Burnout is a real thing

After a decade of leading a studio and twenty years in the industry, I stepped away for a full year. A planned, deliberate sabbatical, not a collapse and not a dramatic exit. I gave myself the space to reconnect with my family, reflect on the whole journey, and figure out what actually excites me about this work before deciding what to do next.

I am saying it plainly because the industry still whispers about this. Burnout is a real thing. Pretending otherwise does not make you tougher. It just makes you the last person to notice you are running on empty.

Burnout is a systems failure, not a willpower failure

The mistake is treating burnout as personal weakness, a thing that happens to people who cannot handle pressure. After living through it, I see it differently. Burnout is what happens when a system runs with no recovery built in. You can be strong, capable, and genuinely good at the job and still burn out, precisely because you are strong enough to keep overriding the warning lights.

The signal, for me, was subtle. Nothing was on fire. The business was healthy, the team was good, the work was solid. I had optimized almost everything except the one question I had stopped asking: whether I still wanted to be in the seat. That was the variable I had stopped measuring, and it was the only one that mattered.

Rest is not the opposite of ambition. It is the maintenance ambition runs on.

What the year gave back

Stepping back did not make me less ambitious. It made my ambition legible again. With the noise gone, I could see what I genuinely wanted to build and what I had only been doing out of momentum. I came back with sharper focus, fresher energy, and a much shorter list of things I actually care about. That clarity is worth more than the year it cost.

Relearning is part of it too. A break is not idle time. I used it to sharpen new skills, revisit old ones, and prepare for the next chapter with intent instead of inertia. You do not come back the same. You come back chosen, rather than carried.

Build the off-ramp before you need it

If there is a practical takeaway, it is this: do not wait for the crash to design your recovery. Build the off-ramp while the road is still smooth. Protect the inputs that keep you wanting to do the work (family, rest, curiosity, time away from the screen) with the same discipline you protect a deadline. They are not a reward for the work. They are what makes the work last.

Ambition without maintenance is just a faster way to stop. I learned that the expensive way so that, this time, I am building something I can sustain.

• Burnout
• Sustainability
• Founders