Most people who do large scale things quickly hit burnout at some point - and then go into bleakness, madness, or meltdown for a while. I don't know of a nicer

Most people who do large scale things quickly hit burnout at some point - and then go into bleakness, madness, or meltdown for a while. I don't know of a nicer way to write that, but almost everyone I know and almost everything I've read suggests that if you keep running on overdrive for a long time, you come apart at the seams for a while. I've heard stories about this from mentors and former professors of mine, and always wanted to be above such things. But alas, burnout seems to be real. When it starts coming on, the proverbial camel-back-breaking straw could be any little old thing. Preemptively heading it off by vacationing, scaling down, getting the hell away and doing hard thinking or non-thinking goes a long way. So there's that - good for Arrington to get away and recharge some. Another thought: If nobody dislikes you, you're not doing something that matters. I'm totally neutral on Michael Arrington - I don't know enough about him and don't read enough Techcrunch to really like or dislike him at all. But I see he polarizes people a lot and people have serious reactions to him. If you want to do something important, look to, expect, and appreciate reactions like that. If nobody dislikes you, you're not doing something that matters.