695: (Solo) I Was Winning. So Why Was I Falling Apart?

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1:03All right, so this one's heavy, but I have to share it. Welcome back to another solo episode, Founder to Founder. I share everything I've learned from building Founder, all my lessons, all my experiences these past 12, 13 years. So I started waking up in the middle of the night a few years ago with my heart beating really fast. and I remember thinking, why am I feeling this way? Like business is good, things are growing, everything's amazing, but something was wrong and I couldn't name it. I remember even saying to my mentor, like my head's not right, like I don't know what's going on and everything felt weird and I kept waking up like my heart beating really fast in the middle of the night and like with cold sweats and I didn't wanna go to work.

1:45And this is me, right? The guy who says life is too short to not do work you enjoy and I didn't want to go to work. So what I eventually recognized, and it's so wild, it took me like three, four weeks to work out, but I realized that I was burnt out. I didn't actually recognize it because I'd never experienced burnout before. And when I say burnt out, like deeply burnt out, like I had absolutely no idea it was coming. And today I want to talk to you about what burnout actually looks like when everything on paper is going right. And what I had to learn the hard way to pull myself out of it in hopes that this might be able to impact you in some way, shape or form.

2:25Nathan Chan:Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

2:38So just for context, I went really hard on Founder for the first seven years, I'd say seven, and eight years and we had a really good run the business kept doubling tripling every year I was in my zone of genius often I was just having fun and you know it was a real it was a real real like crazy and still is a crazy ride and I had no off switch like to put into context if I wasn't seeing my family or spending time with my girlfriend at the time I wasn't seeing my friends and I didn't have anything in the calendar I would be working so every spare moment that I was awake I was either doing one of those things, spending time with friends, doing something, seeing my family or spending time with my girlfriend or I'd be working.

3:20And I had no off switch and it felt like I was on a really good run. Everything I touched turned to gold. Somebody once said that I read it on a, on like a Facebook post after I talked about a new product that we launched and new milestones every quarter, podcast was blowing up, magazine was growing, building our education, building the team, all of it was working. And I need you to understand that part because burnout didn't show up for me when things were going badly. It showed up at the best run of my professional life. And you keep going, you keep going and you don't realize you need to stop because why would you?

3:54You're winning. And then COVID hit. And for those of us here in Melbourne, Australia, we had some of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Like I think we actually held the record for the longest cumulative lockdown of any city on the planet. It was ridiculous. The isolation, the uncertainty, the walls closing in. I think we even shut down our whole city off like five cases. But, you know, the walls closing in, not just on the business, but you as a person, it was tough. And somewhere in that period, around 2021, everything caught up with me. And this is what people don't tell you about burnout.

4:31It doesn't feel like exhaustion. Well, not at first. it started for me waking up at 3am heart pounding and the weird part was there was no crisis like there was no crisis there was no like we were running out of money I didn't know how I was going to make payroll there was no deal falling apart there was no emergency email I wasn't being sued I was like it was none of that it was just me in the dark with my heart racing and this overwhelming feeling of dread that I just I couldn't explain and then came this crippling anxiety and the specific word I want to share is crippling and it wasn't worry.

5:07It wasn't stress. It was the weight that made the idea of opening up my laptop or just doing work physically impossible. Like I didn't want to go to work and this is coming from me. Like that sentence is crazy. Like, cause I love work. I love what I do. So that should tell you kind of the depth. Real quick, before we jump in, I want to shout out one of our sponsors, zero. I've used zero from day one of Founder, 13 years now, and it's still how we run the business today. It's cloud accounting software built for founders exactly like us, and it automates all the admin that I used to do when I first started Founder.

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6:10Of how deep it went. And I built my entire life around doing work I love. And I genuinely believe life is too short to not do work that you don't enjoy. So I couldn't even bring myself to show up to work. I mean, we had like a company wide retreat and I didn't even want to be there. and we were talking about how I'm going to scale a company, all this stuff. And I realized you can have all the success in the world, all the money in the bank, all these different things. But if you don't have your mental health, it's all worthless. And I mean, literally worthless. And I think what happens to leaders, especially founders, is you keep going and you keep going and you don't realize you've crossed the line until you're well past it.

6:49And there's no alarm that goes off. There's no dashboard. You just wake up one day and you realize you've been running on empty. for months. So here's how I think about it now. And I wish this is something that someone had told me this before I hit a wall. Life is a scale and you've got family, you've got your relationship, you've got your friends, and you've got work and your career. And it's kind of like a constant balance of feeding them all evenly. But here's the truth. Nobody's going to have them all evenly fed. That's impossible. What actually happens is you might be really feeding the work side, pouring into it and that means your relationship might suffer or your time with family drops off or you haven't seen your friends in months and that's okay for a while but the problem isn't that the scale tips the problem is when you don't recognize it's tipped and you don't rebalance and for me i'd been feeding the work side of the scale for so long like so many years straight i'd convinced myself i was fine because the results were good revenue was up team was growing content was performing but the other side of the scale my health my relationships my ability just to even be present it had been starving and i didn't see it until it all came crashing down so the rebalancing is the work recognizing where you're over indexed and making sure your cup is full and admitting it and and deliberately scheduling time to refill your cup that's not a weakness like i think of it like you are a racehorse and if you're a best performing racehorse you are not racing all year round you spend time in the paddock and the conversation i had with one of the founders of reddit steve huffman he changed how i think about this i was interviewing him he co-founded reddit it's one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world the largest public forum in human history incredible impact product of true significance and i asked him is it ever enough and he said no.

8:41And I think that's one of the biggest lies and tricks that your mind plays on you. We all tell ourselves, when I get to this, then things will be amazing. When I hit this revenue number, it'll be amazing. When I get to this many subscribers, when I hire this person, when I'm not doing this part of my job, or when I've offloaded everything to my team, or when I launch this product, it'll all be amazing. When I launch this marketing campaign, but it's never enough, because then you tell yourself another lie. Well, I've hit this, what could I hit next? And I haven't reached my fullest potential. There's always bigger, there's always better, and all this kind of stuff.

9:11So don't get me wrong. The drive is real. It is required. It is necessary. And I've said this many times that building anything of true worth and significance, it has to be an obsession. But the thing I didn't understand for a long time is that obsession without boundaries will eat you alive. So what changed for me? I'll tell you. First, and this is the simplest one, I started meditating. Now, during that phase in my life, I was meditating two times a day. I don't meditate two times a day. Now I try and meditate once, twice, three times a week, four times a week. Nothing fancy, no retreats. I use the Headspace app.

9:44I've interviewed the founder, Andy Puttycomb. Love that interview. It's an oldie, but a goodie. Make sure you check it out. And I'll be honest, I used to struggle to switch off. My mind was always in the business, always on. So I find hobbies. I find things that relax me. I love gaming. I love playing Fortnite. I love playing pickleball. When I see my family, I leave my phone at the front of the door. There's the table at the front of the door, I leave it there. I really try and make sure that I have scheduled rituals of time out. I go to the gym every day now. I have regular saunas. I love bathing.

10:19I love going to bathhouses. I love going to sauna and cold. This is part of who I am and I have rituals to make sure that I have scheduled downtime. And I really try and practice to be present in other areas of my life. I speak to a therapist. I think that is very, very healthy. We go to the gym to train our muscles. You need to go and do therapy to train your mind. I find it incredibly powerful and it's not a taboo topic. I'll speak openly about it. I think it's very, very, very healthy. I did acupuncture. I did float tanks. I don't do as many of these things, but you see how I've started to spend more time to refill Nathan, to spend more time to do things for Nathan and it's incredibly powerful.

11:02And I had to push things to an extreme to get where I am. And it's a balance, right? It's a constant balance that you're never going to fully get right. And that is okay. Nobody has figured this out. So if you are in it right now and you are listening to this and you are waking up in the middle of the night and you don't know why, I just want you to know it happened to me too. It doesn't mean you're broken. It just means you need to take care of the person who's building this thing because otherwise you're good to know one. So I hope you enjoyed this episode a little bit raw a little bit vulnerable not so much business tactics but it's an important one guys i hope you enjoy this solo podcast shoot me a dm we'd love to hear from you and please share this with two or three of your friends that have found us we work so hard to make this podcast awesome to help you guys however we can and uh that's it from me i'll see another episode