Why I got totally burnt out (part 1)
A few lessons in building a startup and wrecking my brain
1/ A perfect storm
I had severe burnout two and a half years ago and spent two months on the couch practically brain dead, wondering what the hell happened. I couldn't look at a computer and couldn't even pick up a book. All I could muster to do was eat, go for walks, and play with my dog.
My burnout was caused by several factors: working hard on something/in a role I didn’t enjoy, the lack of positive feedback loops, poor business decisions, emotional dishonesty, plain bad luck, and the lack of a support network living in a new country. Throw in the bad timing of a global pandemic (is there ever good timing though?), and I got a perfect storm that left me shattered.
The experience, while painful, certainly helped me reinvent myself in more than one way. I became more dedicated to meditation, I pivoted my startup, I got a therapist, I started working with a functional medicine doctor, and I became more true and honest to myself and those around me.
As they say, “sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a breakthrough”…But I seriously hated that quote the first time I heard it.
These lessons and my personal growth did come from the ashes of my burnout experience. True. At the same time, the experience absolutely sucked, and I would never wish anyone to fall into the same pit. I certainly wouldn’t want to relive it again. It took a very long time to recover mentally and emotionally, and my body is still paying the consequences (fucked up hormones and all that which I’ll get into). When burnout happens, it can happen again a lot more easily, and I've had one more big burnout episode and a couple more “mini burnouts” since then.
I sometimes wonder if I could have gotten a "burnout lite" experience without all the shitty repercussions like headaches and low testosterone and still got the life lessons. But perhaps I have to accept that these things come as a package. You have to have a really terrible lived experience to reap the fruits of wisdom; or at least, be scared shitless of it happening again so as to tread very carefully. In other words, having regrets ain't so bad. They teach you not to do stupid things again.
There are a few ways to test whether or not you're seriously heading towards a dead end, and in sharing my story perhaps you can notice some of these warning signs for yourself. This first part is centered around my business and what went wrong there, and then in future posts I’ll explore my diet, habits, and emotions and how that contributed to my burnout.
2/ Hints of dishonesty
As a first time startup founder, I naturally fell into building my business for two very bad reasons:1
Startups look like fun.
I will make lots of money.
This was the first problem. These goals weren’t original ideas and they weren’t intrinsic desires. They were stories I heard about other people’s paths that I decided to copy, without stopping to really consider whether that’s what I wanted. They were mimetic desires.
“...Most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.”
I didn’t start the business by listening to my heart in the same way I’d done with other things in my life. Like, when I moved to Japan I felt obsessively drawn to it, and didn’t care how I got there, I just had to be in Japan. Or when I wrote my first book — it felt like it needed to be done, and the process of writing was inherently enjoyable.
On the other hand, this decision to launch a business was almost 100% a mental, logical decision; it began with the expectation that money would be made and what I was doing wasn’t actually important, but rather the “act of starting the business” was all I needed to do. That’s the decision I made, and it began to unfold painfully and unnaturally.
So, there are different types of businesses you can build. You could, for instance, build a small business and focus on making it financially profitable and sustainable from the start. You could do this while you have a full-time job to hedge your risk, which isn’t a bad idea.
Instead, I chose to go all in and play the “Startup Game,” where I would purposefully postpone focusing on profits to focus on growth. This would require me to hire developers, build a product, and raise money as fast as I could. Eventually, I would sell the business for a gazillion dollars.
This is great and all, except for that pesky 90% failure rate. Fortunately, I hustle harder than most people, so the rules don’t apply to me and I’m definitely in that winning 10% — even though I had just moved to a new country where I had zero connections and friends. I could always read Paul Graham’s legendary articles every day to keep me inspired (although I hardly followed his advice).
I got to work and started piecing together a product, but had no idea what I was doing. I don’t have a technical background. I wasted a bunch of money on freelancers and ended up with a botched web app that didn’t work.
Most MVPs (minimum viable products) are pretty lame and ours was no exception. The point was not to make it pretty, but to have something to show to customers and investors to test our use case. You’re not going for perfect.
My enthusiasm was contagious, which is important for a startup founder. But there were already hints of emotional dishonesty.
In the movie American Beauty there’s a great quote:
I was telling myself reality was different than it really was. “We just launched our MVP” — when in reality the thing didn’t even work. I had this small tendency to say things were done when they actually weren’t, and in this case with large consequences. A simpler example of this would be half-assing something, crossing it off on my to do list and considering it “done.”
The only person I was fooling was myself.
I was also telling myself that I was feeling different than I really was. I was a bit lonely and lost — but no, “I’m just figuring it out!” This would have been a good time to join an Accelerator program, seek out a mentor, or a more experienced cofounder and CEO to help out.
You can think of former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Homes at the very end of the spectrum: so far removed from reality that it seems they are pathologically lying about everything. And maybe Jim Carrey from Liar Liar at the other end — total honesty with himself and others to the point where it’s inappropriate. I was somewhere up there towards Homes — never as bad as to blatantly lie to all of my customers and investors — but still bending the truth, mostly to myself.
The problem wasn’t that the first version of the product sucked, it’s that:
1) It took me two months before I admitted to myself that I needed help, which is when I sought out a CTO advisor to help me on the technical side of things. There was a stubborn attitude that I could figure it out all on my own. Stubbornness is a trait of a good founder, I once heard, but probably not in this context of not asking for help.
I had previously written three books in the last year, and knew what it meant to be “productive.” I made the assumption that my creative ability as a writer directly translated to my ability to hustle as an entrepreneur. But a book is not a startup. Writing is solitary and startups involve dealing with other people and tons of uncertainty. This failure to admit I needed help (or, at least, taking too long to admit it) would continue to be a theme.
2) While I had autonomy, my actual role was unclear, which made it challenging to set boundaries. There were already parts of the business I didn’t enjoy; in fact, that I hated. For example, I didn’t like managing people. I did not like customer service and constantly putting out fires. I did not like talking to engineers and figuring out product and technical issues. I didn’t like the feeling of constantly having to reply to dozens of emails from our vendors, customers, and my team.
Eventually, I would learn how to delegate and operationalize the business, but for many, many months I took it all on my own and ignored the stress that was accumulating from doing things I didn’t enjoy. You can argue that this is necessary for a startup founder at this early stage. But there’s a threshold, and I put it off for far too long. In combination with my emotional dishonesty this created a situation where I was starting to grind it out on things that I didn’t really want to be doing.
3/ How it feels to lose everyday
I tried not to take it too seriously and looked at the whole startup thing as a game. I just had to figure out the right moves for each player and we’d win. This lightened the pressure a bit, but not by much.
We had to burn money in order to grow, and I had to constantly be out trying to raise money. It took about 5 months to raise $300k. By design, since we were playing the Startup Game, we weren’t trying to become profitable in the short term, which is why we had to fundraise to continue growth.
Early on in the journey I came across a report by CB Insights about the reasons startups fail. They reviewed 432 startups to nail down what happened. This was pretty informative and I took it to heart. Some of the top reasons:
Being “burned out” is at the very bottom of the list. I had nothing to be worried about. Most startups die because they run out of money or because there isn’t a real need for their product or because they’re crushed by a competitor. I’d best focus on those top 3 reasons.
Unfortunately, little infographics are deceiving. First of all, this was a pre-COVID analysis of a few hundred startups. Way before the burnout epidemic and the mental health impact of being locked in with minimal social interaction. This study was a small sample size that didn’t account in any way for my personal emotional background and history.
As I hammered away at the business, the alarm bells were already starting to ring. Albeit very faintly. They were more like creeping up on me. Like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled alive in the pot.
There was something that didn’t feel good about seeing our bank account balance decrease every month. For every dollar we spent, we were losing two. Psychologically, it felt like I was losing every single day. I drastically underestimated how bad this would actually feel. It’s like trying to fill a pot that was constantly leaking. Every attempt to fill it was futile. A losing-game.
One study found that this feeling of loss is prevalent in people who experience burnout.
“Individuals feel burned out when they perceive a continuous net loss, which cannot be replenished, of physical, emotional, or cognitive energy that they possess. This feeling of ongoing net loss of any combination of individuals’ physical vigorousness, emotional robustness, and cognitive agility represents an emotional response to the experienced stresses. The net loss, in turn, cannot be compensated for by expanding other resources, or borrowing, or gaining additional resources by investing extant ones.”
This makes sense to me. Even when we DID raise money and we had cash in the bank, the feeling of “everything is going to be okay” was momentary. It was gone in a flash. I wrote about that here. Almost immediately after we raised money, that sense of dread came back up. No amount of expanding my resources (adding more money or people) made me feel better.
Shit, is this how running a startup is supposed to feel?
Even though I was confident we could raise more money, it was like groundhog day. Day after day, week after week. And I knew it was going to be that way because, remember, that’s how this whole game works. You had to burn money to grow. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck a fucking duck.
I denied this feeling and used the simple justification: it will get better once we raise again. We just needed more money (even though I had just raised!). Or we just have to find the right marketing channel, find the right investors, and hire the right people. Elon Musk talks about startup life being like “eating glass and staring into the abyss.” I was starting to see what he meant.
And then after one particularly bad month, it hit me:
I was playing a game I didn’t want to play. I wanted to see our bank account balance going up, not down. I didn’t want to raise money or have to answer to any investor. I wanted to work on a business that wasn’t purely online, but that had a tangible, physical aspect to it.
I was questioning everything. But by the time I realized all of this, it was too late: money was already raised, expectations were set, and my emotional and mental health was moving towards oblivion.
To be continued…
Actually, if I’m being totally honest, this was not my first business although it was my first startup. I had previously started a small company in Tokyo and had subsequently shut it down in order to travel around Asia. That’s what I tell myself, although when I look back, there were echoes of what happened in my second business: I didn’t enjoy aspects of it, I was afraid to ask for help and I wasn’t great at setting boundaries. I listened to my gut the first time around but somehow didn’t really take the lesson to heart.
It is interesting that so many of the negative experiences you describe here link back to being mimetic. That's a word I actually didn't know, very cool! As you investigate these experiences, are there specific moments that link back to the disconnection from your intuition? Bearing in mind that so much of what we see in start-up's is exactly the opposite of what you are posting here. Don't be too hard on yourself, this is epic!