This is a topic I've been reading and writing about for awhile. I posted 4 very different stories of burnout here: "Burnout is universal but the right kind of

This is a topic I've been reading and writing about for awhile. I posted 4 very different stories of burnout here: "Burnout is universal but the right kind of sleep, food, and exercise can help" http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/burnout-is-universal-but-the-right-kind-of-sleep-food-and-exercise-helps http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/burnout-is-universal-... This story might be the most relevant to Hacker News and the folks who read about startups: ----------------------------- There wasn’t much about Milburn online, but I looked over his LinkedIn profile, and I looked up the companies that he had been active with. Lying comes naturally to great salespeople, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d been successful in that field. But what did that really mean? A great salesperson has a repertoire of psychological tricks. They can make you their friend, or they can make you feel guilt; they know when to offer a compliment; they also know how to disguise a negative comment as a neutral observation and thus undercut the confidence of their prey. Milburn’s career had apparently done especially well during the 1990s. I wondered if he was now feeling stuck. Stagnancy in middle age leads to all kinds of wild adventures — usually a romantic affair or an expensive car — but perhaps it was Milburn’s style to try to launch a business. Anything to revive that old feeling of success. Apparently he was also somewhat technical. He’d learned Microsoft Excel in the 1990s, and he knew some VisualBasic. Perhaps he’d written some VBA code and connected some Excel spreadsheets to some databases. He knew more about computers than the average salesperson. From the sounds of it, he knew exactly enough to be a disaster. And he started a business for all the wrong reasons, and it ended in disaster. His motivation wasn’t so much excitement about the project, as a hatred of what his life had become, and a desire to escape to some happier reality. Motivations are important. If he’d been excited about the project he would have dived into the details, and learned what was necessary to build his idea into a success. Instead, he started the company as a vehicle for an escapist fantasty, and at key moments, when he had to make strategic decisions, he made the wrong decision, because he hadn’t bothered to learn enough of the details to understand what was really needed. And I believe that in the end, after two years of effort, he was left even more depressed than when he started. If the whole project had been an attempt to revive the old feeling of success, how much more awful it must have been to face yet another defeat?