Your next mountain, pt2 | Swizec Teller

3 quick things before the holiday because it’s on my mind. Then it’s cookie time.

In What’s your next mountain?, I said that “Burnout comes from toil with no reward”. When my partner saw that she thought it was dumb.

Swiz, you love your work and find it super rewarding, but I can see you burning out in real time

The line was a quote from one of my favorite books – Peak – about the science of burnout. Focuses on sports and applies those lessons more broadly. Lots of good insights.

The same authors wrote a sister book – The Passion Paradox – about how easy it is for passionate people to burn out. This book contains all the lessons and insights that didn’t fit into Peak.

Together these two books form a solid theory on burnout:

• burnout comes from toil with no reward
• you need periods of intensity followed by periods of recovery
• even if your work energizes, you need to make sure you don’t physically burnout

But how do you do that? I struggle.

The answer is that you have to drop some balls. It’s the only way. 👉 Four Thousand Weeks – time is the only resource you can’t make more of.

You will never get to do everything. Best accept that, stack-rank your list, and make sure the important stuff gets done. This applies to everything.

But if you don’t do the things then who will? Somebody else. 👉 Who Not How was a recent read for me and had a big impact.

You can’t do everything, but you can find people to own the areas you can’t. Let them do their thing and get out of the way.

This by the way is how your boss thinks of you: They don’t want to learn javascript or python or distributed systems or whatever. They just want the thing to work. The rest is up to you.

Enjoy your cookies.

Cheers,
~Swizec