August 19, 2025 • 28 mins
Think successful founders never take vacations? Think again. We bust the myth that grinding 24/7 equals success and share why stepping away might be the smartest business move you'll make this year.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
But I think there's also a fundamental like I don't trust
you. Yeah.
And I think you know what reallydangerous.
We we explicitly told our staff to like get out of the office at
5K and we were not, we were not setting an expectation.
We could have done both like I, so you could say we respect your
personal time so much. And we did that.
We were like, stop working at 5:00.
I would go around people's ass. I would close laptop lids.
(00:22):
I would say get out of here. I'd call people and Zoom, if
they were still on Zoom. Be like, what are you doing
here? Big ideas.
Smart turn the ground. Into a joy ride.
You're a founder? Nope.
The startup I was. You ever been one?
Yeah. Yeah, a couple years ago now,
(00:44):
yeah. So what I want to talk about is
vacations. Love them.
Hate them? Why?
They're amazing. Why would you hit vacation?
Because you were for employees. For you, for the founder.
For you, the founder. Yeah.
So I think that's a really good question because I want to have
this this confrontation with youbecause it's going to be a
(01:05):
confrontation. Old like dude can I choose a
weapon? Alright, maybe we need to give
the background, the vacation history of the two of us and
explain that to the audience first.
It's not fair. Well, why don't you?
Explain. OK, so Chris never goes on,
never went on vacation, like period.
For a lot of reasons, I would say, and we can get into this,
(01:26):
but I would say the the there was a lot of fear there that
something would go wrong and you'd be on vacation, something
would go wrong, you'd have to deal with it.
You were escalated support. We can talk about that.
I actually have a ton of thoughts on this.
You're not gonna like them. Then on the flip side, I went on
vacation probably every four months.
I was gonna say like 4 * a year,pretty much every three months.
(01:47):
Yeah, you definitely did it. My wife vacation.
He did a spring vacation. You had a summer vacation.
You definitely did something like in the fall as.
Well, maybe. Yeah, quite some.
Good vacation, yeah. Yeah.
But I mean like OK nature of thejob though too, like sales
versus like? Most.
Specifically tech support, Yeah,is the thing that really
prevented you from doing vacations, right?
(02:07):
If it was just building new code, you could have gone on
vacation. So what's what's so your history
of vacation was you're probably taking a one or two week
vacation maybe like 3 to 4 times.
I didn't like more than two weeks.
I would probably do 2 weeks likeonce and then I would do a
couple of small ones. Like one week vacation.
Probably all in. I'd be like 4 weeks of vacation
(02:28):
here. OK, so basically I wanna put out
there is, is this a myth? OK, founders don't take
vacations ever. Is that a business with?
It is because I think the best founders take vacations.
Really. Yeah, I do.
Does that. I'm not taking a shot at you.
(02:51):
OK. Can I tell you why I think that?
Alright, yeah, I might get. It's probably gonna detail into
some of your points. OK.
I think vacation and being able to go on a vacation is a test of
how well you've built your business, your business model,
how well you scaled your role inthat business and, and basically
how dependent the business is onyou, right?
(03:13):
So you, I'm going to do a reallyquick diagnosis and we can go
deeper into this. But so you felt and I think
actually accurately, that you couldn't go on a vacation
because what would happen inevitably is you would go on
vacation, you go somewhere, you would get a support call.
(03:33):
It would be of critical urgency and you'd be out of pocket.
It would be really, really hard.Or even if you're on an
aircraft, for example. Yeah.
And you would be terrified because no matter how long the
flight is like 3 hours long, yoube like, I gotta make sure.
And this didn't really change even when we added the staff who
I think we're pretty competent, you know, like Austin, like our
senior developers, like one of our like the first coder after
you was great. Yeah, yeah, Mind you, there's a
(03:55):
ramp up period you could have done in the early days, but I do
think he could have done it. And but I think what what a
couple of things here 1 is you created accidentally a
dependency. You created a dependency that
you had to handle the most serious customer support.
So why? Because ultimately the buck
stops with you. You were going to get yelled at
if something broke, you were going to face that customer
(04:16):
wrath and you didn't want that. Cool.
Get that second life saving software.
Our software was in the businessof helping inform people in an
emergency or in cases like directly involved in saving a
life. Yeah, OK, that's pretty intense.
That's a burden. Third thing, we never created
adequate systems for escalation of customer support and for the
(04:40):
sort of like burden sharing of escalated customer support.
We learned about this after we were required, right tools that
did this a lot better where it wasn't just going to be Chris,
it was on call. So this is very common in
software. Talking to the audience is very
common in software that you willhave a senior developer or
probably a couple that are available 24/7 and they do this
in shifts. OK, so you know these this week,
(05:03):
it's this person. So what does this mean?
You cannot go to the club and get blackout drunk because you
are on call. And by the way, this is common
in a lot of advanced professions.
Doctors are on call like it's not unusual.
So, so these people have to be, you know, kind of put together
for a week and if something comes through from the customer
(05:25):
support team, because customer support would also have somebody
who's so they're like the first level support and that escalated
support would be the developer and probably be somebody beyond
that. And that's probably when you get
to your CEO level of escalation,like very serious mission
critical issue. We just didn't do that.
You were escalated customer support and you were level 2
support. You wouldn't, you didn't feel
comfortable to let the staff take on the development staff to
(05:47):
take on those customer support issues.
That is accurate and. So, but you put yourself in a
box. So then you like, you couldn't
do it. You couldn't give it.
Up. I also didn't think it was very
fair to put them in that position.
Why? You're paying them, you bonus
them, they have responsibilities.
We told them it might happen someday.
Job description. Yeah, like.
You're a nice. Guy.
(06:07):
Well, like the problem I. Think part of it too.
If you weren't such a nice guy, if you're real bastard would be
a lot easier this whole thing. I I like our staff.
I still like our staff people. Yeah, yeah, I'm not.
It's. Not being mean to.
Them there I did have an issue with.
I didn't want to inflict that onthem.
Because what was the fear there?That they would quit.
Ohhhhh yeah, maybe that it was too much.
(06:32):
You know, our staff were also pretty young.
They were right out of school. There's a lot of responsibility
when you've only been working for a year or two.
Which made me but. Like.
But scary this persisted for many years.
This this wasn't. Austin would have been at some
.5 years with us. OK, yeah, alright.
Well, look, I, I'm just telling you the way it is.
(06:53):
I'm just, you know, like right or wrong or whatever.
But like that, that was my thinking on it, was that I
didn't think it was fair to do it to them.
I didn't I, I think that I had avery like my overall view of our
systems to be able to support it.
So I could pretty much fix anything.
And whereas our staff are a little bit more siloed, they
knew their piece. So that's I would say that's a
(07:13):
second dependency. Exactly.
There was the piece of it. It was really.
So if somebody called for support after hours are our
phone system would actually say we're currently closed.
We do have emergency support. If it's a emergency situation,
press 1. If it's a non-emergency
(07:34):
situation, press 2. So pressing one went to a call
centre that would actually answer the call.
So they immediately got got to speak to a person.
Yeah, OK. That person would then take the
name and number of the person that called.
I would call. This change of the I.
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that would not exist
now because I would do it. But the with the alternative was
it would it would send them to avoice mailbox where they would
(07:56):
leave No. And that's about terrible.
Terrible SO. Well, no, no, no, the the number
for non non-emergency. So but for the emergency stuff,
it would it would eventually getto me.
And they always got to talk to like a like a real human.
That was just an answering service that took down the
information. And that gave me just a little
bit of a break that I could, youknow, I would get a text message
(08:17):
actually with the details of thecall.
I would actually do. Research with the CD or I would
sometimes do that. Actually very rarely.
So I, I would research like whatis actually going on and then I
would call them. So I, when I, they picked up the
phone, I already knew what was going on.
And a lot of times I had a resolution already.
So I was just bringing in good news.
And that was how I protected myself from getting potentially
(08:39):
yelled at, you know, that something went wrong and it was
very rare that it happened. It might have happened, I don't
know, once every two months or something.
Oh no. Way less than that.
I think like like 3 * a year. Yeah.
We get OHT after hours. So you're really worried about
are? Also part of it OK is that
alright? I'm gonna let I'm gonna tell an
employee hey this weekend. Yeah.
(09:00):
You know, you can't really go out and hang out with your
friends because. No, they can't.
They just can't get blackout drunk.
They even have a beer or two. Yeah, well, or whatever they
wanna. Do you can see how anxious I am
even just talking about this? So I, I, I it was.
Obviously uncomfortable, I. Know I can't sit straight
because. We zoom in on him, zoom in on
him, like, like, can we just? Get we need these.
Don't do that. Please don't do that.
(09:21):
Anymore thanks SO. So the reality.
So let's get back to the no no. No, I like this.
Can I wait for? Me hang on, hang on, can I go to
me going on vacation though? OK, so so here's so agreed
intensity difference, urgency, different importance, different
for for customer service, right in that nature, something
(09:42):
something breaking with life saving software is really
important. So yeah.
So this was the reason, though, yeah, getting back to the topic
of the episode, is that that's why I didn't like going on
vacation, right? Or I always did vacations that
were very close to laptop, closeto no long flights, No, no out
of communication, no, you know. That kind of stuff.
OK, hang on. I have a few thoughts.
(10:03):
The other thing I'll just say isthat for me, so I, I managed 2
teams at like my peak business, the operations team which was
deploying mobile application, the mobile applications and the
sales team. Sales team, pretty easy.
Hey guys, if there's any big demo that comes up, push it to
when I'm back. And otherwise, I trust you to be
able to handle about 99% of demos.
It was very rare that there was some that need to be demoed that
(10:25):
like I absolutely had to be on it.
I, I would come in on big deals cause I wanted to show that we
were serious. That kind of stuff like, you
know, Phil Knight kind of move for, you know, like whenever the
big deal. And then I would do, I do demos
myself too, cause I wanna hear from customer, understand the
market, what's going on. Then on the implementation side,
it was like, OK, guys, keep doing your work without me.
This person will be in charge while I'm gone.
(10:45):
If you need escalations, work through them.
And then if it's like a technical issue, just go through
the normal channels back to customer support.
It was like very easy, but therewas like systematized process.
We had like documentation we had, we had a way of doing it.
So I would say that like that's why for me, I felt less stressed
about it. The other thing I wanna put on
your radar was that I would argue that some of this is
because you are older, OK. You have had jobs before.
(11:10):
You had bosses that with that because you were making software
for like it was kind of a weird relationship, but you were
making software for a boss and that boss looked down on people
going on vacation. It was an old school mentality.
It still exists, you know, send us a message if your boss
doesn't like it when you go on vacation.
But and I think you felt that you were also shirking
(11:32):
responsibility, right? I don't think it's just about
operations. I think you felt like you were
getting behind. You were leaving something
behind. You were letting people down.
You were doing or in some cases,your boss was just being a jerk
and guilting you about you goingaway.
So I think that conflated with because think about when you had
century file. You also wouldn't go on
vacations. Remember when we went to Europe
years and years ago, you had that little shitty Wi-Fi dongle?
(11:56):
Yeah, barely works. Yeah.
And we're ripping on a train somewhere and you're like trying
to answer that wasn't life saving software.
Yeah, I know. Those document management, yeah,
come on, you know, But I think there's a guilt complex there.
Yeah, OK. So.
The Graham on this, do you thinkso?
You've read the best, now try the rest.
(12:18):
Wait, who wrote this? Check out Startup Different on
Amazon, Audible, and Kindle. So the podcast viewer listener
has heard kind of like both sides of the coin here on and
they agree with me. You know, psycho never gonna
take a vacation and the hey, pretty reasonable take a few
vacations, recharge the batteries, be productive and and
(12:41):
have it. So so you know, I, I wanted to
try and figure out whether it was a myth that founders don't
take vacations ever and the reality is, is actually
partially true. Can I throw some stats at you?
All right, so 48% of entrepreneurs experienced
feelings of burnout. If you're ever feeling turned
out totally OK, 55% of startup founders have delayed vacations
(13:02):
or time off due to workload, increasing burnout risk.
Well, yeah, here's an HBR 1. Vacation whenever, but OK.
HBR suggests that about 70% of CEOs work during their
vacations. 100% Yeah, well, I agree.
I agree, yeah. Well, OK, hang on.
So this isn't totally fair. You're characterizing it a
(13:24):
little bit differently. So burnout, 48% is less than
half, First off, so I'm just gonna say that.
So more, more than half go on vacations.
Second is that burnout is silentlike debt.
It's like a different form of debt, like technical debt.
Yeah, But for for creativity, for for moving your business for
it, It's a real issue, right. And I do agree that you need
(13:48):
time away to recharge those batteries and be better at your
own jobs. You will be further.
Here's an interesting one. OK, so in startups, OK, most
employees put in about 50 to 60 hours per week.
But do you know that most founders put in 6200 hours per
week on average? On average, Yeah.
Founders. Are so there's a huge range
(14:09):
that's almost 100%. But yeah, no, it, it is a huge
range, OK, but. OK, but still like more than the
average? Yeah.
And here in other states, 40% ofstand up startup founders work
more than 60 hours per week. OK.
So like there's a real risk of burnout.
OK. And so, yeah, and 32% of
entrepreneurs work more than 70 hours per week per week.
(14:30):
So huge burnout risk. And, you know, I, I got to think
that I'm in that category that I, I probably didn't realize
that at the time because it was just life, but I think it was
pretty burned out. Yeah, you in the end, I I don't
think. That I was burned up by the end
too, and I wasn't, I wasn't taking the same vacations as
everybody else as I was before. Yeah, but OK, a couple of things
(14:52):
like 1 is like there's a time and a place for vacation.
You kind of mentioned that like people will still work on
vacation or they defer vacation because they need to do work.
Like I agree with that. Like I think there are times
when you do have to be availablein those situations where did
even though you've planted as well as possible, like you might
have to do something or something comes up and
interferes. Like that makes sense to me.
(15:14):
I fortunately had a cofounder who was working his ass off and
who could fill in the gaps for me while I was away.
You were even courteous enough to not tell me about the
shitstorms that were happening cause they were just constant
things happening. Wow.
Till I came back, which was great.
Yeah. So I get like an e-mail because
I would check my emails at usually at night.
So I worked every day of my vacation by that, by that.
(15:36):
Match you were doing, I would check.
An e-mail every night, yeah, OK.And I would I and but I would
let the emails go all day. I would turn off my
notifications on my phone yeah. So I didn't wanna see them at
the end of the day. I would pile.
I look at them like, OK, it's anything on fire.
What happened here? Yeah, and you know, once I get a
real nasty one, I'd be like, I'dcall you cause I'd be like, oh
geez, what happened with this one?
Yeah. So actually that's a best
practice. If you're a founder and you're
(15:56):
on vacation and you're in that situation, you do need to kind
of be somewhat connected. But what you do is you time box
it. You say 1 hour each day.
I'm going to check my emails, check my slide messages,
whatever, and then I'm shutting it off.
And it worked really at that point too, you're not really
even answering everything. You're just basically.
Like. Crisis identifying Is there a
crisis? I'll deal with this later.
(16:17):
I used this news feature a lot now in G Suite.
Oh yeah, which is really good. I didn't actually use it back
then but I wish I had because I would have just like snoozed
this to when I'm. Back I had it back then I feel
kind of. But I think like, so like I have
a lot of thoughts on this if youwant me to weigh in on what
other impacts here. Yeah.
So like, so that that doesn't that data doesn't terribly
surprise me. OK.
(16:37):
That a lot of people like defer vacation or don't work on there,
like can't struggle with gettingaway.
Yeah. I think it says a bunch of
things about your company, though.
So on the one hand, it's like it's passion, OK.
Yeah. But I think this is the great
fallacy, kind of like hitting usin the face.
There is an expectation that youmust work like this to have a
(16:57):
startup be successful. And that is wrong.
OK, Like it, yes, you have to work hard.
Yes, you want to move the business forward.
But think about like Jess Chan with like long play.
Think about like a lot of these companies that we, that we
interviewed in past seasons, thepeople were like, look, it's a
marathon, not a Sprint. You're running at a good pace.
Yeah. You know, I listen to the
(17:19):
Friends of Lenny podcast, which is really interesting.
Let's cool. Very down to earth dude.
And he interviewed the CEO, cofounder of Anthropic and the
big AI company. And that guy even talks about
how like, it's a marathon. And this is, this is like #2 in
AI is about as big as it gets, about as hot as it gets right
now, selling like hotcakes. OK.
(17:42):
That to me was really interesting that even he
understood this. So there's a risk to pushing
yourself. And there's also a cost.
There's a cost to pushing yourself this hard.
Yeah. Aside from having shittier
vacations or no vacations, does cost your family, cost your
friendships? There's social cost, health
costs. And Grant, we're talking about a
(18:02):
minute ago. Like it's, it's the real deal.
Like, so I think that what what is overlooked in this or what is
the the assumption is that if I work harder at this, it's more
likely to be successful. And that includes accepting a
certain level of burnout. And I don't know if that's true.
I think that's something I can'tdefinitively say that's not
true, but I can imagine that I know that burnout is bad.
(18:24):
Yeah. I actually think that the more,
if you make yourself more likelyto burn out, I think your
startup is more likely to fail. Yeah, by the same rationale that
you think you have to work a super hard on it.
Yeah, and the. Same line of thought.
Gets you there even if you don'tlike burn out.
I think the thing that gets overlooked there is that when
you're working a lot of hours, your creativity is gone, gone.
You are just grinding, right? And I, I think the vacations and
(18:49):
just slowing the pace and being more like a marathon instead of
a Sprint brings back the creativity.
And the creativity is the, the way that you find the, the new
system that you can implement tomake yourself more efficient
and, and scale your business more effectively and those types
of things. And I think, I think there were
times that I probably, I'm definitely guilty of this, that
I work too hard and couldn't seethe forest for the trees.
(19:12):
You know, I, I love that saying because yeah, it's kind of like,
yeah, you're so in the day-to-day of the business, you
just don't, you can't step back and see, hey, how can I actually
make this better longer term? How can I, how can I automate,
eliminate or delegate? And I you just.
Forget about just keep doing what you just keep doing what
you know. I like how I built this, another
great podcast with lots of interesting founders.
(19:33):
But you know, what's fascinatingis most of the time in those
episodes, pick any startup, any industry.
Yeah. The founders usually end up
being done by year, 8:00 to 10:00.
Somewhere in there. Why?
They're exhausted. Yeah.
Yeah. I think they also wanna get, you
know, their payday. That's what they were working
for. Yeah.
But there. There's so many different costs
(19:54):
to this. The other thing I want.
OK, let's shift gears for a little bit here.
What does it say to your employees if you never have
vacation? Right.
Like, I think that this says a lot.
So on the one hand, it says thisis my expectation.
This is how I work. I.
Actually the same, unless you explicitly tell them otherwise,
which you did, which we did, which I, I don't know how I feel
(20:16):
about all the time. The second thing is, yeah, so
that that was basically on. This is my expectation for your
work, your workload, or what I think you ought to do.
But I think there's also a fundamental like I don't trust
you. And I think what really
dangerous we, we explicitly toldour staff to like get out of the
office at 5K and we were, we were not setting an expectation.
That I've done both like so you could say we respect your
(20:39):
personal time so much. And we did that.
We were like, stop working at 5:00.
I would go around in people's ass.
I would close laptop lids. Yeah, I would say get out of
here. I'd call people and Zoom, if
they were still on Zoom, be like, what are you doing here?
Yeah, when we were doing the pandemic.
Yeah. But then like I and I think that
was good. But at the same time, I think
you say there's there's no such thing as a free lunch.
(21:00):
So what's the other side of this?
At that time, it was. We expect you to work really
hard to believe what we're doing.
But. And I think that still remains
true. But in addition, it should also
ban. And if you're in customer
service or if you're in softwaredevelopment, you will have an
escalated support responsibility.
Yeah, I don't think that would have been a reach.
Yeah. And people, we had a good
(21:20):
culture people, didn't it? Yeah.
You know, I think there was justa lot of I So I worry that it
also sends a message to employees that I don't trust
you. And that's a really big negative
message to send. Once you start losing trust or
violating the trust of your employees, it's almost
impossible to get it back. OK.
I know you're thinking about your next thought, but I think
that's another thing that you might take for granted if you
(21:42):
don't. Feel well thinking about is how
knowing all this stuff, I would still struggle with it.
I would still struggle with likewalking out.
And every founder listening to this, we'll struggle with these
concepts. It's we're all control freaks.
Yeah. And it's hard to let go control
because having the control that you have now or perhaps not
taking vacations, in your mind, you have equated with your
(22:03):
current level of success, right.So you were like, I just don't
want to blow this. That's a lot of it, right?
There's so much fear as an entrepreneur.
So so. Let's leave the listeners with
some best practices on vacationsfor founders.
And I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I've, I've put together some that I've
researched and I, I like them and I'm going to put an asterisk
(22:25):
next to all this is that I wouldstruggle doing almost all this
stuff. OK, You would not as much.
I think you would struggle a bitwith it, but not as much.
So alright, so first one, I wantto, I want to kick out the best
practice. I want to get your comments on
it. So first, as you should have a
minimum vacation recommendation or a minimum vacation for
founders, for founders, OK, so you need to say not only do you
(22:49):
have 4 weeks of vacation, but you must take two weeks, three
weeks of those four weeks like you are forced to take.
Them, I agree with it, yeah. I think that would force you to
accept that you won't be in the office or won't be available and
force you to challenge the issues that you have that you
(23:09):
would normally address yourself.Yeah, it forces you to make
systems. Yeah, it forces you to make to
risk mitigate effectively. So the next best practice I
think when we talked about this is, is kind of like that
strategic approach to your time off.
So it is difficult to fully disconnect.
But time boxing a one hour or half an hour a day to look for
(23:30):
fires in your inbox or in your Slack messages are are is a good
way of doing it where you can maintain a little bit of a
connection. But in your mind, hey, by that
maybe you do it at I would do itin the morning so I could get
through it. I wouldn't do it at night
because I wouldn't sleep. So yeah.
So you get up in the morning at 7:00 on your end too, though,
(23:51):
right? 7:30 to 8:00.
I'm gonna check for fires. Then I can deal with any that
morning. So people are getting answers
early and then turn it. Off it, it, it, it so depends on
where you are in the world. Just it just before you get to
the next point and you get really, really matters.
If you're in Hawaii versus you're in Europe, then the
timing of when those emails comes in and when fires are
(24:12):
happening is different. So I don't know.
But yeah, I agree that there should be some sort of practice
there around managing, managing that sort of thing.
The other thing I wanna say too,when I was away on vacation, if
I didn't check my emails, I'd have a little freak out.
Yeah. Because you're all your
identities tied to it and you'rea lot of your wealth, your net
worth is tied to it. It's like if you're checking
like a huge investment. Yeah.
(24:33):
And you just going up and down through, whoa, going up and down
throughout the day. And I think that's kind of
things like you kind of need to know.
Yeah, I think that's healthy. Yeah, I think, OK.
So third, best practice there, there are some benefits to you
being gone in that you can use it as an opportunity to have
some of your key employees step up.
Yes, OK, and empower them to fill your shoes for a little
(24:55):
while and see how it goes. I think that's actually, I
wouldn't have thought of that. I, I, I, I think that's a really
interesting idea that that you can, you can do that.
Yeah, I think you have some guardrails on that, but I think,
yeah, that's a great idea. OK.
And then you know what, here's the other thing is your
employees would be excited to have that.
Yeah, that's that's a good thing.
So I found this that I wanna leave and there's your with with
(25:18):
a stat and I wanna get your. Does it bias the entire?
Conversation. Oh no, no, I just, I wanna just
put it out there and see what you say.
Alright, so we talked a bit about burnout and things like
that and they say that for the average recovery time for a
founder who is like considered like burnt out, how long do you
(25:40):
think they have to go without working before they're kind of
like emotionally back to normal?Six months.
Two years. Oh, wow.
Wow. So think of that consequence.
So this is the thing, like the conversation of, you know, I
can't let this thing fail, so I have to work really hard.
But if you work really hard, it fails because you're not there.
(26:03):
They're tied together. Like this is the thing that
people don't make that connection.
Yeah, this is my grid is a fallacy.
You can't grit your way to an exit because you'll actually
burn out before you get there, and it'll fail.
Yeah. It actually makes you closer to
failure. Yeah, and you know, it's, it's
weird. We've, I listened to some
podcast where they talk about like dopamine and how your brain
works and your neural pathways, how they get worn and things
(26:24):
like that. Yeah.
And I would totally agree that Ifeel like we've been done for a
little over 2 years. And I'd say I'm starting to get
back to normal. Like on, on that sort of stuff.
I'm starting to feel kind of like the tension release, you
know, whereas I feel like go back a year, I think I was still
very tense, but I think I'm kindof getting there.
(26:45):
So I actually think that stat isquite accurate that you probably
need an average of two years to sort of like mentally reset
after you like, you know, reallyleft it all on the field.
So I guess then that. Sort of self back back into to
one piece. That leads to the question
though, like do you feel more creative now?
Do you feel more in control? Do you getting there?
Yeah, but not quite 100%. Yet you say.
(27:08):
How does that make you feel? Tell me about your feeling.
Ohi don't make me talk about my feelings.
That's cool. That's an interesting topic.
I I think you're doing your company and yourself a service
to by going on vacation. And it's super counterintuitive
because it forces you to do all this stuff, build better
(27:29):
systems, risk mitigate Yeah, makes you more creative.
It gives your employees a chanceto step up, take a vacation for
the betterment of your company. The.
Creativity, but I think you're also really need to avoid the
burnout. Yeah, and and just that little
release valve of a vacation every few months to kind of
recenter yourself, do it strategically, follow best
(27:49):
practices, all that sort of stuff.
It doesn't have to be like a completely you're gone on a, you
know, deserted island on a beachwith no connectivity like you.
You could do some strategic things to to to make sure you're
not completely gone, but do it so that you can bring back that
creativity and avoid the burnoutthat you're potentially gonna
have with your. Startup burnout is failure, I
think a lot of the time. Yeah, cool.
(28:12):
Don't burn out. See you next week.
Let's get it. Rolling big ideas money hustle
smart dream so. Why?
Turn that grinding. Through a joy ride.
But I think there's also a fundamental like I don't trust
you. Yeah.
And I think you know what reallydangerous.
We we explicitly told our staff to like get out of the office at
5K and we were not, we were not setting an expectation.
We could have done both like I, so you could say we respect your
personal time so much. And we did that.
We were like, stop working at 5:00.
I would go around people's ass. I would close laptop lids.
(00:22):
I would say get out of here. I'd call people and Zoom, if
they were still on Zoom. Be like, what are you doing
here? Big ideas.
Smart turn the ground. Into a joy ride.
You're a founder? Nope.
The startup I was. You ever been one?
Yeah. Yeah, a couple years ago now,
(00:44):
yeah. So what I want to talk about is
vacations. Love them.
Hate them? Why?
They're amazing. Why would you hit vacation?
Because you were for employees. For you, for the founder.
For you, the founder. Yeah.
So I think that's a really good question because I want to have
this this confrontation with youbecause it's going to be a
(01:05):
confrontation. Old like dude can I choose a
weapon? Alright, maybe we need to give
the background, the vacation history of the two of us and
explain that to the audience first.
It's not fair. Well, why don't you?
Explain. OK, so Chris never goes on,
never went on vacation, like period.
For a lot of reasons, I would say, and we can get into this,
(01:26):
but I would say the the there was a lot of fear there that
something would go wrong and you'd be on vacation, something
would go wrong, you'd have to deal with it.
You were escalated support. We can talk about that.
I actually have a ton of thoughts on this.
You're not gonna like them. Then on the flip side, I went on
vacation probably every four months.
I was gonna say like 4 * a year,pretty much every three months.
(01:47):
Yeah, you definitely did it. My wife vacation.
He did a spring vacation. You had a summer vacation.
You definitely did something like in the fall as.
Well, maybe. Yeah, quite some.
Good vacation, yeah. Yeah.
But I mean like OK nature of thejob though too, like sales
versus like? Most.
Specifically tech support, Yeah,is the thing that really
prevented you from doing vacations, right?
(02:07):
If it was just building new code, you could have gone on
vacation. So what's what's so your history
of vacation was you're probably taking a one or two week
vacation maybe like 3 to 4 times.
I didn't like more than two weeks.
I would probably do 2 weeks likeonce and then I would do a
couple of small ones. Like one week vacation.
Probably all in. I'd be like 4 weeks of vacation
(02:28):
here. OK, so basically I wanna put out
there is, is this a myth? OK, founders don't take
vacations ever. Is that a business with?
It is because I think the best founders take vacations.
Really. Yeah, I do.
Does that. I'm not taking a shot at you.
(02:51):
OK. Can I tell you why I think that?
Alright, yeah, I might get. It's probably gonna detail into
some of your points. OK.
I think vacation and being able to go on a vacation is a test of
how well you've built your business, your business model,
how well you scaled your role inthat business and, and basically
how dependent the business is onyou, right?
(03:13):
So you, I'm going to do a reallyquick diagnosis and we can go
deeper into this. But so you felt and I think
actually accurately, that you couldn't go on a vacation
because what would happen inevitably is you would go on
vacation, you go somewhere, you would get a support call.
(03:33):
It would be of critical urgency and you'd be out of pocket.
It would be really, really hard.Or even if you're on an
aircraft, for example. Yeah.
And you would be terrified because no matter how long the
flight is like 3 hours long, yoube like, I gotta make sure.
And this didn't really change even when we added the staff who
I think we're pretty competent, you know, like Austin, like our
senior developers, like one of our like the first coder after
you was great. Yeah, yeah, Mind you, there's a
(03:55):
ramp up period you could have done in the early days, but I do
think he could have done it. And but I think what what a
couple of things here 1 is you created accidentally a
dependency. You created a dependency that
you had to handle the most serious customer support.
So why? Because ultimately the buck
stops with you. You were going to get yelled at
if something broke, you were going to face that customer
(04:16):
wrath and you didn't want that. Cool.
Get that second life saving software.
Our software was in the businessof helping inform people in an
emergency or in cases like directly involved in saving a
life. Yeah, OK, that's pretty intense.
That's a burden. Third thing, we never created
adequate systems for escalation of customer support and for the
(04:40):
sort of like burden sharing of escalated customer support.
We learned about this after we were required, right tools that
did this a lot better where it wasn't just going to be Chris,
it was on call. So this is very common in
software. Talking to the audience is very
common in software that you willhave a senior developer or
probably a couple that are available 24/7 and they do this
in shifts. OK, so you know these this week,
(05:03):
it's this person. So what does this mean?
You cannot go to the club and get blackout drunk because you
are on call. And by the way, this is common
in a lot of advanced professions.
Doctors are on call like it's not unusual.
So, so these people have to be, you know, kind of put together
for a week and if something comes through from the customer
(05:25):
support team, because customer support would also have somebody
who's so they're like the first level support and that escalated
support would be the developer and probably be somebody beyond
that. And that's probably when you get
to your CEO level of escalation,like very serious mission
critical issue. We just didn't do that.
You were escalated customer support and you were level 2
support. You wouldn't, you didn't feel
comfortable to let the staff take on the development staff to
(05:47):
take on those customer support issues.
That is accurate and. So, but you put yourself in a
box. So then you like, you couldn't
do it. You couldn't give it.
Up. I also didn't think it was very
fair to put them in that position.
Why? You're paying them, you bonus
them, they have responsibilities.
We told them it might happen someday.
Job description. Yeah, like.
You're a nice. Guy.
(06:07):
Well, like the problem I. Think part of it too.
If you weren't such a nice guy, if you're real bastard would be
a lot easier this whole thing. I I like our staff.
I still like our staff people. Yeah, yeah, I'm not.
It's. Not being mean to.
Them there I did have an issue with.
I didn't want to inflict that onthem.
Because what was the fear there?That they would quit.
Ohhhhh yeah, maybe that it was too much.
(06:32):
You know, our staff were also pretty young.
They were right out of school. There's a lot of responsibility
when you've only been working for a year or two.
Which made me but. Like.
But scary this persisted for many years.
This this wasn't. Austin would have been at some
.5 years with us. OK, yeah, alright.
Well, look, I, I'm just telling you the way it is.
(06:53):
I'm just, you know, like right or wrong or whatever.
But like that, that was my thinking on it, was that I
didn't think it was fair to do it to them.
I didn't I, I think that I had avery like my overall view of our
systems to be able to support it.
So I could pretty much fix anything.
And whereas our staff are a little bit more siloed, they
knew their piece. So that's I would say that's a
(07:13):
second dependency. Exactly.
There was the piece of it. It was really.
So if somebody called for support after hours are our
phone system would actually say we're currently closed.
We do have emergency support. If it's a emergency situation,
press 1. If it's a non-emergency
(07:34):
situation, press 2. So pressing one went to a call
centre that would actually answer the call.
So they immediately got got to speak to a person.
Yeah, OK. That person would then take the
name and number of the person that called.
I would call. This change of the I.
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that would not exist
now because I would do it. But the with the alternative was
it would it would send them to avoice mailbox where they would
(07:56):
leave No. And that's about terrible.
Terrible SO. Well, no, no, no, the the number
for non non-emergency. So but for the emergency stuff,
it would it would eventually getto me.
And they always got to talk to like a like a real human.
That was just an answering service that took down the
information. And that gave me just a little
bit of a break that I could, youknow, I would get a text message
(08:17):
actually with the details of thecall.
I would actually do. Research with the CD or I would
sometimes do that. Actually very rarely.
So I, I would research like whatis actually going on and then I
would call them. So I, when I, they picked up the
phone, I already knew what was going on.
And a lot of times I had a resolution already.
So I was just bringing in good news.
And that was how I protected myself from getting potentially
(08:39):
yelled at, you know, that something went wrong and it was
very rare that it happened. It might have happened, I don't
know, once every two months or something.
Oh no. Way less than that.
I think like like 3 * a year. Yeah.
We get OHT after hours. So you're really worried about
are? Also part of it OK is that
alright? I'm gonna let I'm gonna tell an
employee hey this weekend. Yeah.
(09:00):
You know, you can't really go out and hang out with your
friends because. No, they can't.
They just can't get blackout drunk.
They even have a beer or two. Yeah, well, or whatever they
wanna. Do you can see how anxious I am
even just talking about this? So I, I, I it was.
Obviously uncomfortable, I. Know I can't sit straight
because. We zoom in on him, zoom in on
him, like, like, can we just? Get we need these.
Don't do that. Please don't do that.
(09:21):
Anymore thanks SO. So the reality.
So let's get back to the no no. No, I like this.
Can I wait for? Me hang on, hang on, can I go to
me going on vacation though? OK, so so here's so agreed
intensity difference, urgency, different importance, different
for for customer service, right in that nature, something
(09:42):
something breaking with life saving software is really
important. So yeah.
So this was the reason, though, yeah, getting back to the topic
of the episode, is that that's why I didn't like going on
vacation, right? Or I always did vacations that
were very close to laptop, closeto no long flights, No, no out
of communication, no, you know. That kind of stuff.
OK, hang on. I have a few thoughts.
(10:03):
The other thing I'll just say isthat for me, so I, I managed 2
teams at like my peak business, the operations team which was
deploying mobile application, the mobile applications and the
sales team. Sales team, pretty easy.
Hey guys, if there's any big demo that comes up, push it to
when I'm back. And otherwise, I trust you to be
able to handle about 99% of demos.
It was very rare that there was some that need to be demoed that
(10:25):
like I absolutely had to be on it.
I, I would come in on big deals cause I wanted to show that we
were serious. That kind of stuff like, you
know, Phil Knight kind of move for, you know, like whenever the
big deal. And then I would do, I do demos
myself too, cause I wanna hear from customer, understand the
market, what's going on. Then on the implementation side,
it was like, OK, guys, keep doing your work without me.
This person will be in charge while I'm gone.
(10:45):
If you need escalations, work through them.
And then if it's like a technical issue, just go through
the normal channels back to customer support.
It was like very easy, but therewas like systematized process.
We had like documentation we had, we had a way of doing it.
So I would say that like that's why for me, I felt less stressed
about it. The other thing I wanna put on
your radar was that I would argue that some of this is
because you are older, OK. You have had jobs before.
(11:10):
You had bosses that with that because you were making software
for like it was kind of a weird relationship, but you were
making software for a boss and that boss looked down on people
going on vacation. It was an old school mentality.
It still exists, you know, send us a message if your boss
doesn't like it when you go on vacation.
But and I think you felt that you were also shirking
(11:32):
responsibility, right? I don't think it's just about
operations. I think you felt like you were
getting behind. You were leaving something
behind. You were letting people down.
You were doing or in some cases,your boss was just being a jerk
and guilting you about you goingaway.
So I think that conflated with because think about when you had
century file. You also wouldn't go on
vacations. Remember when we went to Europe
years and years ago, you had that little shitty Wi-Fi dongle?
(11:56):
Yeah, barely works. Yeah.
And we're ripping on a train somewhere and you're like trying
to answer that wasn't life saving software.
Yeah, I know. Those document management, yeah,
come on, you know, But I think there's a guilt complex there.
Yeah, OK. So.
The Graham on this, do you thinkso?
You've read the best, now try the rest.
(12:18):
Wait, who wrote this? Check out Startup Different on
Amazon, Audible, and Kindle. So the podcast viewer listener
has heard kind of like both sides of the coin here on and
they agree with me. You know, psycho never gonna
take a vacation and the hey, pretty reasonable take a few
vacations, recharge the batteries, be productive and and
(12:41):
have it. So so you know, I, I wanted to
try and figure out whether it was a myth that founders don't
take vacations ever and the reality is, is actually
partially true. Can I throw some stats at you?
All right, so 48% of entrepreneurs experienced
feelings of burnout. If you're ever feeling turned
out totally OK, 55% of startup founders have delayed vacations
(13:02):
or time off due to workload, increasing burnout risk.
Well, yeah, here's an HBR 1. Vacation whenever, but OK.
HBR suggests that about 70% of CEOs work during their
vacations. 100% Yeah, well, I agree.
I agree, yeah. Well, OK, hang on.
So this isn't totally fair. You're characterizing it a
(13:24):
little bit differently. So burnout, 48% is less than
half, First off, so I'm just gonna say that.
So more, more than half go on vacations.
Second is that burnout is silentlike debt.
It's like a different form of debt, like technical debt.
Yeah, But for for creativity, for for moving your business for
it, It's a real issue, right. And I do agree that you need
(13:48):
time away to recharge those batteries and be better at your
own jobs. You will be further.
Here's an interesting one. OK, so in startups, OK, most
employees put in about 50 to 60 hours per week.
But do you know that most founders put in 6200 hours per
week on average? On average, Yeah.
Founders. Are so there's a huge range
(14:09):
that's almost 100%. But yeah, no, it, it is a huge
range, OK, but. OK, but still like more than the
average? Yeah.
And here in other states, 40% ofstand up startup founders work
more than 60 hours per week. OK.
So like there's a real risk of burnout.
OK. And so, yeah, and 32% of
entrepreneurs work more than 70 hours per week per week.
(14:30):
So huge burnout risk. And, you know, I, I got to think
that I'm in that category that I, I probably didn't realize
that at the time because it was just life, but I think it was
pretty burned out. Yeah, you in the end, I I don't
think. That I was burned up by the end
too, and I wasn't, I wasn't taking the same vacations as
everybody else as I was before. Yeah, but OK, a couple of things
(14:52):
like 1 is like there's a time and a place for vacation.
You kind of mentioned that like people will still work on
vacation or they defer vacation because they need to do work.
Like I agree with that. Like I think there are times
when you do have to be availablein those situations where did
even though you've planted as well as possible, like you might
have to do something or something comes up and
interferes. Like that makes sense to me.
(15:14):
I fortunately had a cofounder who was working his ass off and
who could fill in the gaps for me while I was away.
You were even courteous enough to not tell me about the
shitstorms that were happening cause they were just constant
things happening. Wow.
Till I came back, which was great.
Yeah. So I get like an e-mail because
I would check my emails at usually at night.
So I worked every day of my vacation by that, by that.
(15:36):
Match you were doing, I would check.
An e-mail every night, yeah, OK.And I would I and but I would
let the emails go all day. I would turn off my
notifications on my phone yeah. So I didn't wanna see them at
the end of the day. I would pile.
I look at them like, OK, it's anything on fire.
What happened here? Yeah, and you know, once I get a
real nasty one, I'd be like, I'dcall you cause I'd be like, oh
geez, what happened with this one?
Yeah. So actually that's a best
practice. If you're a founder and you're
(15:56):
on vacation and you're in that situation, you do need to kind
of be somewhat connected. But what you do is you time box
it. You say 1 hour each day.
I'm going to check my emails, check my slide messages,
whatever, and then I'm shutting it off.
And it worked really at that point too, you're not really
even answering everything. You're just basically.
Like. Crisis identifying Is there a
crisis? I'll deal with this later.
(16:17):
I used this news feature a lot now in G Suite.
Oh yeah, which is really good. I didn't actually use it back
then but I wish I had because I would have just like snoozed
this to when I'm. Back I had it back then I feel
kind of. But I think like, so like I have
a lot of thoughts on this if youwant me to weigh in on what
other impacts here. Yeah.
So like, so that that doesn't that data doesn't terribly
surprise me. OK.
(16:37):
That a lot of people like defer vacation or don't work on there,
like can't struggle with gettingaway.
Yeah. I think it says a bunch of
things about your company, though.
So on the one hand, it's like it's passion, OK.
Yeah. But I think this is the great
fallacy, kind of like hitting usin the face.
There is an expectation that youmust work like this to have a
(16:57):
startup be successful. And that is wrong.
OK, Like it, yes, you have to work hard.
Yes, you want to move the business forward.
But think about like Jess Chan with like long play.
Think about like a lot of these companies that we, that we
interviewed in past seasons, thepeople were like, look, it's a
marathon, not a Sprint. You're running at a good pace.
Yeah. You know, I listen to the
(17:19):
Friends of Lenny podcast, which is really interesting.
Let's cool. Very down to earth dude.
And he interviewed the CEO, cofounder of Anthropic and the
big AI company. And that guy even talks about
how like, it's a marathon. And this is, this is like #2 in
AI is about as big as it gets, about as hot as it gets right
now, selling like hotcakes. OK.
(17:42):
That to me was really interesting that even he
understood this. So there's a risk to pushing
yourself. And there's also a cost.
There's a cost to pushing yourself this hard.
Yeah. Aside from having shittier
vacations or no vacations, does cost your family, cost your
friendships? There's social cost, health
costs. And Grant, we're talking about a
(18:02):
minute ago. Like it's, it's the real deal.
Like, so I think that what what is overlooked in this or what is
the the assumption is that if I work harder at this, it's more
likely to be successful. And that includes accepting a
certain level of burnout. And I don't know if that's true.
I think that's something I can'tdefinitively say that's not
true, but I can imagine that I know that burnout is bad.
(18:24):
Yeah. I actually think that the more,
if you make yourself more likelyto burn out, I think your
startup is more likely to fail. Yeah, by the same rationale that
you think you have to work a super hard on it.
Yeah, and the. Same line of thought.
Gets you there even if you don'tlike burn out.
I think the thing that gets overlooked there is that when
you're working a lot of hours, your creativity is gone, gone.
You are just grinding, right? And I, I think the vacations and
(18:49):
just slowing the pace and being more like a marathon instead of
a Sprint brings back the creativity.
And the creativity is the, the way that you find the, the new
system that you can implement tomake yourself more efficient
and, and scale your business more effectively and those types
of things. And I think, I think there were
times that I probably, I'm definitely guilty of this, that
I work too hard and couldn't seethe forest for the trees.
(19:12):
You know, I, I love that saying because yeah, it's kind of like,
yeah, you're so in the day-to-day of the business, you
just don't, you can't step back and see, hey, how can I actually
make this better longer term? How can I, how can I automate,
eliminate or delegate? And I you just.
Forget about just keep doing what you just keep doing what
you know. I like how I built this, another
great podcast with lots of interesting founders.
(19:33):
But you know, what's fascinatingis most of the time in those
episodes, pick any startup, any industry.
Yeah. The founders usually end up
being done by year, 8:00 to 10:00.
Somewhere in there. Why?
They're exhausted. Yeah.
Yeah. I think they also wanna get, you
know, their payday. That's what they were working
for. Yeah.
But there. There's so many different costs
(19:54):
to this. The other thing I want.
OK, let's shift gears for a little bit here.
What does it say to your employees if you never have
vacation? Right.
Like, I think that this says a lot.
So on the one hand, it says thisis my expectation.
This is how I work. I.
Actually the same, unless you explicitly tell them otherwise,
which you did, which we did, which I, I don't know how I feel
(20:16):
about all the time. The second thing is, yeah, so
that that was basically on. This is my expectation for your
work, your workload, or what I think you ought to do.
But I think there's also a fundamental like I don't trust
you. And I think what really
dangerous we, we explicitly toldour staff to like get out of the
office at 5K and we were, we were not setting an expectation.
That I've done both like so you could say we respect your
(20:39):
personal time so much. And we did that.
We were like, stop working at 5:00.
I would go around in people's ass.
I would close laptop lids. Yeah, I would say get out of
here. I'd call people and Zoom, if
they were still on Zoom, be like, what are you doing here?
Yeah, when we were doing the pandemic.
Yeah. But then like I and I think that
was good. But at the same time, I think
you say there's there's no such thing as a free lunch.
(21:00):
So what's the other side of this?
At that time, it was. We expect you to work really
hard to believe what we're doing.
But. And I think that still remains
true. But in addition, it should also
ban. And if you're in customer
service or if you're in softwaredevelopment, you will have an
escalated support responsibility.
Yeah, I don't think that would have been a reach.
Yeah. And people, we had a good
(21:20):
culture people, didn't it? Yeah.
You know, I think there was justa lot of I So I worry that it
also sends a message to employees that I don't trust
you. And that's a really big negative
message to send. Once you start losing trust or
violating the trust of your employees, it's almost
impossible to get it back. OK.
I know you're thinking about your next thought, but I think
that's another thing that you might take for granted if you
(21:42):
don't. Feel well thinking about is how
knowing all this stuff, I would still struggle with it.
I would still struggle with likewalking out.
And every founder listening to this, we'll struggle with these
concepts. It's we're all control freaks.
Yeah. And it's hard to let go control
because having the control that you have now or perhaps not
taking vacations, in your mind, you have equated with your
(22:03):
current level of success, right.So you were like, I just don't
want to blow this. That's a lot of it, right?
There's so much fear as an entrepreneur.
So so. Let's leave the listeners with
some best practices on vacationsfor founders.
And I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I've, I've put together some that I've
researched and I, I like them and I'm going to put an asterisk
(22:25):
next to all this is that I wouldstruggle doing almost all this
stuff. OK, You would not as much.
I think you would struggle a bitwith it, but not as much.
So alright, so first one, I wantto, I want to kick out the best
practice. I want to get your comments on
it. So first, as you should have a
minimum vacation recommendation or a minimum vacation for
founders, for founders, OK, so you need to say not only do you
(22:49):
have 4 weeks of vacation, but you must take two weeks, three
weeks of those four weeks like you are forced to take.
Them, I agree with it, yeah. I think that would force you to
accept that you won't be in the office or won't be available and
force you to challenge the issues that you have that you
(23:09):
would normally address yourself.Yeah, it forces you to make
systems. Yeah, it forces you to make to
risk mitigate effectively. So the next best practice I
think when we talked about this is, is kind of like that
strategic approach to your time off.
So it is difficult to fully disconnect.
But time boxing a one hour or half an hour a day to look for
(23:30):
fires in your inbox or in your Slack messages are are is a good
way of doing it where you can maintain a little bit of a
connection. But in your mind, hey, by that
maybe you do it at I would do itin the morning so I could get
through it. I wouldn't do it at night
because I wouldn't sleep. So yeah.
So you get up in the morning at 7:00 on your end too, though,
(23:51):
right? 7:30 to 8:00.
I'm gonna check for fires. Then I can deal with any that
morning. So people are getting answers
early and then turn it. Off it, it, it, it so depends on
where you are in the world. Just it just before you get to
the next point and you get really, really matters.
If you're in Hawaii versus you're in Europe, then the
timing of when those emails comes in and when fires are
(24:12):
happening is different. So I don't know.
But yeah, I agree that there should be some sort of practice
there around managing, managing that sort of thing.
The other thing I wanna say too,when I was away on vacation, if
I didn't check my emails, I'd have a little freak out.
Yeah. Because you're all your
identities tied to it and you'rea lot of your wealth, your net
worth is tied to it. It's like if you're checking
like a huge investment. Yeah.
(24:33):
And you just going up and down through, whoa, going up and down
throughout the day. And I think that's kind of
things like you kind of need to know.
Yeah, I think that's healthy. Yeah, I think, OK.
So third, best practice there, there are some benefits to you
being gone in that you can use it as an opportunity to have
some of your key employees step up.
Yes, OK, and empower them to fill your shoes for a little
(24:55):
while and see how it goes. I think that's actually, I
wouldn't have thought of that. I, I, I, I think that's a really
interesting idea that that you can, you can do that.
Yeah, I think you have some guardrails on that, but I think,
yeah, that's a great idea. OK.
And then you know what, here's the other thing is your
employees would be excited to have that.
Yeah, that's that's a good thing.
So I found this that I wanna leave and there's your with with
(25:18):
a stat and I wanna get your. Does it bias the entire?
Conversation. Oh no, no, I just, I wanna just
put it out there and see what you say.
Alright, so we talked a bit about burnout and things like
that and they say that for the average recovery time for a
founder who is like considered like burnt out, how long do you
(25:40):
think they have to go without working before they're kind of
like emotionally back to normal?Six months.
Two years. Oh, wow.
Wow. So think of that consequence.
So this is the thing, like the conversation of, you know, I
can't let this thing fail, so I have to work really hard.
But if you work really hard, it fails because you're not there.
(26:03):
They're tied together. Like this is the thing that
people don't make that connection.
Yeah, this is my grid is a fallacy.
You can't grit your way to an exit because you'll actually
burn out before you get there, and it'll fail.
Yeah. It actually makes you closer to
failure. Yeah, and you know, it's, it's
weird. We've, I listened to some
podcast where they talk about like dopamine and how your brain
works and your neural pathways, how they get worn and things
(26:24):
like that. Yeah.
And I would totally agree that Ifeel like we've been done for a
little over 2 years. And I'd say I'm starting to get
back to normal. Like on, on that sort of stuff.
I'm starting to feel kind of like the tension release, you
know, whereas I feel like go back a year, I think I was still
very tense, but I think I'm kindof getting there.
(26:45):
So I actually think that stat isquite accurate that you probably
need an average of two years to sort of like mentally reset
after you like, you know, reallyleft it all on the field.
So I guess then that. Sort of self back back into to
one piece. That leads to the question
though, like do you feel more creative now?
Do you feel more in control? Do you getting there?
Yeah, but not quite 100%. Yet you say.
(27:08):
How does that make you feel? Tell me about your feeling.
Ohi don't make me talk about my feelings.
That's cool. That's an interesting topic.
I I think you're doing your company and yourself a service
to by going on vacation. And it's super counterintuitive
because it forces you to do all this stuff, build better
(27:29):
systems, risk mitigate Yeah, makes you more creative.
It gives your employees a chanceto step up, take a vacation for
the betterment of your company. The.
Creativity, but I think you're also really need to avoid the
burnout. Yeah, and and just that little
release valve of a vacation every few months to kind of
recenter yourself, do it strategically, follow best
(27:49):
practices, all that sort of stuff.
It doesn't have to be like a completely you're gone on a, you
know, deserted island on a beachwith no connectivity like you.
You could do some strategic things to to to make sure you're
not completely gone, but do it so that you can bring back that
creativity and avoid the burnoutthat you're potentially gonna
have with your. Startup burnout is failure, I
think a lot of the time. Yeah, cool.
(28:12):
Don't burn out. See you next week.
Let's get it. Rolling big ideas money hustle
smart dream so. Why?
Turn that grinding. Through a joy ride.
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