“We are the people we have been waiting for.”
David Ogilvy
On one side we experience burnout.
Burnout is the feeling you get when the job requires more resources than currently available.
”The job” is not necessarily your career, it is the required output needed to keep you going where you’re going. You can feel burned out with family, friends, a new city, etc…
The reason burnout exists is because we run out of clarity. A big target without the requisite clarity to make forward progress will create the ingredients for burnout. Quick lesson on this if you have the time to listen:
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On the other end of the burnout spectrum we have boredom.
Boredom feels almost the same as burnout but it’s caused from different things.
- Over-accumulation of energy (not enough expenditure)
- Targets are too small to make a difference
- Your biggest goals and ideas are behind you
Boredom is, in my opinion, worse than burnout because it atrophies you down until you are weak and immobile. Burnout, though tiresome, at least gives you an edge. Boredom gives you no such edge, it simply makes you tired for no reason.
Ryan Bush, author of “Designing The Mind” writes:
Happiness is equal to the sum of three components: subjective life satisfaction, positive emotion, and the absence of negative emotion.
If we were to prioritize these in order of importance, here’s what we would get:
- Absence of negative emotion
- As a byproduct: subjective life satisfaction
- Positive emotion
The most important thing for us to create is a life free from negativity. Price Pritchett, M&A consultant and author of the book “You Squared,” says that negative thoughts are 10 times as powerful as positive thoughts. The secret isn’t just to think positive; it’s to avoid thinking negative.
He writes: “If you’re like most people, you’ll fail to perceive about 70% of your downbeat thoughts. You’ll let them sneak into your mind via the five C-words.”
Areas of negativity
- Concerns (worrying)
- Complaining (describing things you do not like)
- Criticizing (placing judgement where you should not be)
- Commiserating (engaging in people’s drama and misery)
- Catastrophizing (tilting everything towards the ‘worst case’ scenario)
If you want to begin to remove these areas of negativity, here’s my advice: get busy. Go do something worth doing and worth talking about. Your mind cannot allocate resources everywhere, all the time, at the same time.
It will have to pick & choose, and therein lies the opportunity.
Pick a direction.
Then run towards it.
You will have less time to entertain dysfunctional thoughts when your available resources are being used for progress.