Turns Out You Can't Intimidate Burnout

I was staring at the analytics dashboard for this blog again—the one that feels like a cursed mirror that only reflects disappointment. After months of writing, posting, revising, and shouting into the algorithmic void, my reward was a graph that looked like a dying earthworm. A few spikes of life, then a long, flat line of “literally no one cares.” I refreshed it three times just to make sure the numbers weren’t still loading. They were. They just weren’t showing me what I wanted to see. 

That’s when the voice started talking. 

Not the fun kind of voice, like a mysterious quest giver offering guidance. The other one—the spiteful dungeon whisperer that says See? You’re not cut out for this. Nobody wants what you’re selling. It’s a professional heckler who lives somewhere behind your eyes, happy to work overtime for free. It doesn’t shout; it just sounds reasonable. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s the same tone a coworker might use to say, “Maybe it’s time to be realistic,” right before they abandon the project you’ve both been killing yourselves over. 

And this is the thing, I know that voice. I’ve heard it every time I’ve tried to build anything that mattered. It showed up when the bike shop was struggling. It sat in the passenger seat during overnight trucking runs. It even tagged along to grad school, taking notes like it planned to quote my failures in a dissertation. This voice always claims to be protecting me from humiliation, but really, it’s trying to talk me out of doing something meaningful. 

That morning, sitting there with my bummer of a dashboard and my half-drunk coffee, I had the same thought that every burned-out leader, creator, and Game Master eventually has: What’s the point of all this if nobody’s listening? I could almost hear the dice clattering behind it. That’s the despair check—the roll you make when your motivation drops to single digits. And sometimes, despite every buff and inspirational podcast you listen to, you still roll a natural one. 

Identifying the Monster

Burnout generally doesn’t kick the door down and announce its presence, hands on hips. It oozes in like black mold, colonizing every crack in the walls while you keep insisting the creeping smell is probably fine. It’s slow, silent, and polite enough to convince you that the exhaustion is just a result of bad lighting or poor posture. You tell yourself that once the next post lands, or the next session kills, or the next quarter ends, you’ll feel normal again. Then one day, you realize you’ve built an altar to “once the next thing,” and you’ve been praying to it for months. 

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, the researchers who literally wrote The Truth About Burnout, describe it as a mismatch between the person and the world they work in. The energy you give stops matching what you get back—less reward, less control, less sense of community. It’s not weakness; it’s arithmetic. The numbers just don’t add up anymore. Their framework breaks burnout into three components: exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. To put it another way: your hit points are gone, you’ve lost faith in the quest, and suddenly your sword feels like it’s made out of cardboard. 

For me, it shows up as this hollow drag in the chest, like I’m pushing a shopping cart with a broken wheel through an empty grocery store. Everything technically moves forward, but it also pulls to one side and makes a noise that tells everyone nearby that something is deeply wrong. It’s not dramatic enough to qualify as a breakdown—just constant, low-grade friction.

And that’s what makes burnout such a bastard. You can’t fight it with a big heroic gesture. You can’t just “power through.” Powering through is how you feed it. It thrives on noble effort and half-sincere pep talks. You pour more of yourself into the fire to prove you’re not the problem, and all it does is get brighter for a while as it sucks up the rest of your oxygen. 

Leiter and Maslach talk about six mismatches that tend to summon this thing: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. The work gets heavier, your say gets smaller, recognition dries up, connection thins out, justice starts to wobble, and your values stop lining up with what you’re actually doing. In other words, the dungeon gets darker, the torch sputters, and you start wondering if maybe you took a long turn somewhere along the way. 

Once you see it that way, burnout stops being a personal defect and starts looking like a creature built by the system itself—a boss you can’t beat by grinding harder. The only way forward is to change how you fight. Because if there’s one thing humans love, it's losing to the same monster twice. 

The False Cure—More Grinding

My default reaction to burnout has always been the same: double down. Somewhere in my brain, there’s a little gremlin who interprets exhaustion as a challenge. “Oh, you’re tired? Guess we'd better stay up for another three hours.” It’s the same logic that makes someone with a sprained ankle decide to go for a run just to prove they’re not weak. 

That stubbornness has saved my ass plenty of times. Most of the good things I’ve built came from sheer refusal to quit. Every job I’ve ever had was, in one way or another, a test of who could outlast the misery: the bikeshop, the warehouse, the leadership program—all of them rewarded endurance. So when burnout shows up, my instinct is to treat it like an endurance test. Just keep rolling Constitution checks until my skeleton liquefies. 

The problem is that it works right up until it doesn’t. You wake up one day and realize you’ve turned persistence into self-harm. You’re still pushing the cart, but now the wheel is gone entirely, and you’re dragging sparks across the floor. You tell yourself that this is what commitment looks like, when really, you’re just scared that if you stop, the silence will confirm your worst fears: that no one’s watching, no one’s waiting, and maybe the work didn’t matter as much as you thought. 

That’s the trap—mistaking endurance for purpose. Grinding harder doesn’t fix burnout because burnout isn’t caused by laziness; it’s caused by imbalance. The harder you swing at it, the faster it learns to parry. 

This is where leadership theory snuck up and swatted me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. The whole point of adaptability and iteration—the stuff Hersey and Blanchard, and later Peter Senge, keep hammering on—is that no plan survives contact with reality. The way out of burnout isn’t to push harder down the same path; it’s to change the route. Reflection isn’t indulgence, it’s maintenance. Iteration isn’t quitting, it’s updating the map. 

The same loop that saves a campaign saves a career: plan, act, review, adapt. Every time you repeat it, you shed something that isn’t working. When I remember that, I stop seeing the grind as proof of commitment and start seeing it as an early warning system. The fatigue isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s data. The question isn’t “Can I keep going?” It’s “Should I keep going like this?”

The Three Healing Potions

Trying to brute-force your way out of burnout is no more effective than trying to swing a longsword at fog. You just end up tired, disoriented, and somehow wetter than when you started. Eventually, the only way forward is to stop fighting like it’s a boss monster and start treating it like weather—something you navigate instead of defeat. Lately, for me, that’s meant trying to keep three small potions in my pack. They’re not cures, but they might keep me on my feet long enough to find the next door. 

Potion #1: Self-Awareness and Reflection (a.k.a. Identify What’s Actually Eating You)

Maslach and Leiter describe burnout as what happens when the math stops working—when the energy you give stops balancing what you get back. Reflection is how you check the ledger before it bankrupts you. I catch myself muttering things like I’m just tired, as if exhaustion is a personality trait now. Then, I have to ask, Tired from what? The work? The pointlessness? The noise? Sometimes I can’t even tell which. 

That’s what self-awareness really is—not a spiritual awakening, just noticing the fine print before you write off another week. It’s what Argyris called double-loop learning—asking not “did that work?” but “Was I even solving the right problem?” It’s super easy to miss that second question when you’ve been ham-fistedly banging in the same direction for months. Reflection slows the pace just enough to notice when the scenery hasn’t changed in a while. 

Potion #2: Adaptability and Iteration (a.k.a. Change the Map, Not the Mission)

Adaptability isn’t a pep talk; it’s an escape hatch. Hersey and Blanchard called it situational leadership, but in practice, it’s just learning when to pivot instead of insisting the map must be right. I’ve spent plenty of time marching straight into dead ends because I didn’t want to admit the route needed changing. That stubbornness feels noble right up until you realize you’re decorating a cul-de-sac with your own burnout. 

The fix, at least for now, has been to treat everything like an experiment. Exploring different themes and approaches (which is what initially led me to mash up leadership theory with movies like Big Trouble in Little China), stranger metaphors, and paragraph structures. Some of it lands. Some of it detonates immediately. But even the explosions are useful; at least they light the room for a second. Iteration turns burnout from a slow fade into a series of small, survivable resets. 

Potion #3: Vision and Meaning-Making (a.k.a. Remember Why You Picked Up the Sword)

Vision is the part that I keep coming back to when everything else flickers. It’s the quiet conviction under all the noise—the reason I keep writing about leadership and dice and weird movies and all this human nonsense in the first place is because I believe in the mission of communicating this stuff in a way that is fun and relatable to real people. I see value in it. Bass called it transformational leadership. I just call it remembering the quest objectives. 

It’s easy to lose sight of those objectives when the metrics look like a ghost town. But every so often, I’ll reread a paragraph that actually says what I meant, and for a moment it feels like the room warms up a little. That’s the ember I’m guarding. But finding a bit of meaning doesn’t refill the bar all at once. It’s a slow drip. 

None of these potions is enough to restore you to full health, but they do get you to the next checkpoint. And sometimes, that’s victory enough. 

The Saving Throw

There’s this point on a steep climb—every cyclist knows it—when you’re out of gears and your legs start to burn like they’re arguing with physics itself. You can feel the hill winning. The temptation is to keep grinding straight up, out of sheer pride, even though your pace has slowed to a crawl and your quads are drafting resignation letters. But that’s when you remember the switchback. You turn the bars, ease the angle, and suddenly the same hill that felt impossible becomes survivable. You’re not cheating the climb; you’re working with it. You’ll still reach the top, just without destroying yourself in the process. 

That, I think, is what Maslach and Leiter are getting at. Burnout isn’t proof you’re weak—it’s a signal that the path you’re on is too steep for the gear you’re in. The fix isn’t to tell the pedals they're wrong and push harder until something breaks; it’s to change the line you’re taking. Reflection, adaptability, and meaning are just the leadership version of realizing that hammering in a straight line up the mountain isn’t the smartest way to the top.  

The same lesson applies at the table or at work. When your team’s morale tanks or your players start checking their phones, the worst move is to double down on authoritarian control. That’s the equivalent of standing on the pedals and insisting the hill will yield to your willpower. Real leadership is the switchback: adjusting the route so everyone can keep climbing without collapsing halfway up the mountain. 

Most days, that’s what my own saving throw looks like. Not triumph, not inspiration—just the decision to stay upright, shift gears, and keep the pedals turning one deliberate rotation at a time. The progress might feel slow, but it’s real, and it’s moving in the right direction. 

You don’t always get to choose the terrain. Sometimes the gradient just is what it is. But you can choose how you approach it. And that small act of adjustment—refusing to quit, but also refusing to grind yourself into dust—is what makes the difference between burning out and burning through. 

Rolling Again

The thing about burnout is that it usually doesn’t have a dramatic ending. There’s no victory parade or moment where the clouds part and the ray of sunshine comes down. You just wake up one morning, look at the same blank page or the same half-finished idea, and realize you’re ready to roll again. Maybe not enthusiastically, maybe not even confidently—but willingly. 

That’s where I’m at. The despair check never really stops showing up; you just get better at spotting it. You start to recognize its voice, the one that says no one’s reading this, no one cares, and instead of arguing, you shrug, light another torch, and keep walking. Not out of blind optimism, but because you’ve learned that sometimes the only way forward is to change your angle of approach. 

Leadership—real leadership, the kind that Northouse talks about—isn’t the art of perpetual inspiration. It’s the art of keeping people moving through the dark when the map’s gone fuzzy and everyone’s tired of your pep talks. It’s helping the group remember that progress isn’t always a sprint; sometimes it’s just one slow, deliberate step after another. 

At the table, that looks like rolling the next die even after the last one betrayed you. In life, it’s writing another paragraph, making another call, showing up for another shift. You’re not guaranteed a good outcome. You just get another chance. And the moment you take it—the act of choosing to roll again—is itself a kind of success. 

I don’t know where this project goes from here. Maybe it stays small. Maybe it finds its audience later, or never. But the work still means something to me. It’s the same lesson I keep trying to teach in every post, every leadership workshop, every campaign: you learn more from persistence than from perfection. 

So yeah, I’m tired. But I’m still here. The dice are on the table, the torch is lit, and that’s enough for now.