10 Little Lessons That Help Me Avoid Burnout
How to keep moving.
Everything worth building takes a long time to build.
Whether it’s getting good at Jiu-Jitsu, building a business, building a gym, or building anything else — it all takes a long time. Everything worthwhile requires you to stay focused and disciplined for a very long time.
But recently, I’ve struggled with this.
I spent most of my life in Chicago building things and living one way, and when I moved to Texas, many lot of the things I was building and my way of life were left behind. Things like my old:
Training routines
Friendships
Network
Favorite restaurants (I miss good pizza!)
and more
Are all now something I only get to experience when I visit. I built those things and then left.
This can be disheartening. You feel like everything you’ve done is for nothing. You feel frustrated, and you wonder “Why should I move forward on new things if I might just abandon them later?”
It’s a tough question, and thinking about it can elicit feelings of burnout, nihilism, and what I’ve started to call “false fatigue” — burnout that isn’t related to your output or work.
Here are 10 lessons that I’ve learned in the last few years about focus, building, and avoiding burnout that I think answer this question quite well.
These lessons are why you should keep moving forward.
If you aren’t willing to bet on yourself, you need to change yourself.
Before I moved, I was very discouraged with my progression in Jiu-Jitsu.
Despite my hard training, constant study, and daily drilling, I didn’t feel like I was really making progress. I regressed from having unrelenting self-belief to having a great deal of self-doubt and anxiety about putting myself out there in competition, for teaching opportunities, and through writing.
I didn’t feel like I was worth betting on, but I knew I was worth investing in.
That’s the main reason why I made the change. An investment in my own improvement both in BJJ and in life.
You learn essential lessons when you least want them.
Don’t train if you’re super sick or whatever, but you probably know that that’s not what I mean.
You have to show up when you’re tired. You have to keep putting yourself out there. Keep writing even when the article sucks. Go to training when you don’t want to train.
Do the work.
Focus is like motivation — it comes and goes. You must keep applying yourself to the skill even in periods of low focus to truly build the skill. In those times of fatigue and uncertainty, you start to see things differently. You find new solutions to old problems.
Most failures/roadblocks are not because of “you”, they’re because of a network issue or a skill issue.
When I first moved to Texas, I struggled a lot socially, financially, and of course, on the mat.
I, as most people would, thought it was because “I sucked”. I wasn’t “good enough”.
In hindsight, there was not a huge skill gap between me and other people, it was just that I didn’t have my network anymore — the network I spent years building in Chicago. I was alone — for a while.
Likewise, when I started trying to find ghostwriting clients, I struggled with equally as much frustration. I thought it was because “no one would want to work with a writer who was also an athlete”.
It was a limiting belief that I used to disguise my lack of skill in marketing myself.
Pretty much every failure in my life comes down to a lack of skill or lack of network.
If after some time you realize that your failure is not either of these things, then it might be time to look in the mirror — but cut yourself some slack.
Your biggest problems come from conversations you’re not having.
I don’t like conflict or confrontation. These are 2 of my least favorite things.
Part of the reason I think that a grappling art like Jiu-Jitsu has been so helpful for me is because it’s helped me work on the biggest thing I strive to avoid.
In your life, you should always have hard conversations.
The more nervous you are to have a conversation, the more important it is to have it.
Plus, the more you have hard conversations, the less scary they will be and the less they will affect you.
The anxiety you feel from the tough conversations you’re putting off is like a weight. It burns you out and makes you tired. Push the weight off you by opening your mouth.
You can’t figure anything all out on your own.
I would not be where I am today without support from my family, friends, girlfriend, sponsors, and even just random strangers who have been kind enough to help me out over the years.
I used to think hyper-independence was important, but I don’t anymore.
Build community — this is the true path to sustainable independence.
Last year, I started investing in coaching for myself in the last year in a few different areas — something I’d never done before — and I’m happy with the results so far.
If you suck at something, you won’t get better at it just by slamming your head against the wall.
There’s a lag between effort and improvement.
When you work hard at something, you want to see results right away.
When you write every day, your prose doesn’t improve much over a week. When you train every day, your grappling skills or fitness levels don’t improve much over a week.
Sometimes, you even go a month or a few months without a lot of noticeable progress.
The lag between effort and improvement is very real.
The best to avoid discouragement is to learn to love the work for its sake — for the flow, the personal satisfaction, and just because you like it.
This way, your improvement will just be a pleasant surprise.
Your best work will come easily — after a lot of hard work.
I’m still quite proud of my first Jiu-Jitsu instructional, Sloth Style Leg Locks, which covers the leg locking system that my coach and I have used for the last few years in competition.
The instructional was also very easy to design and film. I didn’t have to do much work except write everything down.
I think that instructional is some of my best work as a BJJ teacher, and it came easy to me because I spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours learning leg locks before I filmed the course.
Once “the lag” I mentioned above is over, it gets easier until you find a new mountain to climb.
I’m maximally productive when I’m slightly overwhelmed — and it’s not sustainable.
Maximum effort anything is not sustainable.
Life is not a marathon or a sprint, it’s interval training.
Sprint, rest, and repeat. This is the key to having maximum quality output, plus ample time to recharge.
One trick I’ve been using in Jiu-Jitsu and writing for years now to avoid burnout is “batching”. I batch competitions — a few over a few weeks, I batch training — I lift a few hours after I train to shorten the day, and I batch writing — this article is the 2nd I’ve written this morning.
Slightly overwhelm yourself, and then rest. Recover adequately and then get back to it.
Doing your dream job badly is worse than having a job you don’t love that you do well.
This is a big one, but I don’t know if everyone will agree.
When I was younger, I used to shit on conventional careers a lot. I thought that everyone should “get their dream job” because I was 22 and naive and was working towards mine.
What I didn’t realize is that a lot of people create their dream jobs but don’t actually work their ass off at it. They get the job, start the business, or create the product, but they don’t slave over it enough for the dream job to fulfill them.
The truth is that fulfillment comes from day-to-day activities, not your job title or how you file your taxes.
Doing something you love badly or lazily (like running a Jiu-Jitsu gym or becoming a writer) will make you way more miserable than doing something you don’t love well.
Don’t get a “dream job” unless you’re ready to work like a lunatic.
The harder an endeavor, the more grand the payoff.
Writing my first book made me more grateful for people who run marathons.
Before, I kind of thought they were crazy.
But I think writing a book is kind of crazy too. I mean, you’ve got to be a bit crazy to think that someone really wants to read tens of thousands of words on your experience in a niche grappling art, right?
Whatever.
The project itself has been so challenging in so many different ways that the payoff has been an incredibly gratifying experience — and I don’t even have any sales yet.
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