It was literally cataclysmic...

    I took a long walk tonight - I love walks, there's something about them that can really clear a person's head. I was rolling thoughts around in my head, thinking through things pretty deeply as I often times do. I looked up and saw a street sign that I had seen a hundred times before that suddenly took on a whole new meaning under the cloud of thought I currently had, it said "Keep Right". Suddenly all these desparate thoughts in my mind came together in what felt like a supernova explosion of insight - and I suddenly saw why burnout happens and how people can prevent it. On the same token I realized I had also seen what motivates people to carry on and accomplish things that seem, to many of us, super-human. It all made sense suddenly - I hope you feel the same way....

    But I digress - first, what is burnout? Burnout is, quite simply - a feeling of hopelessness and dispair: you feel loss of control, loss of hope and loss of energy. When burnout happens, you are burned out of the energy that allows you to be actualizing - to get done things, and to be kinetic. The opposite of burnout is energized and focused, it's that state you're in when you can work for hours and hours, go to bed, wake up, and be energetic about "working" again. The opposite of burnout is this passion. Someone who has burned out before (like me) would know that it's one of the most depressing feelings in the world to have, and that it can be straight-up frightening. You see the world in front of you, but it lacks the depth it did before - the possibilities are gone, you just feel there...nothing more.

    You see, life is somewhere around 100% psychological - there is always a level of abstraction regarding our emotions and feelings and reality itself - reality is rarely the thing that causes angst or anxiety or depression, but our reaction to it; or, as Dr. Albert Ellis would say, "The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny." If you fear burnout or if you feel under-energized or under-focused, you fear or are experiencing something that is quite literally within your own control, it's not something external to you - it's still totally and wholly under your power. "But energy is not something I can just switch on" you might say - and this is true, it's not something that you can switch on because this opposite of burnout, this energy you might desire, is a side-effect of something else; and focusing on it (or your lack of it) will cause even more problems as you start to feel dispair. Alright....

    ....it is the belief, the feeling, the strong faith you have in yourself that you, or those around you, have a special insight and are right (and the 'others' are wrong) about doing something or the way of doing something that prevents you from burning out. So, in a sense - it's your ability to keep "right" that will keep you going. It is this belief in you're right'ness that also motivates you to pull the long hours, to push the envelope and to accomplish things that most people think impossible. So much is possible by each of us, though, because so much that is seen as impossible is psychological from the get-go; the impass or wall isn't real. If you look back on younger days when you were filled with energy (really think about those days) you probably knew that you were right and everyone else (or most everyone else) was wrong - you were out to prove how right you were and believed so much in yourself and your cause that you took on feets that, in later years, you wonder how you ever accomplished. It is also the ability to do "right" that gives us a feeling of accomplishment and honor - so that when we feel like we have no aim, it's really because we have no idea of the "right" we want to stand for and get....

If you feel like you are on the edge of your last bit of energy - ask yourself if you really believe in what you're doing; and if not, ask why you're still doing it. What's worth something to you in this world is worth doing. That's what keeps you moving.

Anyway....my hero (in case you haven't already realized it) is Richard Feynman. I'll end with a quote of his:

"In the physics, one of the things I have to do in trying to surmount one of these apparently insurmountable problems that all the other guys are also working on [...], I have to think that I have some sort of inside track, that I'm thinking of a way that they're not thinking of. [...] I fool myself into thinking that I have an inside track, or that I have some special mathematical trick that I'm going to use which they don't have, or some kind of a talent, a way that I'm going to do it [...]. I appreciate the possibility that it is in indeed an illusion, but I don't bother myself about that - I work myself up into thinking I'm on that inside track."