lead the team, but we have to make sure that, that everybody here is going to face exhaustion.
They're going to face that moment where they have nothing left to give. It's our job to diagnose that. It's our job to to, to pull them off, to get them reset, to get them back out there. But if we can't do that with the people around us, if we can't do that in our own lives to be able to [00:39:00] diagnose these injuries and be able to treat these injuries and get ourselves back out there, then we don't stand a chance.
But if we can do that. We treat ourselves like the star player, right, in this entire franchise, and we reward ourselves properly with rest, with reset, whatever it takes to get our version of a respite. Then we can go out, we can crush it, and we can win this thing.
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