Is Burn Out Really Your Problem?

So there’s this guy on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. He’s on all the platforms. He’s got a massive following. He’s probably well over, I would say, a million, maybe close to 2 million followers across all the different platforms. So that’s pretty significant. He said something the other day in one of his tweets that I usually agree generally with this. This fellow, I’m not gonna put him on blast or anything like that. Call him out here.

But he said something the other day that I fundamentally disagreed with. I disagreed with it. So I had a visceral reaction. I was like, I need to respond to this. And it’s not often that I have such a strong reaction to something online. Doesn’t usually move me in such a way. He said this. He said, what was it? The greatest killer of progress is burnout.

And I fundamentally disagree with this. I fundamentally disagree with this. I believe the greatest killer of progress is people just not getting started. That’s number one. The second greatest killer of progress is sticking with the thing, showing up consistently on a long enough time frame. That right there, those two things showing up and consistently doing the work, those are the two biggest killers of progress, not burnout. You need to show up and do the work for a long enough period of time to even encroach upon burnout. And truthfully, the number of people that I’ve met in my life who are wildly successful, the number of people who I’ve met who are burnt out or burnt out at some point, it’s very, very few and far between.

You’re not feeling burnt out. You’re feeling the weight of what is known as hard work. Hard work is hard, and it will feel a lot like burnout. You will feel unmotivated, and you’re like, I don’t think I can do this. I totally understand it. But you can’t confuse burnout with the feeling of difficulty. They’re completely different things. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t burnout.

Totally possible, but in my experience, it’s more rare than people give it credit for. I don’t think burnout is that much of an issue, especially if you’re pursuing something that gives you meaning and purpose and value. Right. I think the harder thing is that people just generally don’t know what hard feels like. They’re used to feeling disconnected and numb when they’re at their w two and feeling like they’re taking for granted and all this stuff. They’re used to that sensation, but they’re not used to the sensation, the burden, the stress that comes with building your own business and moving towards your own greatness. It’s a completely different type of pressure that you feel, and it can manifest itself as though I’m burning out. But I don’t think that’s really the issue.
If you have not yet shown up and done the work for at least a year, then you’re not even close to burning out yet. You have so much more left in the tank. You just are still adapting. Your body is still acclimating to the difficulty of the task at hand. This is a lot like when you haven’t worked out for a long time. You go to the gym and you wake up the next day and you’re sore, and you’re sore for the next two weeks, and you keep going to the gym, you keep showing up, and slowly but surely over the next three to four or five months, the soreness starts to subside. You start to go to the gym. Now you have a different type of soreness, which comes from actually working the muscle.
And a lot of people never get to that point where they’re working the muscle. They stay in this state of perpetual low grade, or maybe even high grade soreness that comes from not moving enough, not doing the activity enough. So, for instance, one of the reasons a lot of New Year’s resolutions fail, when people say, I want to get healthy, I’m going to go to the gym, I’m going to start working out, is because they go in there with so much intensity that they crush their body and they enter into this world of pain and suffering, this deep, deep state of soreness. And they think, well, if this is what it is going to take to be fit and healthy and strong, I don’t have it. This is just too much, right? And so they stopped going to the gym as much, and now they’ve broken the momentum better. Instead of going with intensity and doing too much too soon would have been just to focus on consistency, showing up every single day and doing a little bit, because you can’t actually start making gains towards your strength and towards your endurance or any of those physiological systems. You can’t make gains towards those until you get through that initial bit where you’re just fighting the general soreness that is occurring once you get through that. And that can take a bit.

That can take months, it can take a long time, depending on how long you’ve been sedentary or like, how out of shape you are, right? But once you get through that, now, when you go to the gym, you’re able to work the muscles and those different physiological systems with intention, and now you can start to improve them. But that takes a long time. So bringing this back to the idea of burnout, I think what a lot of people are experiencing is not the sensation of working the muscle. They’re still experiencing the general soreness. They haven’t made it through that acclimation period yet. And that acclimation period in business and in life in general, it can be very long, it can be very hard. But I encourage you, push through that. You have to show up and consistently do the work.

Again, it’s not about intensity, it’s about showing up consistently. Over time, your body will acclimate and you’ll be able to approach the hard work and recognize this is hard, but this is good hard because now I’m getting stronger as a result of it. But you can’t get to that point if you just give up to the burnout too soon. So I fundamentally disagree with this idea of burnout. Maybe it’s possible that you are experiencing burnout. I’m not trying to tell you that your experience isn’t valid or anything like that. I’m just saying maybe readjust your mental calibration, your expectations of what you’re experiencing, and remind yourself perhaps that this is just what hard feels like and it’s the reason most people give up. So, hope this brings you guys some value that will do it for me.

I’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.