Restarting After Burnout | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | Oh, well, okay, let's do one more.

00:00:03.400 | All right.

00:00:04.400 | Final question is from Amy.

00:00:07.360 | She asked, how can I reset my ambitions after burning out?

00:00:12.240 | She's talking about how she's overwhelmed with her career, and she's trying to improve

00:00:16.300 | at that and she's fresh off of burnout and is lost on where to start.

00:00:22.040 | It's a good question, because I don't think we, we don't get into this enough.

00:00:27.600 | Burnout and the sources of burnout, we don't get into that enough when we talk about optimistic,

00:00:33.080 | forward-looking discussions of productivity and planning, organization, et cetera.

00:00:36.640 | So let's, let's be clear here.

00:00:40.200 | You need to do, you know, your lifestyle-centric career planning.

00:00:42.520 | That's the theme of this episode.

00:00:44.520 | Lifestyle-centric career planning is a great way.

00:00:46.400 | It's a theme of block two, at least.

00:00:48.480 | Know your vision, work backwards to figure out what to do with your career.

00:00:51.960 | Here's the key.

00:00:54.140 | Keep the sources of your burnout in mind when you construct that vision.

00:00:58.360 | It should be your vision of an ideal life should keep in mind the things that really

00:01:03.600 | tax you, the things that tend to accumulate and lead to burnout.

00:01:07.360 | Your ideal life should be a life in which you're free from burnout.

00:01:10.740 | That has to be part of the vision.

00:01:13.520 | I think too often what people do is they invalidate the burnout and the things that lead to burnout.

00:01:18.920 | Like that's malformed and successful people don't have that.

00:01:24.220 | And so my vision of what I'm trying to do with my life has to be one that ignores that.

00:01:28.940 | And it might be a vision that has all of the stressors, all of the anxiety triggers, all

00:01:33.780 | of the things that really don't match well with you and lead to burnout in it.

00:01:37.500 | And that's not going to work.

00:01:38.500 | So build an ideal vision of a life should be a life without burnout, which means the

00:01:42.620 | things that cause the burnout should be largely absent from it.

00:01:46.540 | I do this.

00:01:48.540 | I do this with my own planning, my vision with which I think about my life because my

00:01:56.580 | body has this really clear, I talk about this a bunch on the show.

00:02:00.380 | It has this really clear feedback mechanism on don't like where you're going, the workload,

00:02:06.140 | the type of work and it's insomnia.

00:02:09.580 | I have trouble sleeping when things get out of whack.

00:02:14.420 | That feedback mechanism, and that's my burnout.

00:02:17.180 | And that feedback mechanism has a huge impact on the vision of my life that I build.

00:02:21.620 | I steer away from visions, especially the professional part of my life that are getting

00:02:28.580 | after it busy where it's a startup and it's like, let's go and we're going to just get

00:02:35.380 | after it and have all these different things going on and calls and meetings and we're

00:02:39.300 | going to move and we're going to build this thing big and make $20 million off of it.

00:02:43.300 | I have to steer away from that because if I have too much going on and then I might

00:02:48.380 | start getting insomnia, it'd be very hard to keep up those hard schedules.

00:02:51.300 | It's a governor.

00:02:52.300 | So my vision doesn't involve that.

00:02:53.460 | Think about the visions that you see playing out of my own life.

00:02:56.340 | They're all slow productivity related.

00:02:59.140 | It's all based on things that no particular single day matters.

00:03:04.340 | What matters is that over time, you're coming back again and again to work on this book.

00:03:09.340 | Over time, you're thinking deep thoughts.

00:03:11.140 | Hey, tomorrow, if you're tired, who cares?

00:03:13.580 | But this month, you spent a lot of days thinking about this paper.

00:03:16.260 | You spent a lot of days working on this book.

00:03:17.820 | So I've constructed ideal vision that keeps explicitly in mind the specific things that

00:03:22.800 | lead to my sources of burnout, my particular definition of burnout.

00:03:27.460 | I think that's really important.

00:03:30.420 | If you get drained when you're not feeding off other people, you're very social, your

00:03:35.180 | family and friends are important, you better have a vision of your life in which you're

00:03:39.180 | not working 80 hours a week.

00:03:41.020 | It's got to be a vision of your life where you live near family, where you spend a lot

00:03:44.300 | of time with community and friends.

00:03:45.900 | I'm going to give a specific example here.

00:03:48.980 | There's a writer whose book I read, and I feel bad because I forgot the name of it.

00:03:54.380 | I think it's Donald Miller is his name.

00:03:56.620 | He had a self-help advice book.

00:03:58.900 | But anyways, the thing that I remember from that book is they bought a bunch of land outside

00:04:04.740 | of Nashville and built it.

00:04:07.340 | They wanted to be like a retreat center and a place where writers and musicians and artists

00:04:10.820 | they know could always be coming through and having retreats and working.

00:04:15.980 | They could be outside a lot, work on the land a lot, have a lot of people they found really

00:04:19.620 | interesting there.

00:04:20.620 | It was a vision of success for this person in the world of business that really focused

00:04:25.740 | on what he needed.

00:04:28.220 | Probably this would be someone where 90 hours in their office at McKinsey, where you're

00:04:33.820 | not seeing anybody and you're just cut off and you and your spreadsheet would be immiserating.

00:04:39.580 | Your vision is what I'm trying to say here, has to keep your sources of burnout in mind

00:04:43.980 | because your vision needs to be one in which burnout is infrequent and unexpected when

00:04:49.700 | it does happen.

00:04:50.700 | That's what I'm saying.

00:04:51.700 | I mean, so update your vision and it might require radical change.

00:04:55.860 | If the source of your burnout is going to be unavoidable, you're in an academic department

00:05:01.980 | where there's acrimony through the roof and it just stresses you out and you can't get

00:05:05.900 | more than a semester or two without just it wearing you down, you might have to do something

00:05:10.460 | radically different.

00:05:11.640 | You need a vision of your life in which that doesn't happen.

00:05:16.980 | I want to validate your burnout and say, use that in your planning.

00:05:19.180 | [MUSIC]

Restarting After Burnout | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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