Burnout is a term that’s overused but underdefined.
Burnout is tireless work without a tangible result.
Exhaustion is tireless work in the name of tangible progress.
Both require the same amount of effort, both consume the same amount of energy, but only one yields outcomes.
Obviously, everyone needs breaks; you can’t be exhausted on an ongoing basis. But burnout is a lot more mental and emotional rather than physical.
A team does all the hard work, and if they’re good, they will be exhausted no matter what. But the differentiator between exhaustion and burnout is whether leadership set the direction to ensure there are tangible results: rewards, usage, revenue, customers, or anything else that leads to š.
Remember Diem, Meta’s stablecoin effort? Think of all the effort Meta put into it in 2020-2021. I’m sure they worked no less than everyone succeeding in the space today, but regulatory headwinds killed the project.
Remember Leap Motion? The physical device that goes on your desk and tracks your hand movements to control your computer. Their team kicked off an industry, but everyone forgot.
Apple’s Vision Pro is a phenomenal piece of engineering, that likely required dozens of breakthroughs. It’s considered a flop…
This list is endless.
“Working smart” rather than “working hard” is easy to say, but hard to do. The hard part is ensuring work (smart and/or hard) yields results.
They look the same on the surface, but very different underneath.
