You Aren’t Burned Out, Your Systems Are Just BROKEN

0:28Push your limits, train with precision, see the results. Have you ever been burned out by the exact life you used to dream about, where you're finally starting to hit your goals and instead of feeling accomplished, you're just like, I can't handle this anymore. It's the symptom of way deeper deficiency in what you do every day. And if you do these few simple things that have changed my life, you can build a career and a life that actually energizes you instead of draining you. So in today's episode, I want to talk about the three moves I use to pull myself out of daily stress. And I want to give you the secrets because I'm putting a battery back in you.

0:59This is the Big Deal Podcast. Let's go.

1:05Okay, so I was actually thinking about this episode and I don't think you're burnt out for the reasons that you think you are. You are burnt out because you're doing too much of things you don't like, are not good at, and are not uniquely skilled at doing. And so you're calling it burnout, but in actuality, you just have a job you don't really like, even if you're the owner of a company and you're tired of doing what is required and not what you want. You haven't told yourself a big enough why. And so you're obsessing every single day on the work that you don't want to do that feels repetitive.

1:37And you're probably future casting 10 years down the line and thinking, dear God, if this is what my life looks like, then I'm going to off myself right now. And the truth of the matter is you're not alone. This isn't unique. Actually, everybody does this. Everybody sort of future casts the worst state scenario and then gives up on the thing they know they're supposed to do earlier than they should because it feels overwhelming. Then I do it too as an owner. The problem is, one, you're never going to achieve very big things if you continue to do this. And the number one person and culprit and villain in this with much love is you.

2:11You are the reason you do not have the business, the life, the job that you want because you haven't made yourself so good at the very few things that you can afford to bring in more hires on the other stuff. Like right now in your business, if you are like Elon Musk, you see a problem inside of your business, you go to the factory at Tesla and you start saying, hey, we need to automate some stuff because we are like doing too many things. I don't want this many employees. We need to automate it. So you start automating everything that you do right now, except whoops, you find out, oh, like Elon did, that you shouldn't have automated half the stuff because it shouldn't have even been done in the first place.

2:53You have to go back on the plant. You have to actually tag with a spray paint can all the robotics parts that actually make things take longer and thus you more miserable. And you have to sleep on the factory floor figuring out which robots to pull out and get rid of so that you actually don't have to work 120 hour weeks and sleep on the factory floor of a plant. Now he's like a crazy person, but I think you are doing this in your business too. And I've seen it. I mean, we've worked with thousands of business owners by now and most business owners make themselves the hero because being the hero feels like taking heroin.

3:30It feels really fucking good. And so you are burnt out because you are treating yourself like a drug addict in your business. And you keep taking the heroin and taking the heroin because in the beginning, it feels really good to be needed. I'm out there, Elon Musk spray painting cans, things that I don't want to do. And eventually you annoy everybody else in your life because they're tired of hearing about you. Talk about Sally who sucks at work or talk about this job you don't want to have or talk about this employee you don't like because you actually haven't made the decision you know you need to change your life.

4:02And I know that's really kind of like tough feedback overall, but I have an entire system in my book, Owner Be Owned, about process. Why? Because most small business owners continue to do the same thing that isn't working, bang their heads against the wall, and then wonder why their business isn't growing. Instead, you could put our Cato process in there, which is cut all the things that you should not be doing in your business as defined by does it make you revenue or not. Then automate the things that make you the most revenue first that you humanly can. Then delegate the things that have a high enough revenue driving component that somebody else can do them for you and you don't really like doing them.

4:38And then finally, outsource the rest to somebody entirely even to be a team lead on it. I kind of picture most businesses, they look like when you grab cords out from behind the desk and everything's all interwoven and knotted together, and then you plug all the cords into the wall, and then you're like, well, it's not organized. I don't know how it gets there. It's on, it's working, but it's still a mess. And so the cool thing about when you're the owner is like, this is all with love, your fault. So the next thing that I would do after you thought about what do I actually need to cut, automate, delegate and outsource is you're going to have to do what Walt Disney did in some way.

5:15He eventually created a team of people who was better than him. This is all in the people chapter. This is like this goes back as old as the test of time, except none of us do it. You know, when I was on, if you haven't listened to the podcast episode with Ankur, who's the CEO of Built, multi-billion dollar company, or Amjad, the CEO of Replit, multi-billion dollar company, they're going to say, first I had to figure out what to work on. Then I had to figure out what I was good at. Then I had to figure out what I was good at and what I liked. Then I had to figure out what I was good at, what I liked, what made us money.

5:46Then I had to figure out of those three things, what was I the best at from anybody else that only I should do and everything else I should give to my team. And the cool thing is when you go through that process, most of the times, the things that are going to be the most important for you are the chapter on sales. So pitch, you're going to need to be for a while, the one that pitches and sells your product. Hiring, so bringing on the people who want to do the next thing. And then high level product, determining how do I actually build something that other people want to buy and do it continuously.

6:17So if I build something once, people will buy it continuously. Buy once, sell always. is. And what I realized from talking to Amjad and Ankur is you will be miserable if you do not hire a team to take some things off of your plate because you think that you have to be the hero. You will be miserable. I don't care how good you are, how successful you are. Those guys who are out there right now, like the one person AI billion dollar company, I guarantee you that guy is not going to be as happy as if he just had a few other people doing the work for him. Sure, he's got his agents, but add one or two sidekicks.

6:51Even Batman needed a Robin. So I guess I wanted to start by saying that today. You don't have to have a complicated system. You just need to figure out that probably your job as a CEO is not to do everything. Your job is to hire a team of A players better than you who actually believe in the vision that you sell them so much that they come work for you, even though they are fully competent enough to do it by themselves. You're not burned out. You just suck at delegating. You don't know who to delegate to. You do not know the right tasks to delegate and you're scared that if you take your hand off the control, the business is going to fail, the thing isn't going to work, or the other people aren't going to like you because you aren't doing enough.

7:31You aren't giving enough. You're actually in their way because they might want to do more and they can't because you are so competent. You're a little what I would call a ball hog. You're a ball hog who feels really good about the fact that the entire business sits on your shoulders. And we've all been there. It's how we got here in the first place. You wouldn't be an A player if you weren't a ball hog in the beginning. You will never be a multi-multi-millionaire if you stay a ball hog till the end. So the choice is kind of yours. Okay, now I actually want my team to ask some questions on this because they see me every day and I want you guys to get like the raw on it.

8:07So David, tell me what's up. What are your thoughts on this idea of solving burnout by taking a break or taking a vacation? Is that real or is that more of a trope? One, I would say don't quit right before you're about to make all the money. I was at church the other day and one of the pastors also started this church and they're a bunch of young guys. And he was kind of funny. He's like, every Sunday I have the best day ever. I'm on high. I'm on stage talking to you guys, talking to God, whatever. Monday comes, I'm burnt out. There's all this administrative stuff with the team. I've got too much going on.

8:41And he's like, I walked into one of my co-founder's office the other day and I'm like, I just, you know, I can't do this anymore. It's too much. I'm overwhelmed. And his co-founder looks at him and goes, okay, amazing. You can quit for tonight. And then I'll see you back here tomorrow morning. And the point was like, are you burnt out? Do you just need a nap? Like I would be really careful about the words burnout. And my company, if you say burnout, here's what I think you mean. I'm doing work I don't like for a mission I don't believe in. So I should probably off board from the company. You know what I instead think?

9:14Hey, God, I worked a lot this week. My brain's fried. I'm like tired. I don't think I should make decisions when I'm tired. Do you care if I take Friday off? Let me go get my head right. Let me go eat right. Let me go do a workout. I'll come back on Monday ready to rage. Champions do not run at playoff level speed always, right? They have cycles and seasons for this reason. You're the same. So I think it's not necessarily you need a vacation, but you might often be like, dude, I got to bow out early, 2 p.m. on Friday because I got to go get a hard workout in. This week killed me. I'm going to check in some shit on Friday or on Sunday.

9:52Let's see how it goes. So try to replace the word burnout with tired or break. Or sometimes my husband will say, do you want to quit or do you just need a nap? And that always I'm going to speed back into it. Let's say you have a teammate or an employee or somebody else that you work with directly who's experiencing some kind of burnout. How do you get them to rally? Is it an inspiration thing? Is it a motivation thing? Is it encouraging them to shift their mindset? What is that? Yeah. How do you get somebody who feels burnt out to re-engage and get amped again? I think I've talked no less than probably 10 or 20 employees off the edge from quitting at varying companies.

10:31How? Well, one of my last ones, she had a job that I'll describe as like jack of all trades, master of none. And when that happens, which can happen often in chief of staff roles, it can happen in project management roles. It can happen in operations roles. If you're any of those, this could be you. Or you've been in a company forever and everybody's always bothering you about like historical stuff that you feel like you're past, but you're still checking in on people's passwords and it'll drive you crazy. That role, I think, burns out pretty quick because you don't feel like you're actually progressing at all.

11:02You feel like you're just everybody's go-to with no ability to actually close out loops on projects. Humans like loop closing. And so with her in particular, I was like, listen, you're hyper-talented. Every single time you go to a new company, you know what's going to happen with the way you currently work and your inability to set boundaries and your inability to say, hey, I really want to work on this and I want to stop working on this stuff. And I promise I'll super perform here if I can stop doing some of this stuff. If you can't say that in your company. I go, you're going to go to the new company that's not this one.

11:34And guess what's going to be there? You. So you're going to get in the same situation. So I think a lot of times what I'll say to them is like, let's look in the mirror first. What is it you actually are unhappy about? Let's be really clear. And a lot of times they're like, well, I don't know where I'm going and where's the life mission. What's going to happen? Like slow down. No, it's a day, a day in work right now. What do you actually like to do? Well, I don't know because I do so many things or I don't like to do any of it because I've already future cast myself out of this job? And it's instead like a series of questions of saying, are you sure that you actually want to change or do you not want to make the really most difficult self-reflection of what are the things I want to spend my time on and what are the things I don't?

12:15And can I have a difficult conversation with my team about doing more of one and less of the other and what it would take to get there and how much money I'd have to be paid in order to do X thing versus Y thing? And is there a zone of genius here that I see inside of the company that could be uniquely mine. It's not inspiration. It's always self-reflection, like Oracle of Delphi, know thyself. And the reason most people burn out is because you don't actually know what the fuck you want. So you're spinning your wheels nonstop doing a bunch of shit that doesn't make you happy. And then you're upset that your company or your culture or your boss or whatever doesn't know how to read the inside of your brain when you don't even know what to ask of the universe, nine times out of 10.

12:52Do you have a personal story of how So making a particular adjustment really dramatically changed your workday, your life, the trajectory of your company, and just allowed you to get so much more energy to put into your work. Set and setting is really important. So for instance, you're like, God, I'm like really tired of editing because I feel like I'm trapped in a dark hole. Well, can you just like take your computer outside and go, OK, I can only really edit inside for about two hours a day. Then I like an hour break to edit outside, even if it's hot. I like wear workout clothes. I have a guy on my team that has to make a shit ton of cold calls.

13:26He goes in the gym. He walks on the treadmill, makes phone calls nonstop. I got another guy that has to review a lot of salespeople's phone calls. He takes an hour during lunch, goes and does a full workout while he's listening to people's phone calls and making voice notes about what to do differently. So like self-analysis, what are you doing? How are you doing? What would make this actually more enjoyable? Okay. How do you know when to make a pivot or make a change in how you work and when you just need to be resilient and push through and just grind? I mean, Tony Robbins always says, if you have a big enough why, you'll overcome anyhow.

14:07A lot of times I think we don't think about the big why behind what we do. And maybe we need to get resold the dream. You know, when I get tired, as that happens to me too, I'll often go to my husband or maybe my president, Mark, somebody else that I trust at the company. I'll be like, dude, I'm tired this week. You know, I like need to be reminded of what we're doing. And Chris will say to me like, oh, well, you know, this happened this year. This happened this year. We won in here. We're winning here. We're winning here. And somebody else outside of me will remind me all the ways we've already won.

14:42And they'll remind me of the things we haven't accomplished that make it all worth it. and if you don't have that, you won't be able to overcome the drudgery of life. It's like, I don't know, I have a pregnancy bias right now, but pregnancy is not the funnest thing and giving birth I hear is even less fun. Why would people do that continuously? Because at the end, you're like, I have this baby and I know that this is this thing that I want. I also imagine having a baby and having it shit all over itself and you, oh my God, by the way, One of my friends showed me this picture. It was the first picture of her and her child.

15:16And the father was shirtless, like skin to skin, I guess, and put the baby on her chest. And she sent me the picture. I was like, oh, that's cute. Except I looked closer at the picture and the baby had just shit all over the father's chest. She's like, isn't this cute? I'm like, it's literally categorically not cute. That is not a good looking picture. And he looked so happy. And I remember thinking, what is wrong with this man? Why is he so happy? Because he has a son. And like the why is so big that the how kind of doesn't matter. And so I would keep reminding yourself of that. You know, in these difficult scenarios, we know that if you want to win, what is the number one thing that equates itself to winning?

15:50Endurance. Like you cannot win a marathon by sometimes doing a sprint. You just cannot. And so if that's true, we've got to use the big why so that the how doesn't feel that miserable. And then sometimes you just take a nap. Okay, so if you could leave some parting words with somebody who's at the beginning of their ownership journey or stuck in a W-2 and just need to grind through, what would you say? You know, I was thinking about advice that I wish that I had when I was first starting or when I was deeply struggling. And I wrote this the other day to myself, which is the best advice I ever got as a founder, just do not quit.

16:23It is so miserable and hard for longer than you think it will be. You will fail 10x as much as you win. But then one day, somehow, you jump from zero to 10, then to 100. It's not linear, and it is never as miserable in the end as it was in the beginning. So just don't quit. Also, I keep this one saved, which is a picture of Elon's rockets that says, first you make it work and then you perfect it later. That's actually, I believe, in chapter six of the book. I didn't even have this saved. That's incredible. That is actually the exact page. But the real truth of the matter is, is that you got to show people that you got what it takes to have the stamina to make something that's perfect.

17:05And it's never going to be that way in the beginning. And that's okay. So 94, page 94 is for you. See you next week. By the way, also, we want to like switch up some of the ways we're doing the pod. I want to hear more questions from you. Can you guys put in the caption, what questions do you want me to answer? Can you put your unhinged questions? Can you tell me like the things that you probably don't want me to read your username on, but I'll still answer it specifically for you? Because what I've realized is that nobody gives really non-PC advice about business building when they're on the climb, right?

17:40They definitely don't do it once they've made it to the top because you get knifed for telling the truth. So I want to hear from you and I also want to see you on September 18th. This book launch is going to be amazing. I've been obsessing on it. So let's make you the most profitable owner in all of your friend groups. We'll see you next time.

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