Are You Burned Out? How To Reclaim Your Passion

This week on the show, Dan and I discuss “Not Being Bothered,” It's a big idea that Dan loves to talk about.

We dive deep into Burnout, The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma and how to retrieve your passion once it has been CONSUMED by business details and the grind.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You were led to believe that if you’re a marketer, you can teach people how easy it would be to build a BIG business by using social media and “systems,” but soon found your complicated machine required 25 people to run—most of whom you don’t even like or like to manage.

You’ve grown tired of “team.” Tired of hiring, firing, legal stuff, customers, and the list goes on… and now you’re in a situation where it's a constant grind of being shallow and wide from a lack of focus instead of being deep and narrow, which is really the experiential side, the human side, of having a great business. You’ve reached the level where your business bothers you SO much that it’s time to escape. To reinvent. You’ve reached BURNOUT.

Remember the ambitions and goals you had back in your 20s and 30s? By the time you reached 40, you probably far surpassed those ambitions. Have you taken the time to reassess and take your ambitions to a new level yet in your 40s? Now imagine if that happens again in your 50s and 60s. Maybe it already has. You burn out because your life becomes about your past only, instead of including your future.

Dan is 75 and thinks that sometimes “entrepreneurs run out of future,” and I agree with him. Take retirement, for instance: Dan’s perspective on retirement is that the moment you stop being useful or providing value, the universe wants its parts back.

When thinking about retirement a lot of entrepreneurs revert back to a non-entrepreneurial way of thinking. Why? You chose to be an entrepreneur by thinking and doing things differently, so why would you buy into a traditional, non-entrepreneurial idea of retirement? Use the talents that got you here to plan a retirement that fits YOUR wants and goals! Get creative and innovative. DO YOU.

As an entrepreneur, I find creating is easier than managing and growing a business. When I was younger (and should have been focusing on building a real business), my identity was wrapped up in my company, which didn't need me from the start. As a result, I started becoming a “specialist.”

Not long ago I heard the phrase “Specialization is for insects.” Generalists WIN in the new economy. Resilience. Innovation. Reinvention. Co-creation. These are the values that win.

You can't spend your whole life being special and then complain about what comes with being special. It's part of the deal! As an entrepreneur, you never wanted to make your living in a conventional way. There are ENORMOUS rewards to doing so but there are also disadvantages. You have to know that going in and accept it or suffer the consequences.

So at what point in your life would you like to know that something isn't working? Would you like to find out five years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years from now? Dan and I have both done long and short suffering and we’ve decided that short suffering is a lot better.

Enjoy!