Burnout as a strategy problem

Without a real strategy, your options are brute force or luck.

Burnout is a major issue in startups and scaleups. Fueled by 10-15 years of Silicon Valley media, the trope is that people have to destroy themselves so they can show up to the next meetup and take pride in pretending that they're "crushing it." This stress + inauthenticity leads to burnout and to more serious mental health issues.

Don't get me wrong: I'm 100% in support of hard work. It's essential. But redlining, maxing out, burning the candle at both ends, etc., must be temporary by definition. It is unsustainable.

What I want to flag for product leaders is how burnout intersects with strategy. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

I assert that the root cause for much burnout is an absence of strategy. Because leaders haven't made the hard choices about strategy, they have to brute force it.

The most important, and resisted, part of strategy is focus. This is saying "here are all the really good ideas we are not going to do, so we can channel everything into this one thing that will break through."

Strategy is about what sounds good, but we're not doing.

Practically, this means that a strategy must only have 1 top priority. A list of 3+ priorities is no priorities. And having any articulated, concise strategy is already doing better than most.

There's a saying that startups don't starve, they drown in opportunity. It means that companies have so many potential opportunities to pursue that they spread themselves too thin and nothing breaks through. This is the "peanut butter strategy."

Without a real strategy, your options are brute force or luck.

Doing the hard thinking and making tough choices—saying no to good things—might deliver the outcomes the business needs. It's impossible to know in advance.

But it will support your mental and physical health.

Strategy or burnout. Often, that's the real choice at hand.