Avoiding Founder Burnout
waseem.substack.com
waseem.substack.com
However, I think it's also important to recognize that burnout has many dimensions. Burnout is not necessarily the same thing as overworking.
In my book about entrepreneurial failure (Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal [0]) I have a chapter on burnout. Here is an excerpt:
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When you are passionate about a cause, you light up like a supernova. The energy crackles and flows. It powers you through obstacles that would make most people cower. Sheer love propels you onward.
That is where burnout begins.
The dictionary defines burnout as “exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration.”
Yes, burnout entails exhaustion, but it signifies so much more. Burnout is really about unrequited love.
No matter how much you love your quest, it does not always love you back. Often the world does not align behind your glorious sense of purpose. Whenever some new twist or turn puts your goal further beyond reach, you must burn ever brighter to compensate. You seethe at the injustice. You choke back tears of disappointment. Despite all that, you do what you have always done, which is to hold it together through the sheer force of love.
Eventually, this misalignment between your passion and circumstances opens a wound in your soul.
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I conclude, "You aren’t drained because you need more sleep; you suffer because you have a broken heart."
I write that burnout can function as a circuit breaker that protects us from further harm and alerts us that something is profoundly misaligned within our lives. Founders are uniquely susceptible because we pour our hearts and souls into efforts the world might reject or destroy.
With all due respect, what a pile of BS. I monitor closely my productivity. I have been doing it and improving for years.
I am exceptionally productive thanks to that, and one of the major contributors is sleeping well. If for some reason I can not sleep well my productivity drops a lot(because everything else is nailed down so you could easily isolate the culprit). I can even feel the difference.
There are lots of other factors as well, having social contact, friends and family, feeding well, exercising, helping others and feeling necessary.
You need all of them for filling fulfilled, and different people need different amount of each thing, but unless you are a 18 years old, sleep is something almost everybody needs.
You can sacrifice everything for a short term gain, but you must be careful that the effort is short in time as well and you can recover later.
What you call "love" is just a nominalization for a group of things that most people need.
You're right that that is distinct from “hours worked”, and sure, maybe 35 is the magic number for someone.
0 hours is too few hours, and 70 is too many— so clearly there is a line there somewhere. I suspect that that line varies from person to person and even week to week, hence the point about “either be working or don’t be working”.
Similarly I've been in and seen hard working teams make chains of silly bad decisions that had to be corrected with even more work later. So I guess keep in mind the corollary is that it’s a marathon not a sprint. And maybe so it’s less of a trope: there is “too long” on both a low level everyday as well as a larger scale - come up for air and breathe and get your bearings and perspective.
Would love to here that story.
Not to shill my own stuff too much here, but I wrote a bit about this here: https://waseem.substack.com/p/will-your-startup-make-you-hap...