Chapter Twelve

Avoiding Burnouts

“Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean me first,
it means me too.”
—L. R. Knost

I believe the number one reason so many of the people in my purpose-driven realm have burned out is because they did not align their life expectations with what their purpose-driven work could provide. I know this because I have grappled with this along my journey.

A mentor of mine once told me that, in order to sustain the passion that I needed to have for my work, I needed to make sure I was sustaining myself. This is often a sore subject when it comes to dealing with social entrepreneurs and nonprofit founders because it deals with money, which is the last of the motivations on our list for why we committed to doing this work. At some point, we have to face the pressures of reality and understand that the things we want for ourselves and others have a price.

My mentor asked me simple questions about the number of kids I would like to have one day, how I would like to raise my family (middle class, upper-middle class, rich, etc.), whether I would send my kids to public school or private school, how much I would have to support my mom with her retirement, and how much income I wanted when I retired. To my surprise, I had answers for most of those questions. They might not have been final or exact, but I had an idea. He then asked me to do the math.

In 2009, Time magazine estimated the cost of raising a kid from birth to college was just north of $1 million. If you want to have three or four kids, that is a price tag of almost $5 million on its own. Buying a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood could cost almost $1 million. If you factor in retirement and trying to sustain a six-figure income, that would mean putting away almost $2 million in retirement per person. The numbers quickly add up.

For weeks, I was saddled with frustration. I knew that as the executive director of Practice Makes Perfect I would never earn what I needed to achieve the goals and desires I wanted for myself and my family. Before I knew it, the work I loved so much, that had meant so much to me, started to mean less. There were moments when I resented my work because it meant I would never fulfill my wants. Like many of my friends, I toyed with the idea of leaving my work in search of work that might be less fulfilling, less purpose-driven, but might allow me to earn what I needed to bring to fruition the things I’ve wanted for myself and for my family my entire life.

After months of frustration, I finally understood why so many of my older peers in the space had not lasted very long. It was not that they did not love their work or that they were no longer able to carry it out; it was that they probably came to the realization I came to about their wants and their needs much sooner than I did, and because they were older than I was, they had less time to respond and react to their realizations.

When you reach the juncture I hit, you have one of four decisions to make. The first decision you could make is to keep things the way they are. You realize that you will never achieve the things you want for yourself and your family. If you do this, you will resent your work for depriving of you those wants you’ve had your entire life and you will burnout. The second decision you could make is to suppress your wants. You can reevaluate the things you have wanted your entire life and calibrate them to fall in line with what you are capable of achieving on the income you can reasonably expect to earn, which will help you avoid burning out and continue to keep you satisfied with your life. The third decision you can make is to restructure what you are doing in a way that will allow you to achieve what you’ve wanted and potentially leave the work you were so passionate behind you and potentially also cause you to burnout. The last decision, albeit the riskiest to consider, is to evolve what you’re doing to meet your needs and your wants, which will help you avoid burning out as well.

I had an incredible amount of conviction in why I was doing the work I was carrying out. It ultimately led me to take Practice Makes Perfect private. I made the fourth decision. For people with less of an appetite for risk, I advise them to consider the second decision. I did not succumb to the belief that doing good means that you can’t do well for yourself and that doing well for yourself means that you can’t do good for the world. I did not accept the idea that you have to do well now so you can do good later in your life. I put my faith into my own hands and have continued to scale Practice Makes Perfect with a million plus in revenue each year for the last three years. In the process, I risked losing everything I had built. For some strange reason, I had faith it would all work out.

The first half of this chapter covered the mental part of the burnout journey. This second part is about the tactical part of avoiding burnout.

I am very far from having what some might consider an ideal work/life balance. Every once in a while, a friend or acquaintance asks how I avoid burning out. From my experience building Practice Makes Perfect from scratch, I know it takes a lot of time, energy, and sacrifice. The day you sign up to be an entrepreneur you are asking to be pushed toward burnout. Here’s what I’ve learned that helps avoid burnouts:

Start by putting together a frame of what you would like to achieve on an average day. There are plenty of templates you can find to spur ideas, but there is something special about owning this part of the planning. This part starts with your goals. If you do not set your goals, it will be hard to create a routine that you truly feel ownership over. Design your routine with ideal start and end times that help meet your daily needs

As you are designing your days, make sure that they consist of different tasks. I cannot imagine doing the same exact things every single day. If you go to the gym, make sure you change the workout up. If you are at the office, change where you do work. Whatever it is you decide to do, avoid monotonous days by adding variety to your routine. Otherwise, you will get bored and may burn out very quickly.

This is probably the hardest part, especially when you don’t have full control over your environment, such as when you are traveling. You may not have access to a gym, or there may be flight delays that cause you to make compromises to your regimen. However, when you are not traveling, this should be simple. When you finally get in a groove, you also become a lot more efficient.

Of course, this is one of those “easier said than done” secrets. If you can own the process, you should be able to avoid burning out. This secret has worked for me for many years.