TL;DR: “Life ain’t a track meet; it’s a marathon.” – Ice Cube

Related Reading: Burnout, Depression, and Suicide

I’m prone to deep thinking about life. It’s why I quit the honors program in a great business school within weeks of entering college, and switched to Philosophy (adding Economics later). Best career decision of my life. No offense to the business school grads out there.

I’ve always had this feeling that people devote far too much brainpower toward things that ultimately amount to nonsense, and yet things that are infinitely consequential – like what you want to do in life, where and how you want to live, whom and when to marry, whether and when to have kids – people seem to either follow a script, or just let their surrounding culture/peers push them in the direction of the current zeitgeist. And the truth is, the zeitgeist doesn’t give a shit about you. Slow down, and think it through. You get one shot.

And instead of asking your friends, ask people who’ve gone the distance. It’s well documented culturally / sociologically that spending all of your time with people your own age leads to all kind of mental dysfunctions and myopic thinking. The only way to get real perspective is to listen to other perspectives, and that means age / generational diversity.

A lot of the advice out there on founder burnout amounts to a kind of checklist on health and wellness. Let’s go ahead and get that checklist out of the way:

• Sleep – Don’t delude yourself into thinking that pulling all-nighters and not hitting your 7/8 hour a day quota will make you more productive. It won’t. The data is clear.
• Exercise – Same. Go for a run. Lift some weights. It’s not time wasted. Again, it makes you more productive.
• Eat well – Eat shit, and you’ll feel like shit. Read up on carbohydrates, insulin, inflammation, and energy. You’ll learn some things.
• Delegate – Build systems, and then hand those systems over to other people. If you can’t figure out a way to scale your skills, you will fail at life and at work.

But in my opinion, and from what I’ve observed among certain entrepreneurs, there’s a deeper, longer-term issue at play regarding founder burnout (and life burnout in general) than just getting overworked and not taking care of your body. The best way I can explain it is using some old school philosophy concepts: higher and lower pleasures.

Speaking very generally, lower pleasures require constant replenishment, because the feeling they generate just doesn’t last. They’re the “simple carbs” of life. Sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll are the typical go-to’s when someone wants to explain lower pleasures, but lots of cleaner forms of activities in life fit this category. Once they’re over, all you’re left with is a memory, and a desire for another one.

In contrast, higher pleasures have a kind of lasting effect. They have staying power and can bring satisfaction to life even when you’re not at the moment “doing” anything about them. Long-term friendships, love, family, and a sense of meaningful (not just financial) achievement are all classic examples of higher pleasures. They can be entertaining (or the opposite) and take up your time, but that time is a kind of investment toward building something that carries you forward in life, and is still there when you’re in your 40s, 50s, 60s, and later. David Brooks wrote a good op-ed called The Moral Bucket List that is worth reading.

The deeper kind of life burnout that goes beyond health/wellness results from years, or even decades, of failing to build durable “higher” pleasures into your life. You can ensure that you’ve slept enough, exercised, eat well, and have built a great management team, and yet at 40, 45, 50, find yourself sipping martinis on Christmas Eve, alone, or with someone who means absolutely nothing to you. That end-result really burns, because there’s no checklist for resolving it. Fail to build/invest into things in life that last and will help you really go the distance, and it can eat you alive in the long run.

When asked by young law students about how to vet law firms for employment, I’ve always said to look at the older partners, and watch/listen very closely. Look for divorces, kids in therapy, anger management issues, drug addiction, alcoholism. In the legal profession, and in all areas full of high performance personalities – including entrepreneurs – they’re everywhere. People who treated life like it’s a track meet – narrow your vision and run as fast as you can – when it’s really a much longer, much more intricate marathon.  Rock stars in their earlier years, but they failed to go the distance.

So my personal advice to ambitious entrepreneurs about preventing burnout long-term is, yes, sleep, exercise, eat well, and delegate, but also build a real life, not just a company. Emphasis on the word build; as in, activities that contribute to relationships and things that will be there tomorrow, and next year, and a decade later, when you’re a different person, with different priorities. Look ahead, and plan for the distance.  Most of the people around you telling you to just “keep hustling” care more about your stock than they do about you personally, or are themselves ignoring how long the marathon is.

Look for mentors who’ve built their own companies, but while maintaining a sense of balance (even if loosely defined).  Even if zen-like balance isn’t really achievable, the simple act of trying hard to achieve it will ensure you land somewhere sustainable. Like a speed limit, you know you’ll break it, but it’ll still help pace you.  

Think things through, and spend some of your time really building a life, apart from your company. The building may take longer than just narrowing your goals and running as fast as you can, but the end-result will be something much more durable.