Burnout Hits at the Summit: you get there — and realize you were running the wrong way

On vacation, standing knee-deep in warm sea water, I couldn't bring myself to turn my phone off. I had everything I'd spent ten years dreaming about. And at that exact moment I was a deeply unhappy man, though I blamed it on exhaustion.

You know exactly what you need to do. The plan's in your head, you've read the books, sat through the conferences, everything's clear. Then morning comes and you think: just a few more minutes in bed. You get fired up about an idea in the evening, and by morning nothing's left of it. You reach for your phone instead of working, you put things off to the last second, and no goal lights you up the way it used to. You call it exhaustion and wait for a vacation to fix it.

Sometimes it really does fix things. If you're simply sleep-deprived and overloaded on work you love, you'll catch up on sleep and get fired up again. But sometimes it goes differently: you rest, you sleep it off, you come back, and inside it's still that same gray "I don't want to." That's not exhaustion anymore. That's burnout, and it doesn't come from working too hard. It's a signal that you're running in the wrong direction. I've spent thirteen years figuring out where people's energy disappears to, and I'll start with the day mine ran out — at the very peak, at a point where by every measure it shouldn't have run out at all.

I Won on Every Front and Couldn't Bring Myself to Go Swimming

It's 2017, and I'm running eleven companies at once. A big coworking space in Odesa, a hall that seats six hundred, studios, a restaurant. From the outside it looks like a magazine cover about success.

Here's what it looked like from the inside. Vacation, the sea, I'm standing knee-deep in water and I can't make myself go swimming. Because to swim, you have to leave your phone on the beach, and leaving my phone terrifies me: I'm convinced that if I switch it off for one hour, everything collapses, the business dies without me. Eleven companies are being held together by the fact that I never let go of my phone, not even in the sea.

I was chasing status, power, resources, and at some point I stopped understanding who I even was or why any of it mattered. I'd achieved everything I wanted, my income was bigger than I'd ever dared to dream. By every external measure, I'd won. And inside I was empty and miserable, which scared me more than any amount of debt, because it didn't come with an explanation. I unpacked that same trap later in a separate piece: it's not failure that breaks you, it's the pressure of keeping up the image of a successful person. Rich, free, on the sea, and not a drop of energy. How does that even happen?

The Carrot Behind You

To explain what happened to me, I need one image: the carrot behind you.

Fear drives us our whole lives. Fail the exam, you're out; miss a loan payment, they take it; stop grinding, you end up broke. That's the carrot behind you — a rottweiler at your back, and you run from it like your life depends on it. It works fast: almost everyone makes their first real money in business exactly this way, running on sheer terror. The trouble is you build a tolerance to fear. The dose stops working, and you need an ever bigger rottweiler just to move at all. Life turns into running from one disaster to the next, and you never once stop to ask yourself where, exactly, you're running to.

I didn't build eleven companies because I needed eleven companies. I built them because that's what a man you can't help but respect looks like. I was scoring goals I didn't actually need, so that no one, myself included, would dare call me a failure. And once I'd scored every single one, it turned out there was no joy in the goal at all: I'd been playing a game that wasn't mine.

Someone's going to say: come on, that's just being spoiled. You had three cars and you're whining about meaning. Take a vacation, rest up, you'll come back like new. I did take one. I stood in that exact sea with my phone in my hand. That's precisely the point: a vacation doesn't touch burnout, because it's not muscle fatigue that lying around fixes. It's a gap between where you're running and why. Lie around for a month, go back to the same race you fled, and within a week you're dark again.

Why Energy Disappears Even When You Know Exactly What to Do

After that, it all collapsed, and I was left owing almost half a million dollars. But the debt is a separate story, and this isn't about money. What matters is that the energy ran out before any of the collapse, at the peak, when there was nothing yet to lose.

It works simply. For work that leads toward what you genuinely want, your body hands out energy freely, you don't even notice you've been at it for half a day. For work that doesn't lead toward what's real for you, there's no energy no matter how hard you talk yourself into it. Not out of spite. There's just an honest guard standing inside you, one that won't release fuel onto a road heading the wrong way. We're used to calling this laziness or weak willpower and drowning it in coffee. But willpower has nothing to do with it: the guard is working exactly as it should, honestly telling you the route is wrong.

That's why it's never the slackers who burn out, it's the ones who grind the hardest. A slacker isn't running at all. The one who burns out is the one sprinting down someone else's road with everything they've got, unable to understand why they have less strength with every mile, when logically it should be the opposite. I unpack the same idea about laziness as a signal, not a character flaw, in a separate piece.

And to be fair here, no sleight of hand. Not every kind of exhaustion is burnout. Sometimes you've simply run yourself into the ground doing something you love, and you genuinely just need to sleep, not overhaul your life. Here's the difference: after real rest, real exhaustion clears and the drive comes back. If you've rested and there's still no drive, everything's still gray, rest won't help you anymore. The problem isn't your battery charge, it's the direction you chose.

Learning to Play Again, Instead of Scoring Goals

My turnaround didn't come from a book or a vacation. In 2019 I wound down the companies and kept only the online business, and in 2020 I set off on a trip around the world and, for the first time in years, turned my phone off completely — not for an hour, like in that sea. Out there, without eleven companies and without the best view in the city, a simple question I'd drowned out with the race for years came back to me: what do I actually want.

Here's how I put it to myself. For years I'd been scoring goals. What I needed was to learn to play again. A kid kicking a ball around a courtyard isn't doing it for a trophy, no missing goalposts or worn-out sneakers stop him, he's just happy inside the game. I'm strongest exactly where the process matters to me more than the result, where I can't not do it, the same way I couldn't not kick a ball around as a kid. And I burned out every single time I started running for the scoreboard instead of the game.

You don't need to sell eleven companies and move across an ocean to do this, I just didn't have a gentler option available. It's enough to stop and honestly answer three questions on paper, because in your head you'll just skate past them. First: am I running toward something I want, or away from something I'm afraid of? Second: is the goal I'm chasing actually mine, or someone else's picture of who I should be? Third: if you removed the money and other people's opinions, would I even do this at all? Three answers of "fear," "someone else's," and "no" — and your low energy isn't laziness or exhaustion, it's the guard that's been asking you to change roads for a long time.

Changing roads doesn't mean dropping everything. Usually it's enough to turn the wheel a couple of degrees: cut out of your week the things you only do for someone else's approval, and bring back what once genuinely felt good. Energy comes back when the route lines up again with where you actually want to go. A vacation has almost nothing to do with it.

The Phone on the Beach

I still sometimes picture myself standing in that warm sea with a phone in my hand. At the time I thought the phone was holding my business together. In reality, the phone was holding onto me, and the business wasn't one worth holding onto in the first place.

If you're reading this right now and you recognize that morning energy of yours fading out, don't ask yourself "how do I force myself," ask "why am I even running in this direction at all." And if the honest answer doesn't sit well with you, don't rush to blame your own laziness. Finally put the phone down on the beach and go check whether you still remember how to swim.