#5 Burnout Better

I’ve been thinking even more about stress types after two different friends got nice buyout offers for their companies last month.

Each responded from stress, and both regretted it in hours. (They also both approved this)

A few years ago, Sam (not his name) bought a stable, cash-flowing regional monopoly(ish). It's the kind of “buy-out-the-boomers” story that would make Scott Galloway or Codie Sanchez feel like their ideas work. But Sam’s has slim margins and can’t legally expand.

Two weeks ago, he got an offer from one of those east coast PE firms where half the partners share a last name. The firm is in roll-up mode, and the offer was generous.

"Can you believe these idiots??” Sam emailed. “I told them piss off. LFG!"

It turns out they might have been idiots to offer so much.

Then, Erika. (None of these names are ever real.) I would describe her company as a fantastical machine that turns every dollar into 3, belching rainbow exhaust while it runs. 

Knowing her makes me feel lucky. She succeeds at everything. Barely three years in, it's obvious her $3-for-$1 rainbow farter is just warming up.

Yet the offer in her email had way less Dad's Money than whoever wrote Sam's. 

"I got an offer I think we'll negotiate," she texted. "I could use some beach time."

I blinked. When someone like Erika talks about a beach, they are experiencing burnout.

First, let’s talk about Sam. He’s a striver. The kind of guy who bags groceries in high school and runs or owns the store by college.

Strivers don’t rest. They drive. Bigger budget, better title, higher perch.

I always credit Paul Ollinger for coining the term, but it’s a common one now.  If you know someone who’s always chasing that next milestone (or you are that person), you know strivers. And the stress has a rhythm. I notice it in my clients as extreme anxiety about every 2 months. 

How does the striver stress cycle work for you, my driven friend?

Intense focus is easy for you. But eventually you worry that projects aren't moving fast enough. You push harder. The work succeeds, but with a cost to your friends and family time. You ignore them a tiny bit more, in a sprint to the next level when you’ll have more time off. You get that time, then get back to work, repeat.

Trust me: this is a treadmill without a kill switch. You've got to make your striver tendencies work better for you.  

The worse blindspot of strivers is they also aren't very good at seeing the targets which grow on their backs. 

Remember how you hated the valedictorian in high school? (Or you were the valedictorian.) Your smiling colleagues want to take you down. Especially if you have a stack-ranked perf cycle, but even your stakeholders and friends are human. Self-comparison and resentment are evolutionarily baked into our brains.

Caesar learned that the hard way. Et tu?

How to solve: First, communicate LESS. I know that’s weird for the comms guy to say, but really. Stop it. Say stuff only where you need to. Stop the podcasts, resist the roadshows, and cut back on your wide-distro emails. Definitely ignore LinkedIn.

If you don't make this shift, I have to warn you: a basic truth of power is the more of it you have, the strongest weapon that can be used against you is your own words. So say something, but say way less.

Next, take that time and energy to build systems for communicating MORE to your friends and family. Do it like a job you get rated on. Put it in your calendar, set your EA on it, develop a system.  You wont be the only one happier you did it.

Sam’s mistake? His wife could have told him 10 bigger and better things to strive for with pocketfuls of PE Bux. But he had no habit of asking her, and she had no ambient context to give fast (and right) advice as the one who knows him best.

A striver growing 3% a year isn’t. It took him 4 hours to realize the error.

And now, the kind of stress for people who have no stress: burnout.

If you’re the type prone to burnout, your leadership style has probably been called “unflappable.” You're not fazed by new challenges, responsibility at work or home. Balance amidst chaos is easy.

Everything is fine for you until suddenly, it isn’t. Something has ruined your chill.

Burnout is also a cyclical stress, because you steadily accumulate responsibility, which earns you more of it.  That doesn't really bother you, then one day it does. For a camel, this straw will break its back. For you, the straw creates intense mental exhaustion. Burnout that ranges from mild to existential.

One thing I’ve noticed is leaders with high complexity-tolerance seem to permit a lot more transparency in their org and decision-making. It makes sense this also increases the number of totally insane things that can go wrong for you.

When you hit that exhaustion point it’s true the beach sounds nice, but it’s not in your DNA. You’d be the head lifeguard before you even unpacked the snacks.  

Here's how I've seen good leaders solve the burnout problem.

First, they tend to already be good at delegating. They have good systems in place for giving and receiving information from their teams. This is why it's so easy to pile on more responsibility–their system can handle the load. 

What they forget are first principles.

A lot of good delegation runs on “what” and “how” forms of information. Plus, grounded leaders tend to be so reasonable in their own thinking that their biggest blindspot is overlooking the need to communicate more of the "WHY."  The reasoning.

Backing up into first principles communication removes a lot of the mental load from your system.  Especially if you have already been a strong delegator. This will feel inefficient at first, talking about ideas and missions when all you need is code. But it’s not, I promise. Communicate more why more often.

The result is teams will start to take on higher-order decision-making than you thought they would, and you can keep expanding your system.

In Erika’s case, she thought over dinner and declined to sign. First principle: passion for the product will grow the company best. She realized her team should never have even worked on a counteroffer. It was all wasted energy.

Plus, science says even 10 days at the beach is around 8 too many.

One thing I am sure of is this: for all the burnout coaches, meditations, and retreats—the only real solution I have ever seen to extreme burnout for founders has always been the hard work to identify the one pernicious and hidden problem that's overloading your system, and eliminate it.

Then, invest your comms into defining those problems before they get to you. The whole world becomes your beach.

I hope I can pour you a piña colada there soon.

-Jesse

PS: What’s irking you right now? (FrieNDA applies)

PSS: One more thing about the two cases above: I’m kind of amazed by the other side of these transactions. Each buyer did a crap job predicting the psyche of who they were dealing with. Some of the smartest dealmakers seem to get biased by their own pre-work on numbers. Before they even engage the seller, it’s all moved to the wrong part of their brains.

Sam’s buyers could have used a lot better ways to paint a vision for him than the old “second bite at the apple” rollups love. And Erika’s suitors should have known burnout types won’t stay in their stress response for as long as deals take to close.

I’ve never understood why many people will hire a comms firm to work on their pitch decks then bankers to work on their offers. The exception (and usually winners)? Investors whose content strategies target future investments over future LP’s.

PSSS: Share this newsletter! I need that dopamine hit from my Beehiiv metrics. And, please share only with good people. My pre-1000 OG’s will have benefits as this grows.

Finally, as usual, thanks for joining. It’s weird to write in my own name but I’m having more fun every week.

Jesse