from Hacker News

Avoiding Founder Burnout

by wdaher on 8/14/21, 10:22 PM with 14 comments

• by markdjacobsen on 8/15/21, 11:35 AM

  This is good advice and absolutely true. I badly burned myself out with my first "startup" (a technical nonprofit) and needed a couple years to heal. I went into my second much wiser about boundaries and self-care and performed far better.

  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:

  ----

  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.

  ---

  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.

  [0] https://markdjacobsen.com/eating-glass/

• by dv_dt on 8/15/21, 3:18 AM

  I find it interesting that he admits that earlier he thought that 70hrs/wk was the required way to move forward, then worked 40 on twilio and found it was better to equivalent productivity - but then seemingly suffers from a possible identical blind spot when he also puts out that 35hrs would of course be too few hours.

• by nullspace on 8/15/21, 1:26 AM

  On a side note, I find it fascinating that someone who worked on KSplice went on to work on Zulip. Kernel dev and chat software, to me, are two different worlds.

  Would love to here that story.

• by aarondia on 8/15/21, 3:38 PM

  I think it’s a cliche at this point, but what has really been helpful for me is setting boundaries. I used to do some work 7 days a week, trying to do less on the weekends. But because I didn’t have strict guidelines, I would have anxiety that I should be doing work humming in the background all weekend. When I switched to the model of doing absolutely no work on the Saturday (even if I didn’t have anything better to do), it allowed me to completely separate work from recovery, and made both more enjoyable.