Back in the day when I used to pull some seriously crazy hours at the office, friends of mine used to warn me about burning out. I used to joke that the only burnouts that I knew about involved internal combustion engines with a ton of torque and a heavy foot on the gas pedal. The warning however did linger on in the back of my head.
As time passed on, I managed to align my hours to something that is more akin to a better work-life balance (keep in mind though, that just the hours were aligned...), and when work really demanded, I was still able to pull off that long day or two. I however did look back (and still do) with some wonder at those continuous stream of twelve ~ fourteen hour days that was normal for me to kick back without breaking a sweat. How I had managed to do that without actually burning out remained somewhat of a mystery until recently.
The breakthrough came to me when I read an article linked to by a friend. While the article, written by an MIT grad mainly dealt with other issues, the key take-away line for me was the following:
"What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work."
At once it became abundantly clear to me that I was so much more motivated back then (maybe even for the wrong reasons) than I am now, and that is what allowed me to stretch so close to the breaking point, maybe even beyond, and still survive.
It's not that I am not motivated about my work at all these days, or that I don't like what I do at all. And as far as I can tell, I have not burned out; not yet, at-least. What I didn't like was how easy it was for me to drop a few rungs on the motivation ladder.
The final nail in the coffin came in the form of another article, or rather a series of articles about the lives and times of engineers working on the first Apple Macintosh computer. While most of the articles were written by one particular engineer, and dealt with the technical intricacies of the pioneering work that they were doing in the field of GUI for the people, something was very clear. All the engineers on that team had a motivation level that I can barely even dream about. Even my peak couldn't hold a candle to what these guys achieved. Nothing deterred them from working on and on and on towards their goal, the completion and launch of their product. Neither weekends, nor long deserved holidays. Neither technical limitations and stumbles along the way, nor demands by their project leader. Neither bad managers, nor awful reviews. Maybe it was the rush of being pioneers in their field, or maybe they just believed so much in the work they were doing, they just couldn't be brought down!
What I am left with is a sense of emptiness, of not feeling that level of a connect with my work that can push me to do crazy stuff again. And I guess its not just me. From what I gather, such a thing is happening with a lot of people. All I can do is ask, "Will we ever get back there?"
The article written by the MIT grad can be read on the MIT publication, The Tech, here.
The series of articles about the original Apple Macintosh can be read at Folklore
