Burnout Your Way to Success

When you start working in tech, nobody says it to your face, but you learn it anyway: if you want to be successful, you have to break yourself.

You learn that the only way to build something big is to never stop, that emotions are noise, and that anything asking you to slow down is a weakness.

If you have something emotional to work through, you're told to take a few days and deal with it somewhere else, in your therapy, at home, on your own time. Here we execute, and there's no need to tell me about your personal life.

I've been burned out several times, and they were some of the hardest experiences I've ever been through.

One of those times I quit because I couldn't take it anymore. For months, if I was awake, I was working, carrying two or three high responsibility roles while getting paid like a junior, believing the promise everybody keeps repeating: that you force your way into success through outworking everyone else, that you burn until you finally get rewarded.

Another time they fired me. Nobody ever asked what was going on with me, they just saw that I had started performing worse after months of working over twelve hours a day at the top of my game, and it was true, I wasn't performing.

What they didn't know was that I had anxiety about answering a message on Telegram, nothing urgent, nothing serious, just a message, and that writing a blog post, one of the easiest things in the world for me, had turned into a mountain I couldn't climb. I would sit down to do it and start crying.

What made it worse is that I never said a word. I was too afraid that naming what I was going through would read as weakness.

Around that time I weighed twenty kilos more than I weigh today, and I was an alcoholic, on top of being addicted to work.

None of it was for pleasure. It was there to hold up what I was trying to sustain and to cover what I was actually feeling underneath, to keep alive a dream that wasn't even mine: total success in tech, millionaire, young, famous, recognized.

I truly believed the only way to get there was to work until I almost exploded, that my worth was measured in how much I could take, that my worth was whatever I had achieved.

I hurt a lot of people I loved along the way, by never making the time, by letting our connection go uncultivated, by taking them for granted, by being absent and denying them my presence.

I was denying my presence to myself, too.

Getting out of the burnout dynamic wasn't just realizing I could work fewer hours. It was learning to take care of my body, going to therapy, learning to say what I was feeling, learning to see the person in front of me instead of staring at my own navel, and deeper than any of that, it was finally sitting down to look at what I really wanted.

That's where I found what I wasn't expecting. Being a millionaire, being successful, being famous, none of that was even my desire.

Many of the desires we believe are ours were handed to us. They come from the collective unconscious, from the narratives floating around us, from the people we spend our days with, and we carry them inside as if we had chosen them ourselves.

Every time I burned out I went a little deeper looking for what I actually wanted, and I'm still refining that today. I can't tell you I have the answer.

What I can tell you is that going inward is a magical key, especially when you do it while genuinely accepting who you are and what you want.

So if you're feeling the kind of tiredness that sleep no longer touches, if you wake up anxious every single day, if you're successful and still depressed, maybe it isn't only about working too much. Maybe you're chasing an image somebody placed on you.

You can take the time to connect with what you actually desire, and from there, manifest your deepest will.

Because the man and the woman who do their True Will have the inertia of the Universe to assist them.