Are idealists more likely to get burnt out? (burnout part 2)
How idealistic goals and poor boundaries contributed to my stress
1/ Dream big or go home
In my last post I talked about how my reasons for starting a business, emotional dishonesty and the nature of a venture-funded startup began to wear down on me. Another piece in the puzzle was the actual business I decided to start and how I chose to operate it.
I’d been living in Japan for five years when my wife and we decided to get out of the country for a bit. ‘Cauz why not, right? We chose the Netherlands because 1) easy visa process 2) English-friendly 3) Central location in Europe, meaning we could travel everywhere. For American citizens there’s something called the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty which made it super easy for me to sponsor both myself and my wife under a freelance visa.
The lawyer we found helped us get all the documents together and we didn’t have to pay her until we got the visa. It required a $5,000 upfront investment to be deposited in our Dutch bank account and a 2-page business plan that I threw together one afternoon. The plan was to stay there for a couple of years and see if we liked it and go from there.
When I landed in the Netherlands in August of 2019, I got to work on the business immediately. I set up a legal entity in Amsterdam (called a “B.V.'') and invested about $50k of my own savings (my early Ethereum earnings). In terms of timeline, I hadn’t actually raised money for the business yet — that would be about a year and a half out.
The idea for the startup, Carrus.io, would be a career coaching platform where you can get 1-1 sessions with an expert to prepare for a job interview. It was a direct extension from my previous work as a recruiter for several years. It made perfect sense because I already knew the industry. In fact, I had been a career coach myself, and all I was doing was making a platform where other coaches could sell their services. Easy peasy!
The platform started as a consumer marketplace. We didn’t actually focus on just career and job interview stuff, but it was very broad. You could get any type coaching: business coaching, life coaching, career coaching, skills coaching, and more.
That was version 1.0, and I remember we almost completely copied a website called codementor.io (little did I know they’d actually raised $1m to build their platform from scratch, whereas I had basically had raised nothing at this point). In fact, in our first pitch deck, I took screenshots of their website to make it look like it was ours.
We tried this version for a couple of months, but nobody was signing up. Crickets. The truth was we didn’t really have anyone experienced on the team to market the product. There was also no product manager to A/B test different audiences or versions of the product (nor did I know this was important!). Our core team was myself, a developer who later became my cofounder and a part-time product advisor who also later became a cofounder. Individually we had drive, ambition and skills, but they didn’t quite match with what we needed to get things to the next stage.
I hadn’t really spoken to any mentors, and I hadn’t yet come across this beautiful guide on kickstarting a marketplace. In retrospect, I also wasn’t very patient and I wanted to see results now. (Ironically, a year later we went back to this exact same model).
The results did not materialize, so we did what all startups do. We “pivoted.” A.k.a we had no idea what we were doing so decided to try something else.
The brand new Carrus: We were now a B2B business, targeting corporates who might need coaching and charged a monthly subscription. This seemed like a smart decision because companies have more money to spend and we already had a group of coaches (and SaaS businesses tended to bolster higher valuations). My goal became to sell our service to HR departments. The pitch was we could “help your employees become better leaders” and we targeted mid-level managers.
Now, this seemed like a really good idea. There were billion dollar coaching companies like BetterUp in the U.S. and CoachHub in Europe who had raised serious funding and were doing essentially the same thing. In other words, I knew there was a growing market for this.
2/ When your target market is 9,179 kilometers away
For some reason (inexperience, mostly), I made this really, really difficult for myself. Instead of trying to build a network on the ground in The Netherlands and marketing to companies locally, I had the genius idea that our first market would be…Japan! Yes, that’s right. A country 9,179 kilometers away. My logic was that I had more connections in Japan and it would be easier, even if I did all of it online.
When I look back at this decision, it was pretty insane. But I didn’t care. It was just another obstacle to overcome, another problem to solve.
Barry Farber, who’s researched burnout extensively, talks about a remarkable change over the last few decades in the type of people who get burnout. He says that the classic burnout victim in the 1960s and 1970s was an idealist who failed to reach unrealistically high altruistic goals. In the last couple of decades, this has changed. He says:
“Today’s burnout stems largely from pressure to fulfill the escalating requirements of others, or from the intense competition to be better than others in the same organization or company, or from the drive to make more and more money, or from the feeling that something that one obviously deserves is being withheld.”
Now, his studies were from a few decades ago. It seems like, though, in todays’ culture the typical startup founder has the worst of both worlds: they are both idealists by nature and have the drive to make money and deal with the ‘intense competition’ to be better, often operating from an intense sense of FOMO. Was I one of them?
Keeping my eye on the ball, I quickly hired a couple of part-time coaches who served as sales people in Japan and agreed to pay them a commission if they closed any deals. One guy, Toshihiro-san, was an O.G. in the HR space from SAP (since retired) and opened up some doors. We had meetings with big recruitment companies, startups and multinational firms like Mercedes. Considering I wasn’t even in Japan, it was pretty nuts that we got this far!
And yet, it was going pretty slow. I was frustrated that we weren’t really making any actual revenue, apart from a few people who got coaching sessions. It felt like I was putting in all of this effort day in and day out, but the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t getting any closer.
Yes, the stress and frustration was starting to build, but I was not burnt out. It felt like the “normal” challenges of what I imagined a startup would be like. I was also still in a bit of a honeymoon period since we’d just arrived to the country. Things were still fresh and new. I was more or less able to handle the worst of the stress by going to the gym, sauna, and meditating. I was also enjoying life: Within a few months of arriving, we went to Oktoberfest in Germany, we flew to Manchester for a friends wedding and I ran a marathon that December.
Eventually, at the end of 2019 I figured that I needed to take a business trip to Japan to close these deals. Six months after coming to the Netherlands I took a two-week business trip to Japan in January 2020, about 2 months before the start of the pandemic.
The meetings were okay. Companies were skeptical that I was not living in Japan and didn’t have any full-time employees. We didn’t close any big deals like I thought we would, but got a couple of companies to agree to pilots. That was pretty cool — these were like free trials that could lead to big money!
Now, the tricky part about all of this was that HR budgets were decided once a year, and this included how much they’d spend on coaching, which was lumped under “learning and development.” They usually had all of their vendors and partners decided early on, too. The end of the fiscal year was coming up, which means that if the pilots went well, we’d have a shot at taking a slice of their upcoming budget. The pressure was on.
3/ Sorry, I’m too busy
After the Japan business trip in January 2020, I stopped by Thailand for a couple of weeks to hang out and work remotely. It was supposed to be my “vacation.” My plan was to do a 10-day silent meditation retreat (I wrote about my first retreat here). However, I made the fateful mistake of canceling the retreat because I was “too busy.” Oh, man. Famous last words.
There’s a Zen proverb that goes something like, “If you’re too busy to meditate 20 minutes a day…You should meditate 1 hour a day.” That is to say, you really freakin’ need it. And I really needed it. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It’s very possible that the 10-day retreat could’ve given me some perspective on the hole I was digging for myself. Instead, I continued to dig deeper.
There are different types of people who get burnout. Psychologist Barry Farber lumps them into three groups: frenetic, under-challenged and worn out. I’ll dive into all of these in more detail a bit later, but I fit squarely in the “frenetic” type, which is classified by:
"Those who in response to frustration work increasingly harder"
“The frenetic type is a profile for tenacious and energetic persons, who cope with adversity with considerable enthusiasm and interest, doing all they can and giving all they are able to give. When they perceive that the results obtained do not correspond to the invested effort, they work with more determination to meet the goals they set initially…They seek good results without recognizing the negative aspects of their modus operandi and fantasize with the idea of accomplishing significant goals, placing themselves under growing pressure caused by their exaggerated need to obtain praise and distinction.” (source)
There were several such occasions where I began to prioritize my work to an obsessive, unhealthy degree. For example, my friend who let us stay at her apartment when we first moved had asked me out for dinner and drinks a handful of times. I turned her down and made almost zero effort to hang out with her…or anyone else. Even when my best friend came to visit us from Tokyo during Christmas, I took a bit of time off, but still felt pressured to work during the end of the holiday and ran off to a cafe a couple of times.
Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger is considered to be the O.G. who first recognized “burnout syndrome” as a thing. According to his 12-stage cycle of burnout, I fit somewhere around the “revision of values” phase at this point.
I was busting my balls and I definitely had “something to prove:” That I was going to build a startup and launch it to the moon. Friends, meditation, dancing and other forms of play were put on the back burner. Those values that were so important to me before were starting to change.
Here are the stages in more detail:
The model has been simplified since then and it’s now a 5-stage burnout model.
There was also a growing anger inside of me, which really surprised me because I’ve never considered myself an angry individual. This might coincide with stage #6, denial of emerging problems in the 12-stage cycle, or between Stage 2 (Stagnation) and Stage 3 (Frustration) in the 5-phase model.
The former CEO of Yahoo, Marisa Meyer, said that:
“Burnout stems from the build-up of resentment at having to give up what really matters.”
This rings true.
What was I resentful about? Why was I angry? Well, going back to the above stages of burnout, when you neglect your needs and start to revise your values, you are giving up something that you love to do. You’re putting yourself second and all of the things that you once cherished – from relationships to hobbies.
For me, a lot of it was about creativity. I had a deep creative spark and a passion for writing. This came out during my first job (I talk more about my story here in my friend’s interview) when I would pretend to go to meetings and instead spend an hour in a cafe writing answers on Quora. My love for writing was coming out, a purely intrinsic motivator, and when I quit my job to travel around Asia I spent a big chunk of that time writing blogs and books.
Now that I was solely focused on the business, I made very little time for writing. It’s not that I didn’t want to. I had the desire. But I found it hard to write about anything other than work, since I was using a different part of my brain for creative writing. Paul Graham talks about this in his famous essay, Maker vs. Manager Schedule.
“Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.”
As a startup founder running the show, I had no choice but to be on calls and had little time for “deep work.” In giving up my love of writing to do something that I was increasingly finding less enjoyable, I began to resent my situation. I even began to resent those around me who were creative, because they were doing something that I was craving, deep down.
Today I realize that the belief a founder or CEO has to be on a manager’s schedule wasn’t the only way to do it. If you are operating the business and managing lots of people, it might be inevitable. But in my case, I could have focused on the creative side of the business like writing and making content, and found another team mate or co-founder to handle the rest. I would, eventually, come to this realization but not until months after my first burnout episode.
To summarize, at this stage I was:
Pulling out of my own savings
Building a startup with a 100% remote team, a couple of freelancers and with myself as the only full-time person
Living in the Netherlands and trying to sell a half-baked product to traditional companies in Japan, a country where it’s almost impossible to business unless you’re there in person
Focusing almost 100% on my business and not attempting to have a social life at all in a new country
Slowly dying on the inside
And then about two months later, shit hit the fan.
To be continued…
Awesome writing Misha. Looking forward to the next piece.
I always wondered what happened to you after you left Japan. What a journey! I recently put aside my free time which I enjoyed going to the gym, swimming, etc. in favour of helping my son with his university studies. I’ve noticed symptoms you’ve mentioned, but at the same time, I rediscovered how much I like school work, 30 years after graduating. I wish we spoke early on in your venture. I would have been the first to warn you about starting in Japan. It’s a really tough market for outsiders. And btw, I made a similar mistake to the cost of $100K earlier in my career. I developed an PC-based service you could bet on Japanese baseball game outcomes! Crazy stuff … all history now.