THE JEM DIGEST

In association with StudioBook.io

I’ve burned out one time in my life. It was pretty terrible. To be honest I didn’t even know what it was until I have the privilege of hindsight, but I now know that it was generally caused by my ambition and my tendency to be pretty hard on myself.

I worked at Lyft for a little over 2 years. When I was there, I really found my professional stride. I had worked at Uber before, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do then. I was still kind of figuring life out. When I joined Lyft, I was in a pretty opportunistic situation. I had a General Manager who had complete trust in me, and expected me to execute. I loved it. To this day it was my favorite job I ever had, and that’s including even all of the contract clients I’ve had since then, no offense intended.

Lyft was the much cooler little brother of Uber. The atmosphere was fun, collaborative, and innovative. The higher ups actually cared about everyone’s opinion and even leaned on local teams to make huge decisions that effected the bottom line. When I worked there, it was the first company that I legitimately saw myself at for a long time.

This caused me to give it my all. When I got my first promotion, I really gave Lyft my undying loyalty. Shit, I still exclusively use Lyft whenever I need a ride from the airport. I worked for 25 hours straight once during a New Year’s Day activation that we had. Yeah, that’s right. No sleep, no breaks, 25 hours. My wife still brings that up to this day.

Toward the end of my tenure with Lyft (which I definitely will be doing a post on later), I started to see the cracks. I was feeling…. weird. I wasn’t feeling as accomplished as I should, and things just weren’t quite right. I personally, before this time had never dealt with mental health issues I the way you might imagine mental health issues, but this weird feeling concerned me, so I started seeing a therapist (which Lyft provided for free).

Long story short, I never got to the bottom of it. My therapist was great, but I felt as though he completely misunderstood where I was coming from. I didn't want to die, I just wanted to enjoy life more than I was. After this, my burnout got worse, I was depressed, and I had a panic attack for the first time, which continued for a few months. That sucked. After that, my wife and I went on a road-trip across the US with my severance package from Lyft. During this time, I really just tried to learn how to love the experience of life again. A few years removed from this, I can tell you that I’ll never be the same, but I am in a lot of ways much better and in no ways worse.

I realize, in hindsight, that my ambitions for moving up the corporate ladder, along with my inability at the time to give myself any real credit for what I was doing, really put me in a bad spot mentally. I still struggle with this from time to time, but I really do try to be kinder to myself. Kinder in the failures, but also kinder in the victories.

Giving yourself credit can sometimes be much harder than you thing. Even when you are setting company records month to month and beating the evil empire (Uber) in marketshare for the first time ever (see what I did there). It’s super important that you give yourself the credit you deserve and the time to reflect and love yourself. Corporate America is a really unforgiving place, and so is business ownership, with A LOT of things out of your control. Work on gaining the wisdom to understand that and giving yourself the love you need and deserve.

At the end of the day, when you strip away everything, love and how much of it you have and experience is really the only thing that really matters anyways.

Keep it all in perspective.