Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Ran joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com, Will Schroeder. Well, today we're gonna talk about something that is not a maybe, it's not an if, it's a when, and that's burnout, right? Sometimes the silent co-founder in the relationship of the startup and definitely part of the path, I think, for pretty much everybody. So let's talk about like why it happens. Does it matter, right? Should we pay any attention to it? What what do we need to do about this, this beast?
Wil Schroter: Yeah, you, you said it's not if it's a matter of when, and I, I think there's another side of it. It's how often. For a lot of founders, they associate burnout as like the end of the story, like the like, OK, and then I was burnt out and then I went to do something else, and look, that's possible, right? It it is possible to have a a terminal burnout, right? But I think what we'll talk about here is that no, burnouts going down. Happen, right? It's tough. It's going to happen. Here's how you need to diagnose it. Here's what you need to do to treat it, and here's how you have to plan to get past it, because that's the key. I would say in my career, over 30+ years, I've had 4 seminal burnouts, seminal burnouts where I was just like, I gave everything I had. And I couldn't have one more step in the marathon. I had nothing left. And also when I look back at those, this was fascinating, because I did a little bit of chronology and and when those things happen, right, the last time that happened to me, like a like a just like a hardcore burnout was right before I started uh Startups.com, right, which is a pretty long time ago actually, you know, it was 15 years ago, but like, you're getting better at this. Yeah. I've been running 5 companies at the same time, which guarantees burnout, and I was so fried, and I was like, I never want to do this again, that doesn't mean starting a company. It meant like, I never want to be this fried again. I learned about pacing myself, which I'm still not great at, but I, you know, uh I learned about pacing myself. But when I look back to my first burnout, when I was just like, basically had nothing left, I was 19 years old, I'd just come off a 6 month bout of mono. I was in bed for 3.5 months, Ryan, at the time, figure I'm, I'm 19 years old, I'm in college at the time, I think I went into mono weighing like 160 pounds. I came out of mono weighing 130 pounds. Wow. Can you imagine
Ryan Rutan: that? That's not exactly a healthy fighting weight for you,
Wil Schroter: bud. Oh my God, I, I, I'm a buck 90 now, just like put it in perspective, right? I mean, it literally drained the life out of me. I couldn't eat, I couldn't you know, whatever. And I'm saying that to say, like, that is the most physical burnout you could have, like, everything in your body is gone, but when I came back from it, when I, you know, recharged and renewed, that's when I, you know, started my first company. It was amazing that those reset moments had such an incredible rubber band effect for me. And I think, you know, we'll talk about this as we go, but if you look at famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, like Musk, etc. you know build these empires, same thing, they all had this like rubber band from it. So I think we'll talk about, you know, what burnout means and and how to diagnose it and everything, but we'll also talk about the value of getting past it.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, and I think that's something that does get overlooked, right, which is one that you can get past it, that it isn't, it isn't terminal. I'm burnt out, right, and it's a permanent state, right? It's not, it's not, it doesn't have to be, it could be. It probably isn't a permanent state, but it can lead to permanent consequences for your startup, and I think that's where we have to be, be very careful. There's something else that's interesting, and you said, you know, as as physically drained or as physically burned out as you can possibly be, um, mean, like the, the, the mono period. But there's something else that was pretty interesting as I've gone back and thought about some of my periods, my burnout wasn't always physical exhaustion. There were times where I still had plenty of energy, the burnout was something different, and it was and it was, it was just like, I had the energy and I was doing this stuff, and I was still throwing it at work at it, and I just, it was almost as if like, just didn't care whether it whether it happened or not, right? It was like, I'm there, I'm gonna keep doing this because I have to, but I actually didn't really care, right like periods where that happened for one reason or another. And, and that was really tough. And so I think that there's there's another side of burnout where you can still have plenty. I had plenty of physical energy, right? I just did not have emotional energy for what was going on in the startup at that point, and that was tough, and it was, it was interesting, and I'm I'm sure I have plenty to say about this, but it was leading up to a period where then that first company was acquired. Yeah. And I'm very thankful that I came out of that before we entered into those negotiations, because had I not, I think that would have gone like way, way differently. If I had still been in like burnout mode and somebody walked up and was like, I got a fiver, you want out of this thing I'd be like, hell yeah. In fact, you can keep that 5 high five, that's all I need. I'm
Wil Schroter: out. Well, OK, so stick with that though, cause you're talking about this here. Hidden cost of burnout, OK? For a lot of us, like, here's the cadence that we're used to. We work really hard at a startup and over some period of time, 57, 10 years, we become burnt out. Now, of course you are because you are a professional athlete in the startup sense of the word, being on, on the court and we're easy, we're gonna beat the hell sports analogies because they're so apropos here, but you're on the court nonstop, OK? Even LeBron James has to come off the court at some point, right? But, but we don't realize it is us staying on the court is the worst thing for our startup, because LeBron James in the 4th quarter, right? Exhausted as hell and everybody running past him is an impediment to the success of that team.
Ryan Rutan: You're playing exhausted, you're playing, you're you're playing frustrated, you're, you got 4 fouls, right? Like it's just everything is against you at that point.
Wil Schroter: What ends up happening is we end up getting gassed, cashed out at a time when maybe the startup needs us most. And so we're I think you and I tend to see this, is with founders that are in the, they're like series B, C, and D and beyond venture capital routes where they have been in this mix for like 57, 10 years, which in regular employment years isn't that many years in startup years. Each one of those is like a decade of of taking off your life. But the second thing is. They're at a point where the most exciting things are happening to their startup, right? Like the startup technically needs them the most, and they're at a point where they're the most gassed again, they're LeBron James in the 4th quarter, they can barely run at a time where they're trying to win a championship. That's a problem.
Ryan Rutan: Yep. And I think this is another one, it's like there, there can be a huge disparity between like kind of the state of the startup and the state of the founder. Right? They may, they may, so they've gone from being inside the rocket ship to being strapped to the front of it, right? It's a much less comfortable ride at that point, and it's like it may still be on the trajectory. It's still doing all the things it needs to do. The founder is just struggling because it was their emotional energy, their physical energy, their everything. They got it to that point. Now it may be in some version of very few times or startups on cruise control, but like it may be moving pretty well on its own. And now the founders just gas and just beat and burnt. I think that can actually make it feel worse. I think that's where the the founder goes like, well, I feel guilty feeling bad. I feel guilty admitting that I feel
Wil Schroter: great way to put it, man. The guilt of indifference, the guilt of indifference, exactly, right, where I, I show up at work and I'm not engaged, I'm not disengaged, I'm indifferent, right? And so like I'm here, but I'm just pushing papers, so to speak, and all of a sudden. Uh, the startup could be at any one of a few different inflection points. The startup could be at the point where it's about to take off, it could be at the point where it's about to tank. In both cases, we are very much needed at the wheel. Yes, but we're burned out, and I don't want to burn out to sound like it's some version of weakness anymore than like running a marathon. You are going to tire out. You just can't run forever.
Ryan Rutan: I'd say actually flip that on its head for a minute, man, it's the opposite of weakness. It's overexertion in a lot of cases in different ways, right? You've overexerted yourself. You have proven exactly how strong you were to your own detriment, right? There is a cost to physicality, to emotionality, to mentality, right? These things all have bills that come due at some point and burnout is when all those bills come due at the same damn. Time, often at the worst time. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: yeah, agreed. And when we think about, hey, I'm burnt out, again, we're often thinking about let me get out of this. Let me hit the eject button. Let me stop doing startup because startup caused burnout. Ergo, in order for me to get rid of burnout, I have to stop doing startup. There's some truth to that, but it's, it's a vast oversimplification. One of the things that I think folks don't oversimplification as well. Great way to put it, great way to put it. One of the things I think that that folks miss is, hey, I need to come off the court for a second, OK? But that doesn't mean the startup has to change, right? The startup has a trajectory, it has a life, and maybe things aren't going well. OK, so the other side of it, things aren't going well, maybe that's all the reason more that I need to come off the court, right, which is hard to do when startup's not doing well, but what I'm saying all the reason more that I need to take this seriously, because maybe my startup is going to go on to become a great company. But I'm in the wrong position at this very moment to do something about it. And I think that is a very difficult thing for folks to assess, particularly internally.
Ryan Rutan: I think that even if a founder is self-aware enough to see that, I think it's extremely difficult to act on, because to your point, If your startup's about to take off and everybody can kind of see there, you feel that way, right? It's hard to tell when that's gonna happen, but you feel that way, or it's about to tank or it's already starting to tank, something's coming unhinged, even if it's the right decision, and even if you're self-aware enough, which that can be a challenge in and of itself because you might be feeling awful. But you may not be associating it with burnout, and you may not be willing to admit that because why? You're too busy looking at how to keep the bolts screwed into this thing, or, hey, we're about to take off and this thing's about to go, you know, ballistic. You need to make sure it's pointed in the right direction before it does that. That's a really hard time to say to anybody else, even if you can say it to yourself, even if you're self-aware enough as a founder to go like, I'm in that spot where I need to do something about it. Man, I, I just, I don't see enough founders just coming up with that idea themselves and going like, I need to do something about this.
Wil Schroter: I hear it almost never, and I'm pointing to myself as much as anyone else. I have had in my life, and you've witnessed this, a very bad habit of only running till failure, right? Like just like, I have no idea what a, like a preemptive vacation or rest to prevent burnout, or prevent getting sick for for a very long time. My entire routine, and I'm not bragging about this, this is the point of how bad it was, I would just run until I got sick over and over and over again. Every quarter, I would get sick, I would get a sinus infection, especially when I was traveling a lot, and I'd always be out for like a couple weeks.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, you're running the immune system down, running the energy levels down, you know, not, not getting enough physical activity, not getting enough sleep, not getting enough anything, and all of a sudden the body is like, hey, Jacko, I got something for you. I think you were you nailed it, man. I think you, you literally had like a Quarterly mini burnout episode that was usually related to some physical illness that your body was blessed you with the point.
Wil Schroter: When we look back at it, like, man, how could you not see that? But I'm telling you at at the time it it doesn't feel that unusual, and, and I'd conditioned myself to operate like that. Then years ago, I remember coming to you guys as a team and saying, hey, uh, this is a little unusual for me, but I'm gonna take the month of December off, uh, the whole month, and I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. I'm just, I just know that I'm so fried and I don't like the fact that I don't like how I'm operating. Like I, I don't like, you know, my bill. To score points, so to speak, and I did that. When
Ryan Rutan: you told us, I just immediately went to like the minute you told me that, I went to GameSpot and I was like, what's releasing? Like what is this is a new SI coming out? Like what, what is, what is happening right? Is there a new fallout? Like what is Will doing with this month? Like where, where is it gonna go? because you didn't have the house project at that point. You didn't have some of the things that you have there keeping you busy now.
Wil Schroter: I had no idea, but you know, what happened was I took that time off, which is a luxury. It's, it's a luxury to be able to say to the team, hey, I'm gonna go do something. And have nothing break while you're gone.
Ryan Rutan: Yes and no. I want to push back on the luxury piece of it because I think there was also some necessity to it. And, and we certainly saw some things. So if we go to the the other side of that, like when we look at then what came out of that, there was a much better version of you that came back after that month.
Wil Schroter: That's what blew me away. And I started to realize, and I, and I say this in case some folks that are listening have the same pattern, right now as we're recording this, we're heading into almost a Q4 of 2025. That's not possible. I have learned that by the time I get to Q4, I've typically run myself toward exhaustion, and again, I, this is me publicly saying I'm well aware of what's happening, right? I'm just not great at managing it, and I know that over the next couple of months, my productivity, my output, everything is about to plummet. Not because I wanted it to be like, you talked about this a moment ago, my energy level hasn't necessarily changed, but my output, my mental ability to be in the zone because I've pushed and pushed and pushed.
Ryan Rutan: You're just, you're entering, you're literally entering that and we back to the sports, you're in the 4th quarter now, and you haven't been out yet. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: quite literally in the 4th quarter. Uh, and, and every single time this happens, I'm like, OK, now I know that I've got this like baked in respite that I do every year, you know, where I, I take December off. The funny thing, you can attest to this. I usually work more in December than than I do rest of the year, just not on startups.com stuff.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I, I have a feeling this year in particular, given with the stage of the house project and the the plans coming up, this will be a December to Remember, but it is not going to be a restful one. I'm actually, I might start some kind of an office pool around what you look like in January, like in terms of like where you're like,
Wil Schroter: I'll be skintier, that's for sure.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Will's doing all of his meetings horizontal for January and uh just kind of roll with it. It's it's cool.
Wil Schroter: I'm, um, right now, I just give a kind of a moment in time, a bit of a time stamp. Right now I'm working 14 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, uh, you know, for folks listening, I'm in the process of building a house. I'm an obsessive carpenter, so I'm actually building a house. I'm not just like watching someone else build it out there doing stuff. Um, but I also have my, my full-time responsibilities here, which I love. Uh, frankly, I was thinking about this the other day. My responsibilities here are a break. Like, I cannot wait to come back to my job here because my back doesn't hurt, my neck doesn't hurt. Every part of my body doesn't hurt.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I can attest this, man, you are, you are, I, I am 6 hours ahead of you, uh, in Madrid, and you are. Living on both my time zone and your time zone at this point, like you were, you were working both time zones
Wil Schroter: and I love it, to be honest, I, I love it. It's, it's hard, but I absolutely love it and I'm doing it because I want to do it. However, there is a cost to it. There, there's an actual cost to. I, I can only run at this pace for so long on the weekends because I have no, I can just focus on being physical, I'm burning an average of 4000 calories a day with 20,000 steps a day and you're, you're my 7 year old, yeah. So I don't know, on a Wednesday, and that's just nonstop labor all day long. I never take breaks, whatever, and I say this to say. I'm well aware that this level of, you know, mental, physical, emotional effort has a burnout factor. There ain't no way I'm gonna be able to maintain this, uh, and I'm no spring chicken, so it's like I've got unlimited energy, right? So, so I have to realize, let's look at this. I have to realize that I'm actively injuring myself. I'm actively burning myself out and I'm about to create an injury, and I don't think a lot of folks. See burnout as the injury that it is, you know what I mean? No,
Ryan Rutan: they don't, they don't treat it as something acute and necessary and is in necessitously treated, right? It has to have a treatment, right? There has to be something. But let's, let's talk about burnout as the injury, right? I think part of the reason that it's hard to see burnout as an injury, unlike a lot of other injuries, it, it doesn't like, I think you've you've analogized to some things like, you know, breaking your ankle or or tearing your ACL. Yes. But it tends not to come on that suddenly, right? It's hard to see. I, if I'm, if I'm on a soccer field and I tear my ACL, it's not like maybe something happened or maybe something didn't, like, it's pretty obvious. I'm, I'm in a heap on the ground and I'm I'm waiting to be carted off the field. It's more like an overuse injury, right? It's like tendinitis, it builds up, it starts to bother you a little bit, it starts to have some level of impact, and then it gets to the point where like the the really acute symptoms set in, and it's, it's more obvious that it's an injury, but I think because it sneaks up on us a little bit. Although I'd be interested, did you ever have any periods where you went from like 0 to burnt out really quickly?
Wil Schroter: No, but you know what I did do every time, right? I I always blamed my startup or my work for the injury. Let let me build on that for a second cause I, I think it's it, it ties into a lot of what we're gonna talk about, which is, I would be like, oh, I'm burnt out, so I need to exit my startup and go do something else. I basically said that it's not me causing the injury. It's the startup environment that's causing the industry or the injury, and while that, obviously there's correlation. I think the part that we have a hard time decoupling is that I can work at the same startup and get injured and recovered, injured and recovered, injured and recovered, and the startup remains the same. He's a better way to say it. There's not a version where I go to work for a startup and I never get injured. I'm just always just unlimited energy. It happens,
Ryan Rutan: and that's what we said, it's not if it's when. And I think that's part of where that misplaced correlation comes in, right? It's kind of like saying, well, if they just didn't make stupid soccer fields, I could never get a soccer related injury, right? So I just have to never go on a soccer field, implying that I will never get injured in any other ways. I'll just go back to doing jiu-jitsu full time instead of soccer. That'll keep me safe, right? Then I won't get injured, right? So I, yeah, there's there's a huge fallacy there and I get it, like, and look, it's not that it's not causal, right? Yes. Because you were doing the things you did in the context of the startup, you burnt out. Yes, yes, that is, it is there. Had you not had that, you, you might not have, or you might have, right? It's not as if startups have, you know, some sort of exclusive license on, on burnout. I know plenty of people who burn out in medicine, corporate world, academia, right? You can do it anywhere, right? I, I think that the, yeah, the field of play isn't the challenge here, it's how we treat it and the fact that we don't treat some of those early symptoms. So the ACL one is a good one. Right, cause I know a lot of people who've had, you know, the, the fully knock on, knock on wood, has not happened to me, but there were usually things leading up to that, right? There were other preliminary soreness, light injuries, other stuff that led up to the the full blowout, and I think it's the same in my case, that's why I was asking you if you'd ever had kind of like the, the instantaneous blowout. In my case, and look, I was never particularly good at seeing it coming, or or counting up the accumulations and going, oh, we're getting near to that point where the injury happens or where I recognize it. But in hindsight, it was always clearly able to go back and see like, 04 months ago when this happened, right? Right when that happened. I'll give you the the more recent example for me, and this, I'm gonna, I'm gonna couch this one under like partial burnout. I didn't fully go there and I, I think I did catch this one a little bit, a little bit early. This one was a great example of that second category, the emotional burnout for me. I was not physically burnt out at all. This goes back 2 years now, and I think we've talked about this before on the podcast, but I was doing a ton of office hours a week. I had 40 available office hour slots of 15 minutes each. So, you know, it could have been up to 10 hours plus. It's a lot of office hours, it's a lot of gear changes, and man, if you go back in time, you remember this period. This was not a great time for startup companies. Right, the the funding had taken a downturn, layoffs were happening, people had stopped buying, fear in the economy was out there. And so I was talking to founders who, by and large, were all burnt out themselves. They were burnt out, they were scared. It was just dragging on everybody. And a couple months into it, I was just like, I started feeling really awful. I just like I was sad. I was like starting to get push. It was just weighing me down. I realized I was like, oh God, it's because I'm I'm carrying water for all these other founders. And I had to figure out something to do. And so that's what it was. I realized I had injured myself by just playing in in that case, I wasn't just in the 4th quarter of one game. I was in the 4th quarter of like everyone's 150 games at the same time, and it was. But it was a slow build. It took me 4 or 5 months to get to the point where it really broke, and then I had the course correct. You know,
Wil Schroter: something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists, you may just not know it, but that's OK. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this. Stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it. A while back, not that long ago, when you came back to the states and you got your your your folks set up, right? You, you were getting your folks set up uh in a new house and that that was a lot. And then then there was some calamitous injuries while that was happening uh to your wife and to your mom and like,
Ryan Rutan: they literally ended up looking like sports injuries for both of them, right? Like as if my mother was a linebacker and my wife was a fullback.
Wil Schroter: So, I bring this up to say, at that time if someone that has worked with you for a long time and and and has a great relationship with you. I thought to myself, there's no version where this isn't gonna affect Ryan in some way, right as well it should, right? So I need to make sure that I'm not putting undue pressure on him. In other words, I think partners in a business, I think even just like, like, uh, you know, when we talk about our, our team, etc. we need to be cognizant of where and how injuries happen, if we overlook them, right? If we overlook them, that's a weak leadership move.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, cause it's not just founder burnout, right? The, the entire startup or pieces of the startup, individuals, teams. Burnout can spread through the entire organization, or it doesn't necessarily spread either, it can just happen, pop up here and there, it's a very individual thing. So,
Wil Schroter: so my whole I just bring this one up to say like, it would have been easy for me or someone else in that situation to just ignore what just happened. Hey, sorry about your luck, you know, um, make sure you get whatever done. Make sure those TPS reports are on the desk. Exactly, exactly. I'm like, to me, and I'm, I'm zooming out beyond just ourselves, I think our job with the folks that we work with every day. is to help assess when those burnout moments are happening, not just full burnout, like you know, at the the moment of of of explosion, but just the kinds of things that drive burnout. And by the way, they tend to be personal things that happen to people.
Ryan Rutan: I was getting ready to go here, and this is interesting because if we back up a couple of podcasts, you and I were talking about. How friendly should we be with the team, right? Like, should we be friends with him? Should we be in people's personal business? Yeah. And there's a really interesting double edged sword to that, which is that there is such a thing as overinvolvement and and people may not want to we there's a whole podcast and guys go back and check it out. It was about 7 or 8 podcasts ago. But, and I think that we kind of where we landed was that there is a line that you don't want to cross with that. But I think that the further you are from that line, the harder this is because you're you're absolutely right. The major contributors to burn out and or I'm just gonna say this, even if they're not contributing to it, cause work could be the entire reason you're burning out, but I think a lot of the things, like a lot of the manifestations, the early ones start to show up more in personal life than work life, because we continue to push. We continue to make sure we're doing this job. This is exactly why we burn out. As founders we're we're gonna continue to do as team of the founder, right, as people who are working for the startup team, they may want to push through and get things done, right? I'll I'll I'll figure it out, I'll do it. Where that typically then manifests is things start to fall off on the personal side. They're not going to kids games, they're not doing all the things that they should be doing with their friends. They're, they're not having dinner, they're not whatever it is, right? Whatever the things that were part of their social life or their personal life. Start to fall off. And so I think as founders it's, it is tough when we don't have that level of visibility into personal life.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, and so sometimes, let's say a salesperson, uh cause they have a very binary output, their sales drop. Well, sometimes, you know, just they're doing everything they can in their sales shop, but other times there's there's almost always a story behind the story, right? There's always some other reason and to your point, we can only take it so far. You and I have a great relationship, so you can share things like uh like that with me. Um, my point to it was, I can just proactively say, OK, now is not a good time to press super hard. There's plenty of times that will be, now it's just not one of them. I've dealt with this issue myself many times, and you've given me the same courtesy where like something's happening in my life, you're like, you know, dude, yeah, I got the wheel, just do your thing, right? Like every every December, and I, I point this out to say, if we're not even good at diagnosing it within ourselves, imagine what it's like to have an entire team of folks. That are in some version of burnout. Again, going back to the sports analogy where we've pushed everybody to the 4th quarter and everybody's struggling, but no one wants to say it, and we pretend like it's not happening, and we just wait for this like, you know, apocalyptic moment to address it. I think for for founders, for for leaders. We have to be able to look at the organization and say, I can't push forever, and when I do push, I have to come up with an equal pull, right? If I push somebody on the court, I need to pull them off the court, right? In order to to recharge them. And and I think if you only rely on the team saying, hey, I'm burnt out, I need to be pulled off the court, you're gonna miss nearly every time, cause I, I think people are bad at diagnosing it and they're worse at admitting it.
Ryan Rutan: 100%, yeah, I think it, it often does take a third party eye to say like, hey, we, we all sort of see this coming. That's where it goes back to like, do you have the visibility? Can you spot those optics when they're happening? Another question here, like, I I'm thinking back through through history and trying to recreate some of these scenarios like. In your experience, your remembrance, do you feel like there were times where your burnout preceded burnout for the rest of the team, or the team burnout, individual or or widespread contributed to your burnout, or has it always been sort of a a a very personal thing?
Wil Schroter: I have rarely seen a moment in my 30+ years where I was completely burnt out, and the team was just on fire. I always saw and and that could just be a perception thing. But I've always seen, having worked with lots of different teams, I've always seen that if I'm not like on my A game, the team, whether deliberately or indeliberately follows, right? So if, if I'm pushing and pushing really hard, like anybody like a coach or anything like that, the team has like an impetus to do it, but if I'm not pushing. I've never seen the the team just like go bonkers while I'm screwing off, right? I just usually I, I, I, I see an effect to it and and and that's what has always made it hard for me to slow down, because I realized that it's not just me that it affects, that it affects everybody around me, which is dangerous.
Ryan Rutan: It is, and I think, but that it actually, when you look at it that way, it makes a really strong case for actually doing something about it. So let's talk about treating the injury because it to, to that end, right? Like, so if, if you do know that this has not only there is a, there's a clear and a negative impact to you as the individual suffering the burnout, but you know that this has an impact on the rest of the team. It's one of these like, and there's so many of these decisions as as founders, there's so many of these little moments in time that are so, so leveraged. Right, like deciding to take some time as a founder to heal and recover from this injury that is burnout. It isn't just about you regaining that energy. It's about restoring momentum and balance to the entire team. It has a huge, huge potential ROI done right, right? And yet, again, we'll still look at that and go, oh, probably next week, right? After, after I break my other ankle, then, then I'll come off the field.
Wil Schroter: I think in treatment is different for everyone. I think this is super important. Typically we associate not being burnt out with not working. And and and I want to be very careful with that. Sometimes that is exactly the prescription, OK? It's just not
Ryan Rutan: the but that is the hard part, right? Because treating it feels like the very opposite of what your startup needs, even if it's what you need. It feels counter to everything that you're supposed to be doing there at that moment.
Wil Schroter: Personally, I have what I would consider the concept of my life is a certain amount of energy that I need to put somewhere. The the variable is where it gets put. If I put it in startup for too long, it burns me out. It just does. I, I've been doing this forever at a very sustained pace, and I'm well aware of of that outcome. I have, I'm just kind of like ballparking, I have 8 to 9 months out of the year that I can operate very well and very consistently and kind of like, you know, have, have great output, but the other 4 months, let's say. I cannot, I simply cannot. There, there is, again, we're going to this like 4th quarter. There is some point where my output will just need to be recharged. That's it. I, you know, like I, I've got to have it. Now, again, for me, my treatment plan is always put that energy somewhere else. In this case, like I've said it over and over that I'm building a house, and that is a phenomenally therapeutic place for me to put my time. Yeah. It's exhausting, but, but not in the way that I'm getting burnt out, right? Like I'm not getting
Ryan Rutan: burnt out I think it's, it's important to note that, right? So again, it burnt out doesn't just mean you're out of energy. That's not correct, right? We, we did an entire podcast on this too, which is like as founders, we need hobbies, and generally we need hobbies that are as demanding as our startups, because if we don't have something as as demanding as our startup, we're probably not going to be fully there, right? We're gonna, we're still gonna be somehow like 1 ft or maybe more than 1 ft in the startup while we're doing this other thing. And I think that the same thing when we're looking for the burnout antidote, I think there has to be something that is pretty starkly contrasted. But also very consuming in the same way that the startup is.
Wil Schroter: Again, what I said earlier is that I think that being able to take time away is a luxury because it implies that you have people that can fill you and do those things. So let's talk about like the different buckets of treatment if you will. One bucket, let's say, is go do something else that that that where you can invest your time differently, and I think part of that, Ryan, build house, build house, right? It's regain your passion. So if you do the same thing over and over and over every single day, and it becomes totally wrote and you lose your passion, which is a dangerous thing to lose as a founder, then you're thinking, well, I wanna go do something else, like some other startup, cause I've lost the passion in this one, and that might, that may be entirely true, but you may have also just lost your passion to do anything else, because you just keep doing this one thing over and over. The place that I reset my passion right now is I do carpentry, right? I love to build stuff. However, if you were to say cool, now just go do that full time. I would say in less than 4 weeks I would hate that job. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: becomes full time and then it just becomes a job, right? Then I'm right back to where I started. Of interest, it's not something, yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting because they just last week, the week before, there was a a discussion on LinkedIn that I was part of, and burnout was was the topic and and there was a pretty hot debate around it that somebody was saying that like isn't even real and burnout is just BS and it's like, yeah, OK, let's let's beat this up a little bit, but I said something to the effect of burnout isn't about how much work we do. It's about why we're doing it, and when you lose that why, then it becomes right, when it when when the work you're doing becomes disconnected from the why and the and the and the and the outcomes and the transformation you're trying to create. It really does start to weigh on you. I think that and and we look at, you know, modern knowledge work, which is what most startups are engaging in at some degree, it severs the primal link back to that work, right? So there's a reason you can go and do hard work if it's directly connected like building house, like, when you spend an entire day will, and your back hurts and your knees hurt and your hands hurt, is there ever nothing that you can look back on and just see like physically some some shit change every time you do that, like, there's new stairs, there's new ca. There's something. You're very viscerally and strongly and primly connected to those outputs, right? But when we're doing knowledge work, right, it doesn't feed us, it doesn't warm us, it doesn't shelter us. And so then it can start to feel like it doesn't matter when you're not feeling that progress. And I think that's where that like lack of why, lack of passion can jump in. But we've said this earlier in the podcast, like, but this is, this is normally is a temporary state, right? This is why we have to treat it as an injury. Not as a terminal illness.
Wil Schroter: Let's build on that a little bit, uh, what I want to talk about is another bucket, which is what's causing the burnout. Like in other words, within your role within what you do every day, if you could pinpoint it, sometimes you can't, but if you could pinpoint it, is there some something you're doing it, for example, you mentioned, hey, I'm doing 40 office hours a week, right? That is burning me out. OK, how about we not do that or have someone else pick up and do that. Yeah, yeah, right, and it doesn't like we don't necessarily have to have you stop working or sell the company or any of these things, right?
Ryan Rutan: Like Ryan can't handle office hours anymore. Uh, we're gonna fire
Wil Schroter: sell
Ryan Rutan: this thing
Wil Schroter: sell the company, right? Find out what it is that is burning you out and address that. Now, sometimes you can't, sometimes it's like I hate my investors. I absolutely can't stand my investors. They're they're driving me insane, etc. and the only way to sever that relationship is for me to not be there. Sometimes that's entirely true. Sometimes that is entirely true.
Ryan Rutan: Yep, sometimes couples therapy doesn't work. That's why divorce exists,
Wil Schroter: right? So sometimes that is entirely true. However, there are a lot of different ways to address where uh that burnout's coming from. Sometimes people will do a mini sabbatical, sometimes people will do a role change. Sometimes people will start to spread the, the work, right? Like, hey, for example, For me, where I see burnout most acutely is from creative work. Every week, uh, you know, I sit down and and I I brainstorm whatever topic we're gonna cover. I write an article about it that we send out to a few 100,000 people. The complexity, I should say that the challenge of doing that in January versus June versus December is dramatically different.
Ryan Rutan: Interesting how that goes, isn't it? Yeah, is that particular battery gets worn down throughout the year, there's that period where it just needs that reset, which, by the way, to all of you lovely podcast listeners, is why we don't do podcasts in December.
Wil Schroter: That we need to do that. So with that said, that is acutely where I feel it the most. I don't feel it doing CFO stuff like our financials. I don't feel it doing like our workshops and stuff like that. There's a lot of things that like, actually, I don't hit what I call. Blinking cursor syndrome. Blinking cursor syndrome is a term I think I made up that simply means I'm, I want to type something, but all I can do is look at a blinking cursor and that's like nothing will come out, right? When I get to that point, I know there is no solve that's called, well, let me just work more hours, right? The problem is at its core something I've injured something.
Ryan Rutan: literally pouring gasoline on the fire that
Wil Schroter: exactly. And so, uh, what I'm gonna say is this, this next bucket is about finding acutely what is driving the burnout the most, and looking to to reset what that is. Sometimes it just means take a break from doing that. But I think the biggest thing is doing nothing at all is a plan. It's a bad plan. But it's a plan.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, yeah, just continue, like, hey, we've been running the same plan for a while and it's clearly created some burnout, and I don't feel well. I should probably keep doing the same thing. Let's keep running this playbook.
Wil Schroter: It's when I hear about Elon Musk, I want everybody to do a 100 hour a week work weeks. Bro, you can do that like a week, 2 weeks, 34 weeks tops, OK? At that point, I, I would, I would argue doing it at all is a waste of time, but I would argue that like once you know you're gonna run people as hard as they possibly can until you break, what did you really achieve? Like what are
Ryan Rutan: you doing, right? Yeah, is this a social experiment or work?
Wil Schroter: Like what what do you not want them to work with you anymore? Like you want, you wanna run out their output. Also, like,
Ryan Rutan: do you want like it go back to the sports analogy for a minute. If if you've played LeBron, let's just say this, you had a triple header that day. Yeah, it's not a thing, but let's just pretend that you did. And now we're in the 4th quarter, the 3rd game. The guy isn't come out. Would you even want him in the game? At that point, he's no longer the same version. He's not the best player on the on on the court at that point. There's a bunch of fresh legs. Why would you even want what output is coming at that point? You have beyond squeezed the juice out. This is just, you're just now putting effort in and getting subpar output at that point at best, if anything. That's
Wil Schroter: it, so that's what I'm saying, when you look at your whole team. And you're like, huh, I don't really know if my team's burnt out. I, I should probably dig in and, and, you know, impose a little empathy and find out, you know, where people stand, recognizing that that that that they're gonna be guarded, that they're gonna be guarded about about that answer because there's a lot of consequence in their mind. And we talked about this, right, right, we talked about this in previous episodes where showing your own vulnerability is a great way to like, you know, level set to say, hey, it's OK, like I'm, I'm feeling the same way. But I, but I think our overall purpose for ourselves and for the team should be getting people back in the game. Get, get everybody, like, in order to get them back in the game, you gotta help them out of the
Ryan Rutan: game and get back in the game. Yeah, it's it's exactly it. To get back in the game, you have to leave the, you have to leave the court first.
Wil Schroter: You, you do, and, and again, like I said, the treatment plan is different for everybody. Some people just need time off, right? Some people like just want to like put their toes in the sand and just relax and and and I get it, I'm not one of those people, but I certainly understand and apparently the rest of the world does too. But I look at it and I'm like, OK. When I hit burnout, and I think this is critical. When I hit burnout, it is a moment in time. It's not the end of my startup. Oh, I'm burnt out so my startup can't go on. No, I'm burnt out. And my startup has its own lifespan, right? If I'm burnt out or my team is, I need to address that, separate from, like I said, let's get let's let's fire sale the whole thing because I'm burnt out, which is ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. So I think for for a lot of us, we should think of ourselves more as like a professional sports franchise. I think that the athlete analogy absolutely uh makes sense here. And I think we need to think of ourselves as coaches. Um, number one, we gotta make sure the coach is OK, so the coaching have to do to lead the team. But we have to make sure that that everybody here is going to face exhaustion. They're going to face that moment where they have nothing left to give. It's our job to diagnose that. It's our job to to to pull them off, to get them reset, to get them back out there. But if we can't do that with the people around us. If we can't do that in our own lives, to be able to diagnose these injuries and be able to treat these injuries and get ourselves back out there, then we don't stand a chance. But if we can do that, we treat ourselves like the star player, right, in this entire franchise, and we reward ourselves properly with rest, with reset, whatever it takes to get our version of a respite, then we can go out, we can crush it, and we can win this thing.
Ryan Rutan: Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone, you don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes. Connect with bootstrapped founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups.com community. Check out the Startups.com community at www.startups.com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.