I work all the time.
(Do as I say, not as I do on this one.)
Whenever I have three free hours, I feel guilty if I’m not pushing something forward.
The kids are on their iPads, there’s a rare window of quiet, and I’ve got an unlimited to-do list staring me down.
The pull to just get things done is overwhelming.
But “get a bunch of stuff done” never changes anything because it never actually ends.
Now you might be thinking:
“Well, Sharran, how do you not burn out?”
Let me tell you, because most advice about burnout is wrong.
The advice today assumes burnout is a workload problem. It’s something you fix with:
A vacation
A long weekend
Or fewer meetings on the calendar.
But all of this misses what’s actually happening. I believe there are two reasons people burn out.
And neither of them has much to do with how many hours you worked this week…
Reason one: you’re not working in your zone of genius.
Your zone of genius is the intersection of three things:
Your joy: The work you’d still choose to do even if nobody was watching and no result was guaranteed.
The market: Whether anyone out there actually wants what you’re offering right now and will pay for it.
And money: The work pays enough to support the life you want to live.
Work that sits outside the intersection of these 3 drains you no matter how good you are at it or how much it pays.
You can be excellent at something, get paid well for it, and still burn out doing it.
Because here’s the thing:
Excellence and pay aren’t enough. For most people, joy is the missing one.
But today we are told that to find joy we need “work-life balance.
Balance implies you’re not moving or creating momentum.
And it’s staying in the same place for too long that makes A-players start to resent their own work.
This is why you don’t need balance.
You need to be in constant movement.
And the fact is, most people say they need balance to be happy, but spend their entire time on their phones doomscrolling.
But when you’re moving forward, energy returns. When you can see growth, the work becomes reward.
And here’s what changed everything for me:
I stopped optimizing for comfort and I started optimizing for momentum.
Chase balance if you want to stay average.
Chase progress if you want to build something meaningful.
Progress is what happens when you’re in your zone of genius. But there is still one more common reason that makes people burn out…
And this reason is the easiest one to solve today.
Reason two: you don’t have the skill to avoid burnout.
Burnout is preventable, not inevitable.
You can build the skill of avoiding it the exact same way you’d build any other skill like writing or marketing.
And to learn this skill, you need to understand two things:
Hardware
Software
Let me explain.
Hardware is physical health. It’s sleep and food, in that order.
Because neither one is negotiable to function and both get sacrificed first when things get busy.
On the other hand, software is mental and emotional health.
Mental health means having a support network like a therapist.
Their job is to help you process what’s happening and what happened instead of carrying it alone.
Emotional health means love.
It’s the people in your life who you give it to and get it back from.
This is not a “nice-to-have”; it’s a part of the system that keeps you functioning.
Skip either one and the other cannot compensate:
No amount of sleep will fix unprocessed emotional work.
No therapist can compensate for a lack of sleep or rest.
This is why you need both systems running at once.
The same way you’d never expect a laptop to work with good software and a dead battery.
So how can you avoid burnout today?
Audit your zone of genius
Does the work you’re doing give you joy, is there a market for it, and does it pay you enough money to live the life you want?
If the answer is no to any of those questions, you’re probably not in your zone of genius.
And one of the quickest ways to find your zone of genius, if you don’t know what it is, is to ask: “What don’t I want?”
What doesn’t give me joy?
What job doesn’t have a market for it?
And what jobs/skills don’t pay me the money that will let me live the life I want?
Look at your hardware and software
Now you have to be honest with yourself here.
For hardware, are you actually getting enough sleep and eating the right food for your body?
And for software, is there unresolved emotional stuff you need to deal with?
Is your emotional health fulfilled by the relationships in your life?
Hope this helps.
If you enjoyed this post, I talk about the system I use to have maximum productivity in this next one:
Become Dangerously Productive Like a CEO (Just Copy Me)
Most of the productivity advice out there tells you to:
Reading this after a month with more than one 3 am finish. The line that getting a bunch of stuff done never actually ends is uncomfortably accurate.