Four Random Lessons From Burnout
This is a total “Dear Diary” entry designed for self-accountability.
If you can take something from it, then great. If you want to skip this one, check out the archives for more online business posts.
So recently I’ve been suffering burnout and I have injured hands. Regular readers might be sick of me mentioning it, but being a writer who can’t write anything has made me re-evaluate what I’m doing and here are some of those thoughts.
Be More Professional
Recently, I’ve had repetitive strain injuries messing up my ability to write. So pretty much everything you’ve read of mine outside of tweets has been done with Dragon dictation software.
As a writer who can’t currently write (and also facing burnout in general – more on that below) I’ve been planning how to stop this from being an issue in the future.
One of the things I realised I need to do is scale, outsource, automate and generally be more professional.
In typical fashion, I’m going to do exactly the same things I’ve always done.
Namely, I’ll take an experimental approach to the whole thing. But importantly, because I’m being more professional, DO SOME EXPERIMENTS shall now be referred to as INVEST IN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT.
Let’s talk about burnout.
One Month Internet Detox
Every so often, I realise I’ve fallen back into the habit of spending a ton of time browsing the internet and not doing a lot. This is not professional and largely a waste of time. Also, the knowledge and information you actually get tends to be subpar.
(Take this blog post for instance, it’s pretty weak.)
And seeing as I can’t type all that much for the next 3-6 weeks or so, retreating to books and doing other non-internet-time-wasting stuff seems like a good idea.
It should be the summer in England (though that’s variable) so that works out well.
Crucially, productivity will not go down and probably will go up.
Every time, my hindbrain internet-addict says, “If you spend less time online, you won’t get your work done” and every time I do this, I actually get more work done.
Generally though, I’m burned out on everything and taking a break. If productivity increases, then it increases. If it doesn’t, at least I’ll avoid the burn out.
It also gives me time for a new experiment.
Can You Apply Everything I Do Outside Of Writing And Internet Business?
I found a new hobby a while back.
Well actually, it’s a new niche/application for an old passion. More on this later, but basically, when Alexander Cortes started talking passionately about ballet and how his internet business allowed him to do his old passion, I started thinking about hobbies and stuff I’ve left behind.
And I thought to myself, “could I do something completely unrelated to writing, internet business, and all the other stuff and make a success of it?”
And so I’ll try.
You should try too, if you have outside interests. It’s easy to get caught up in the online world and forget there’s another world out there.
Hot Potato Investment Strategy
I was looking into buying land and property over the course of the past few days. Taking the “Do something outside the internet” idea to its extreme, I looked at empty land to buy.
And I found a stretch of land that’s worth about £80,000 at the moment.
The crazy thing is that we’re in a property bubble in the UK even for land where property hasn’t actually been built on it yet. We’re due a major correction (isn’t everywhere?)
Yet this bit of land was listed at £100,000 a few months ago. And it didn’t sell. Instead of being snapped up within days like everything else on the market, this land has sat there. Then the price dropped by £20,000 to £80,000.
The kicker: The current owner bought the land for £200,000 back in 2011.
They’ve made a ridiculous loss.
And that makes me think about investing.
People get into flipping, day trading and other stuff that’s basically an adult game of hot potato. Look at the cryptocurrency boom and bust of late last year.
Everyone’s playing hot potato and the problem with that as an investment strategy is you can end up like the owner above – spending £200,000 thinking you’ll flip it for £250,000 but the game ends while you’re holding the hot potato and you’re the one getting burned.
Obviously, you want to avoid this unless you like living really dangerously or you have insider knowledge/some competitive edge.
Final Thoughts
I’ll wrap this up. Maybe I’ll come back to these topics after I’ve done some research and development and my hands have stopped hurting.
However; a positive to note is that when you’re facing adversity, turn it around into a positive by creating experiments (running research and development) that’ll help you push through, go around or otherwise overcome the difficulty you’re facing.
There’s a big world out there and a million different things you can try.
Catch you in the next one.