My recommendation for recovering from burnout is to find the sweet spot of caring less about the work, while not finding it boring. Care 60%, not 0 or 100. “So

My recommendation for recovering from burnout is to find the sweet spot of caring less about the work, while not finding it boring. Care 60%, not 0 or 100. “Sometimes I work hard, sometimes I just work”. It’s hard to “just work” on something you are passionate about. I think most startup folks will need to correct in the direction of caring less about work. (For a while! Not forever!) I agree with your concern in that this is a U-shaped cost function. You don’t want to over-correct. But it’s not binary. You can care less than 100% and not be “punching in”. There is a lot of variance between orgs and even teams within an org. But there are definitely companies where startup folks can do good work and not feel burnt out by the organizational inertia.