Years Down the Line…

Likewise, nearly a decade later, I find myself in a similar state of mind. In fact, my company, after years of development, is finally becoming financially sustainable.

Nevertheless, I’ve begun to experience the signs of burnout — not just physical or mental exhaustion, but something deeper. I’ve realized that the people who most need help are often the most passive about pursuing their dreams. That’s especially true for their career development, and that realization weighs heavily on me.

I started the company out of a genuine desire for growth and development — and yet I often find myself practically begging people to take even the simplest step, like pressing “apply.” Many remain too passive to do even that.

In short, most people never reach any real strategic progress in their careers. They stumble on the most basic tasks and lack the agency to push themselves forward.

Still, one thing I’m learning—sometimes painfully—in my business is that I tend to absorb the emotions of the people I work with. When I’m surrounded by ambitious, excited, and self-driven individuals, I feel motivated and energized myself. But when I’m working with someone who constantly looks for shortcuts and avoids putting in real effort, my own motivation drops as well—even if I’m being paid.

The Founders I Surround Myself With

Also, I usually make friends with other founders — 90%+ of whom are builders, with the remaining few percent being opportunists and consumers who don’t last too long anyway. Among the employed, though, the proportions seem inverted. In contrast, most people there seek comfort and safety, and only once in a while do I meet someone genuinely obsessed with self-development.

What also became clear to me is how quickly the job market itself is shifting. Moreover, in such an environment, expertise is always a moving target.

No matter how much I learn or how fast I move, there’s always more to do. No matter how much I learn, any sense of mastery feels temporary at best.

Furthermore, perhaps, in the span of the next 10–20 years, we’ll transition toward a post-labor economy. Consequently, in that world, it may no longer be necessary to help people move from one career to another.

They simply won’t have to struggle just to make ends meet. And my professional mission will naturally die at that point. 

Is This The Real Crisis?

Meanwhile, it’s been roughly 7 years since I started working full time on career development. 

Notably, on the one hand, I sometimes think that careers are a bit like material science. From a distance, you see these shiny, polished surfaces. At first glance, some people’s jobs seem fascinating—full of adventure, success, and splendor.

But when you look closer, you realize they often come with conditions I would never accept. Their hands are tied by dependencies I wouldn’t tolerate, or they’re forced to take risks and make commitments I would never be willing to make.

And so when you look closer—close enough—you realize that beneath the gleam, everything is made up of atoms that are mostly empty space. In practice, what appears solid is almost entirely void and vacuum.

Overall, I find careers to be much the same. The closer you look at someone’s professional path, the more cracks, gaps, and empty spaces you notice.

And every time I examine other people’s careers in this way, I always end up with the same conclusion. I love my own job, my company, and the work I do most of all.

On the other hand though, perhaps every passion comes with an expiration date. Similarly, maybe our passion for work follows the same rhythm as long-term relationships. At first, there’s a trial period—those first few months when you’re simply testing whether the job is even possible for you.

The Honeymoon Phase

Then comes the honeymoon phase, two or three years when passion carries you forward almost effortlessly.

However, eventually, passion settles into routine. And around the seven-year mark, you face the ultimate question: is this a lifelong adventure, or just a stage along the way? Just as in long-term relationships, there comes a point—often after about seven years—when you must decide whether to commit for the long haul or move on.

I wonder why so few founders stay committed to a single mission for more than a few years. It’s not only a question of survival—it’s also about sustaining passion over time. Looking at the bigger picture, most founders eventually find a way to exit or to reboot the business, moving toward serial entrepreneurship.

These few factors are probably why my thoughts have started naturally pivoting toward yet another potential mission in my professional life. It’s a new project that feels risky, creative, and exciting… and is independent of the AI revolution.

At this point, they are just loose reflections, but they keep coming back more and more often. Is this yet another passion growing on the shoulders of the previous one?

What Now?

Meanwhile, I have moments when I feel that my passion for career development has slowly transformed into more of a duty. It’s like staying in a long marriage that has lost its spark. What was once my deepest passion now sometimes feels like “just a job,” something steady and safe.

In fact, in business, the first six months are usually all about the initial spark — the excitement and curiosity of starting something new. At the same time, for the next two or three years, you run mostly on enthusiasm and momentum.

But after about seven years, the source of motivation shifts. You’re no longer driven by novelty; instead, what keeps you going is the satisfaction of mastery. It’s the feeling that you’re truly good at what you do and that others respect you for it.

So even if your business is successful, the emotions you experience toward it change profoundly over time. They’re very different from what you felt in the early years. And you have to make an active effort to get back to the point of excitement over and over again.

In other words, sometimes it feels like the simplest way to make work truly joyful again would be to change something. For instance, change the KPIs — to make maximizing revenue the primary goal, almost like a video game to play to regain the sense of excitement and joy. Gamification helps people get excited with things in general, why wouldn’t it work here?

A Practical Compromise

At the same time, I thought: even if I ever wanted to move on to a new passion, I’d still need to sustain myself with a steady job first. So why not make my current job—my own business—that steady foundation, and build the next passion on the side?

Doesn’t that make more sense? After all, it’s far better than working for someone else and starting over, only to end up as an uninspired 9-to-5 employee again.

Perhaps this is my chance to finally combine two things: what is safe and steady (my “day job”). And what is bold and driven by pure passion (my “night job”). In that sense, I don’t have to give up anything I’m doing now.

And who knows—maybe I’ll catch a second wind and rediscover my passion along the way. Either way, it feels like a win-win.

Am I a Multipotentiate After All?

You see, people relate to jobs much the same way they relate to other people—through different orientations and preferences. Indeed, there’s even a whole category of individuals known as multipotentialites: people who simply aren’t wired to stick with one job at a time.

They have multiple passions and can’t confine themselves to a single, steady role. According to Super (1980), a career is precisely such a sequence of roles played out over a lifetime.

For multipotentiaties, once they reach a certain level of proficiency, fatigue and boredom set in, and they deliberately shift disciplines to begin learning anew. For these people, learning itself is the ultimate goal.

Perhaps that’s my case as well. Every time I start to feel a sense of steadiness and rhythm, I instinctively want to break out of the box. And it doesn’t really depend on the subject matter—it’s just part of my personality.

It feels like a disadvantage in today’s world. Still, true recognition requires staying in one field long enough to become an expert, which often takes a decade or more. In such a system, there seems to be little room for people whose primary drive is not mastery, but the joy of continuous learning.

Micro-Crisis is a Good Thing!

Having said that, I still believe a micro-crisis — the kind that forces a mental reset — can be a good thing. Notably, at least once in a lifetime, that’s worth experiencing. According to Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996), people commonly report real psychological growth after such periods.

Ultimately, your relationship with your job is, in a way, like a small dynamical system. And as with any dynamical system, stability is key — but how do you know if it’s stable?

The only way is to perturb it and see what happens. Does the system fall apart, revealing instability, or does it return to equilibrium and hold together?

It’s the same with human relationships. You sometimes need to have a conflict with a friend to find out whether the friendship is truly stable or just fragile beneath the surface.

Similarly, you occasionally need to question your path — to experience doubt. That’s just to see whether it leads to a lasting crisis. Or whether you wake up the next day with renewed motivation and clarity.

So far, so good. Thus, every time I go through one of those mental micro-breakdowns, I wake up the next day renewed.

It feels as if something inside me has reset, with a fresh sense of strength and clarity. It always gives me fresh energy and even more enthusiasm to keep going with what I do.

Is Anyone Really Immune to Burnout, or to Doubt?

Lastly, no one is immune to burnout. A neuroscientist is no more immune to burnout than a firefighter is to fire.

According to the World Health Organization, burnout is an officially recognized occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic, unmanaged workplace stress. It’s marked by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional effectiveness, regardless of how well someone understands its mechanics.

Simply knowing how the mechanism works doesn’t mean that, when you’re in the middle of it, you can predict or prevent burnout.

It can happen to anyone — even those who fully understand the physiological and psychological processes behind it.

I’d say burnout comes in many flavors. Instead, it doesn’t always feel like an illness or a debilitating condition.

Sometimes it’s subtle—just enough to cut your wings without plunging you into full misery. But even then, it’s a clear signal that something needs to change.

That kind of burnout is especially dangerous, because it can masquerade as normalcy. It’s really just a lack of passion—and that lack of passion is not your natural state of mind. Recognizing this should be a strong enough stimulus to act.

Reborn.

For example, Justin Welsh has recently shared the following words about his new self-development discovery on socials:

“I tried something weird last month. Each morning, I’d think: ‘My previous life is over.

The new one starts now.’ It’s a simple mental trick…

But it helped me change a lot of things. Projects I was forcing myself to finish? I dropped them.

That meeting I was absolutely dreading? I canceled or rescheduled.

The most surprising effect was on my decisions. When I ‘died’ each day, I stopped caring about sunk costs. I stopped caring about what people expected from ‘old me.’”

Funny enough, I recently tried a similar trick, independently of Justin… and it yielded opposite effect on me. Namely, once I started telling myself every morning, 

“You are reborn today! Your game starts anew.” 

As a result, I became much better at forgiving myself for the mistakes of yesterday, combating procrastination, and finishing all the boring and unpleasant tasks I need to finish. And that, in itself, gave me the sense of pride and progress and increased my everyday level of joy. So far so good.

Overall, perhaps what I’m experiencing isn’t a real crisis at all—just a small dip in the never-ending cycle of ups and downs around some natural level of homeostasis. Maybe it’s even healthy to doubt yourself from time to time. To lift your head above the water, look around, and check whether you’re still on the right mission, still doing what you’re most passionate about.

Doubt as Part of the Process

Maybe it’s also healthy to doubt your passion once in a while—so that you can return to it with twice the force. After all, passion management isn’t something we usually think or talk about.

Rather, we tend to treat passion as if it were a God-given gift, something permanent that requires no effort or care, or a second thought. Nevertheless, perhaps it too needs nourishment and encouragement from time to time.

What about yourself? What is your passion management strategy?

Update from September 26th 2025, a few days after the post release:

In summary, I actually feel better now after releasing this essay. As I mentioned in my previous essay on bootstrapping, most bad emotions and mental states lose their power. That includes emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, depression, and burnout — they lose it as soon as you identify them.

According to a peer-reviewed UCLA study published in Psychological Science, simply putting feelings into words measurably calms the brain’s threat response. It reduces amygdala activity by as much as 30% compared to just experiencing the emotion. 

Combating burnout resembles an exorcism: when you spot a monster, you need to call it by its name. The monster will squeak and try to persuade you that their name is somewhat different… until you shoot it or it eats you. This time I shot the beast.