Burnout

“When in computer science, often you'll hear people say like, hey, like maybe I'm a system design architect, right? And I, my job is to think about like what the big distributed system is going to look like in Google search. Well, you don't spend every minute o…”

“Lazy people always say they're burnt out... But the people that complain about burnout, I think deserve a scarlet L burned into their forehead and don't hire them.”

“Sastra connect, which is this new hiring platform. We're going to actively search for anyone that says burnout in their bio, and we're going to give them a quiet demotion, massive demotion.”

“When it comes to significant burnout, burnout, that's higher than moderate. We've gone up from 44.7% in 2025 to 54.7% in 2026. So burnout is surging. More than half of our sample are feeling significantly burnt out at this point.”

“As we ship faster than ever, as we move from shipping, you know, a couple of PRs a day to 30 PRs a day, or just doing so much more in some ways that might be fun, but we are burning out more than we did before. And we're not working any less hard clearly, righ…”

“If we look just at burnout specifically, then you can see very clearly here that burnout climbs in very significant ways. In between working for a small one to 10 person startup and working for a 5000 or 10,000 person enterprise company.”

“One thing we saw people who feel amplified and energized reporting is that they actually went deep on specific tasks and specific jobs to be done rather than trying to be the generalist who does everything. I think it's the people who try to be Or lean too muc…”

“Placing all your bets on one idea is very risky, both emotionally and financially. This can quickly lead to burnout”

“You get burned out doing work that, you know, where you don't feel like you're winning.”

“Unfortunately, today, most people seek nourishment in movies, in, you know, scrolling on the social media. They feel that is what is, you know, decreasing the stress without realizing that actually subtly increasing the stress. It is not helping you relax. It …”

“If anyone can do these five things, one of these five things every day for at least 15 minutes to an hour, it will have a massive impact on their own life and ensure that they don't burn out and they're filling up their well again and again.”

“I think burnout actually happens because we don't have processes. If we had processes, and systems, and people, and ways that we followed along to things, we wouldn't burn out.”

“Especially for product people who are you know, so much of their self identity is wrapped up in having the answers, being competent, getting things done. And so many of them have been people who have been really good at that for most of their careers, which is…”

“You burn out, not because you're just spending too many hours on something you burn out because like, you don't have that sort of energy sustaining environment that allows you to kind of go beyond what you might expect yourself to be able to do.”

“And boys' nights are a good way to counter burnout, right? Because burnout's usually a symptom of something not working in your business, but if you hang out with your boys, they can help give you that clarity, gas you up, give you that extra conviction to kee…”

“The more homogenous your life and career and job is, the faster you're gonna burn out.”

“Fear is kind of obvious, but if I put a gun to your head, You're going to run faster than you've ever run in your life. So the benefit of fear is it's super effective. And that's one of the cool things about this paradigm is it never argues, because one of the…”

“Sometimes what people do is they take on all these ideas and they're cranking the treadmill up to a sprinting speed. And that's cool for a little bit. And you're getting the dopamine hit and you're getting that reward for that. But pretty soon the dopamine wea…”

“Yeah, so I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon, and basically what that means is when we are showing early signs of burnout, our body will give us feedback, usually in subtle ways in the beginning. So the feather might be waking …”

“There was a research report that I did a couple of years ago where we interviewed these leaders And they'd all experienced burnout of some degree. And we said, if you were to estimate like how much this costs your startup or business, what would you say? And t…”

“The biggest risk to content creation of any sort is quitting soon because you get burned out. The biggest risk is not that you grow too slow initially.”

“Once you get into burnout, it's really hard to undo. Usually you have to take months off.”

“I think like burnout occurs when your batteries get drained and it doesn't mean you've worked 60 hour weeks. It doesn't mean you are like burning the candle at both ends. It probably means you're just doing things that don't get you fired up. And, or with peop…”

“Burnout is not a function of time and energy like a lot of people think.”

“If you have a toxic culture, you could be working four hours a day and be miserable because you feel you're not treated with respect. You feel you can't speak up, you can't express yourself, and that's when we burn out. It's not because we are working hard and…”

“And so I actually think velocity is a way to potentially avoid burnout. I'm not asking people to work, you know, unless hours a week, I'm asking people to get out of their own way and to focus on, on what truly matters, which is building great products for our…”

“One of the biggest things, if you do encounter burnout and you go into full-fledged burnout, a big thing you have to do is just stop working. You know, sometimes it's a month or two, and it's usually when you feel like you can't do that, and I'm nowhere near t…”

“And I just think it's gonna take you longer to bootstrap a company. So you're signing up for 1015, 20 years of your life. If you don't put in boundaries soon enough you know, it could, you'll burn out like anybody else.”

“You start it with lots of excitement, You get your first couple users, and you're super enthused, and then the bug reports come in, you start fixing those in your nights and evenings, and if you're successful, you get more and more and more bug reports, and mo…”

“Burnout is something that you aren't always totally aware of in the moment, or you might know that you're tired or you're exhausted but you don't really know the extent. That's the kind of thing that like, until you stop everything, like you put everything dow…”

“I personally now can pretty cleanly like tell the difference between exhaustion and depression and It tends to tie to my broader motivations, not just my motivation to work, right? So like, the, like, when I'm exhausted, I will, I'll still show up to work, I'l…”

“The one that I see the most is, is a, like, adaptability goes down really fast. And this is more me noticing, like, I, I've managed a lot of people and coached a lot of people, and so, like, when I see that from people that I'm working with, I, like, I usually…”

“Oftentimes it's not because your work, you didn't care about your work, or your work is boring, or it sucked. Oftentimes it's because you got so involved in your work is really your identity right now.”

“Solitude, I think when you're experiencing this, the depersonalization, which is like rich cynicism, you know, I get it. It's like, I don't want to deal with people anymore. But ultimately that's allowing us, that's forcing us to lose out on this one mechanism…”

“And we described this term burnout as creative output without direction.”

“Burnout literally makes our brains less flexible and less fluid. It's not the best state of mind in which to make a really significant decision.”

“They were really experts in their field, but they weren't necessarily experts in running a successful business. And so we were noticing a pretty high burnout rate and an imbalance in health and wellness and an imbalance in their life and their business where T…”

“I think if you try to really increase the clock speed and sort of cadence at which you move, but there are no results, I think that leads to burnout very quickly. At least for me, and potentially for you as well, and for many people I've talked to, working har…”

“And I think the root of a lot of them is people pleasing and worthiness. And that's something that so many of us struggle And that we use working, overworking, and over delivering to mask the core underlying emotional things that don't just go away overnight.”

“Depression or burnout or whatever other folks would call it is really a result of stress and unrecognized stress based on me trying to get control of things I cannot control. And that's the fundamental thing that really burns me out is when I'm trying to get c…”

“I feel like it's in some way easier to burn out when it's something you're really excited about and care for”

“We are living under a collective delusion that burnout is the way to succeed.”

“I think you can certainly take it too far and really Push people to work crazy, crazy hours, and I'm not sure there's a much incremental upside there, and there's a risk of huge burnout.”

“At least in my own experience, what I found is that burnout actually comes from failing and things not working. Momentum is really energizing. The lack of momentum is super draining.”