Be terrible at something you enjoy and do it anyway because it's fun and stupid. It puts what actually being good at something looks like in perspective. The th

Be terrible at something you enjoy and do it anyway because it's fun and stupid. It puts what actually being good at something looks like in perspective. The things you're good at, you probably don't struggle and suffer with unless you are in an elite/olympic level training program. The things I'm best at, I got almost passively good at as the effect of decades of doing them because I enjoyed them and sought out challenges and mentoring. I'm a pretty good security architect but with the confidence of a CTO because I can tell really fast how good someone is at what they do, not because I'm the best in this field, but because I know what being good at something looks like as a result of my other interests. Nobody burns out from succeeding, so add unrelated things you enjoy to offset the things you struggle with, and the discipline on your time that doing things for yourself imposes pays huge passive dividends. I also burn out periodically because high performance is less about linear productivity than managing work, which means being strategic and scaling the value you produce, and when that managing thread blocks, downtime is expensive and necessary, but that's just the cost of performance at that level. If you're burning out, a) you probably aren't good enough at what you are doing that anyone will miss you if you aren't there, and b) your additional effort is past the point of diminishing marginal returns, so pay yourself some time and joy. It's like a power lifter injuring themselves just to make goal nobody else sees or cares about and costing themselves months of training to recover from it. Work smarter, and good luck. :)