Grounded

I’ve got some advice for people feeling “burnt out” and overwhelmed, but you won’t like it. In fact, you’ll hate it. I know, because I give this advice professionally all the time. It works. It works really well. But people hate hearing it.

You have to cut the gas line. You’re burnt out because the fire is too intense, and it’s too intense because you keep feeding it. You can’t add a new technique or a new method or a new structure to it, because that’s still adding fuel to the fire.

You’ve got to put out the fire first, and rebuild. There is absolutely zero possibility that you can maintain your current levels of output, without interruption, and still cure your “burnout.”

I know. You don’t want to hear it. You don’t want to hear that (at least for a short duration), you’re going to have to just accept getting less done. Maybe making less money. Maybe pumping the breaks on your advancement. Maybe putting a major project on hold.

If a jet plane is going so fast that it’s about to break apart, it might be possible to redesign the plane and get it to where it can fly just as fast – maybe even faster! – without blowing up. But it is impossible to do that without landing the plane for a while.

You can’t do repairs while maintaining 100% efficiency, especially if 100% efficiency was killing you.

This is the first step: accepting this as truth. From a stationary position, a thousand different methods can work to rebuild your engine and do things right. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution there, because there isn’t one. But literally none of them will work without you taking a break.

I know you don’t want to hear it. If you were the kind of person who swallowed that pill easily, you probably didn’t get here in the first place. But the sooner you accept it, the sooner it’s over. And the sooner you can fly again – the way you were meant to.