I've been pretty heads down working on a new project, Mahm. Nights, weekends, my actual birthday were all consumed with a singular focus: Getting a product out the door to start user testing.

I started this project in December. The first few months were a flurry of work and excitement. I spent whole days reading and writing, shaping something that was just a fragment of an idea into something more tangible. I started building prototypes. Code flew out of me like it were merely exhalations. My breath, and breadth, was endless. I built a small team, figured out a potential business strategy and charged forward toward our first large milestone: A functional MVP. Even when the shutdowns began, I sort of just glided forward through it, using the shutdowns as a way to focus my attention. (Without fun things to do, i’ll be able to completely focus on this project tun hindered right?) I poured any anxiety I might have felt about the world, or that was transferred onto me from others into my work. I got obsessive about maintaining a perfect routine. Sundays I would wake up early, go for a long run or workout, meal prep food for lunches and dinners M-F of the following week, and write the newsletter for that week. Each work day of the week was the same. I would wake up around 630, workout or run, make a double shot latte and leave for the office by 830 at the latest. I’d get to the studio before 9 in the mornings and leave close to 10 at night. I would sleep and repeat it all again the next day. I was a machine. Nothing could stop me provided I kept the machine well oiled.

In late July I started to feel this nagging tiredness. I'd wake up and have to draw from some inner well of determination to get moving. "Get out the door and build things already dammit", I'd find myself saying. Instead of leaping out of bed, I found myself spending about an hour each morning just surfing twitter. The work itself became a slog. I found myself resisting letting myself get drawn into my work. But I persisted anyway. I kept pushing through.

I slid across the start of August with most of our basic functionality working and started onboarding users. (Those of you who read this newsletter and are in the beta, I owe you an infinite debt of gratitude for testing). Something didn’t feel right though. I had been going non stop for the entirety of the year so far. The wins didn’t feel euphoric anymore. They felt Phyrric; Like the toll inflicted wasn’t worth the reward. My workout routine got disrupted. I found myself spending my evenings trying to find any way to decompress. The exhaustion built, even when I would get a solid 8 hours of sleep, I felt tired showing up at the office each Monday.

I was burned out. I had been running the engine on red for months with no real breaks or time for reflection. I had been through this a few times before, and in each instance I had done something relatively different to cure in. In one case, I decided to read 2-3 books a week and take up meditation. In another, I took an extended vacation. Online resources were poor in quality and failed to offer any singular insights in framing or understanding burnout. One recommended “avoid stress at all cost” and “be more social with your coworkers”, as cures for burnout. Another suggested “focus on breathing techniques” and “take frequent 5 minute breaks every 20 minutes”. All of these tips seemed specific for individuals and were likely to have high variance across different people. Moreover, they seemed to imply that burnout came from stress— which didn't seem to make sense to me. Plenty of people operate in high stress environments for years without burnout. I wanted to find a framework for understanding burnout in a way that would be broadly applicable across all people.

In mid July Netflix began to stream The Last Dance, a documentary about the 1997 Chicago Bulls championship team. It’s a stunning story of dreams, drive, and friendship. If you have yet to check it out I highly recommend you do so. One of the things that stuck me from it was how frequently and sometimes severely pro-athletes get injured, and the things they have to go through to get back into playing shape.

In Michael Jordan’s second year of professional play, he landed awkwardly trying to catch a ball and fractured his foot. He had to sit out six weeks of the season. Jordan was furious. Even 35 years later, he still felt frustration of not being able to play during those weeks in 1985.

Weeks went by with Jordan sitting on the bench. The doctors recommended he sit out for the entirety of the season. After 5 weeks, Jordan asked if he could go back to college— presumably to finish some of his classes. Instead, he started playing basketball with his former UNC teammates; 1:1 at first, then 2:2, then 3:3, and eventually up to 5:5. Six weeks after his injury Jordan returned to the bulls in playing shape, to the surprise of everyone.

Jordan had to take 5 weeks of forced rest, and then slowly worked his way back up to playing shape. “When I came back to play, the calf of my injured leg was stronger than the one on my injured side.”

It suddenly clicked for me. Burnout, is not exhaustion or too much stress, it’s an injury and we should treat it as such.

Someone once told me, burnout doesn’t come from over work, it comes from frequent and repeated frustrations. This resonates with my own experiences. I’ve found, provided I run into few obstacles, I can work until my eyeballs start to bleed. But work (and especially starting a company) is full of little frustrations: This task is behind schedule, This idea didn’t work as planned, This random angel investor went dark. All of these things are fine in isolation. They do a small amount of damage to whatever it is inside of me that tells me I can keep going. Keep pushing. Keep working harder.

I’ve followed the career and work of vlogger Ze Frank for years. Ze rose to popularity as one of the first daily vloggers. Ze has an interesting framework for thinking about motivation and perseverance. Ze calls it his FILDI: (Fuck it, lets do it). Your FILDI is like a battery. There’s times its full and your biggest challenge is stopping yourself from biting off more than you can chew. When its low it’s still functional, you just need to recharge it, either through multiple small wins or through R&R.

Burnout at its core is an injury to your FILDI such that even tiny wins or minor types of relaxation don’t refill the tank. It’s a crack in the tank. No matter how many small wins you pour into it, it doesn’t stay full. Its your job to find a way to repair those cracks. If you do it right, the result may be stronger than it was when you first started.

If you’re burned out, the only real way to get back on your feet and at peak performance again is to repair those cracks. There’s a few lessons to take from Jordans story and sports therapy that can help us build a frame work for fixing burnout.

Take a forced break. No work, or as little as possible for some length of time that you can start rebuilding that muscle.

When you do start up again, don’t dive back in playing at your fullest. Treat it like you would a physical injury. Start with giving yourself multiple small wins, then work your way up to the truly frustrating tasks. Work on adjacent tasks to support your ability to tackle the truly hard ones.

Add in new regular exercises to allow you to keep that specific muscle strong in the future.

In my case, I had to take a solid week off doing as little work as possible. I supplemented it with activities I knew helped calm my mind and refocus my goals. I came up with my own form of mental PT that included a combination of reading, writing, meditating and watching truly terrible Netflix movies. Last, and most importantly, I became extremely careful of the new tasks I took on. I avoided engineering tasks that would cause me too much frustration. By the end of two weeks, I felt like I was back in fighting shape and ready to tackle anything. In the process, I learned a set of new coping mechanisms, better signals for identifying burnout earlier, and found a renewed sense of purpose on the mission I was on.

Unlike physical injuries (which have some small chance of never repairing fully), recovering from burnout more often than not leads you to have a stronger FILDI than you did before. I had ignored the early signs of burn out in mid-July and kept trying to push through. I found myself reciting the old Winston Churchill adage: "When you're going through hell, keep going". Sometimes that adage is useful, but in this case it potentially did more damage than good.