by CJ Quines • on
Give yourself a speed limit
go too fast and you’ll burn out
My friends and I share writing with each other, and speed is a theme that’s come up several times now.
- In There’s no speed limit, Derek Sivers argues that you can go as fast as you can.
- In Fast, Patrick Collison names several examples of people doing things quickly.
- In Be impatient, Ben Kuhn quotes several more places where people write about the virtues of doing things fast.
Here’s a quote from Sivers, emphasis in original:
In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging classes. […] By doing this in addition to completing my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years. I got my bachelor’s degree when I was twenty.
Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
While Sivers’s essay doesn’t discuss whether you should go as fast as you can, the example of graduating college in two and a half years feels to me as something presented in a positive light; a similar thing holds for Collison’s piece. Kuhn argues that being fast “correlates strongly with being effective,” before proceeding with the quotes. If going fast had its caveats, they certainly weren’t notable enough for these authors to mention in their writing.
Like all generic life wisdom, though, I think this is subject to equal and opposite advice. If you’re in the kind of friend group that shares blog posts with each other about going fast, you’re probably in environments where people tend to go too fast. So let me give the opposite advice. Go as fast as you want, but give yourself a speed limit. Go too fast and you’ll burn out.
⁂
My first year in MIT was relatively smooth; even given the pandemic, the main feelings weren’t stress-related, but sadness-related. But the following summer, I burnt out. From non-stop / walang hinto:
i feel more busy [this summer] than i’ve been during my fall or spring semesters. the only time i can think of that’s comparable was during iap, or maybe near the beginning of spring.
When I think about that summer now, however, I don’t think I did more work than I did during the school year. Rather, I’d accumulated enough low-level stress, and my stress compounded: the more stress I had, the easier it was to get more. When I noticed my stress earlier that year, I didn’t do anything about it. Partly because of all the chaos surrounding the pandemic, but moreso because the stress felt small, so I ignored it.
but even then, that feeling was maybe i am doing much. even then, it felt like i was approaching my limit, but not reaching it, not getting past it. now, it truly does feel like i am at my limit, that i have overcommitted this summer, and that this was a mistake.
I knew I had limits, at least in theory, though I hadn’t run into them yet. I trusted myself to recognize if I got close to those limits, but the warning signals didn’t happen.
i’m hitting the ceiling and i’m feeling the blowback in full force. it’s just hard to calibrate when your ceiling changes every day. the brakes that normally prevent me from doing too much just aren’t available, not when i’m spending all day indoors.
In retrospect, the “spending all day indoors” reason doesn’t feel right. The pattern of burnout repeated itself earlier this year. Things looked great for a few months, and then I broke down all at once.
⁂
Consider the following riddle, which I first read when I was ten years old. A small water lily grows in a pond. Each day, the water lily doubles in size; if left alone, it’d cover the pond in thirty days, killing the other plants and animals in the pond. You want to rid the pond of water lilies before that happens, but because the plant grows so slowly, you decide not to worry about it until it covers half the pond. When does that happen?
If the amount covered by the water lilies doubles each day, then the day right before the plant fully covers the pond, it covers half the pond. As the pond is filled after thirty days, the answer is twenty-nine days, which leaves you only one day to save the pond.
You can’t estimate the rate of change from a point measurement. If I’m at fifty percent of my stress limit today, I might predict that tomorrow, it’d stay the same. But if I was at twenty-five percent of my limit yesterday, and twelve percent the day before, I’d predict differently.
If you’re like me, then you burn out the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. Enjoying work one day, sick of it the next. It’s best to deal with the water lily while it’s still small, and in the same way, it’s best to deal with stress while it’s still small. I shouldn’t need to wait for a meltdown before I take a break. The path to success isn’t measured in handspans.
⁂
It shouldn’t be controversial advice: if you need to take a break, do so. Sivers, however, seems to disagree.
Power through [stress and burnout]. Bitch and scream, but then do what needs to be done. […T]he best [athletes] knew how to push themselves, then recuperate, push, recuperate. Take this same approach to your emotional, mental, physical, and even spiritual life, and it’s a powerful metaphor. Think of sprints, not marathons.
And in another comment:
Powering through it is also the advice that ultra-marathon runners advise. They say you feel the pain, but just ignore it and go anyway. You don’t take a break. You just keep running.
The mixed metaphors here strike me as strange. We’re asked to think of sprints, but we’re taking advice from ultra-marathon runners. It’s not even the case that the best athletes push and push; Andrew shared the example of Tyson Fury as a top boxer who stepped away from the sport for a few years.
Collison has expressed a more tempered view.
To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do. Subject to that constraint, it’s not clear that the returns to effort ever diminish substantially. If you’re lucky enough to enjoy it a lot, be grateful and take full advantage!
The difference, here, is “that you enjoy” it. If you burn out, and the same kind of work that used to be enjoyable becomes painful, the advice doesn’t apply. Alright, fine. But how useful is this advice, if your stress grew exponentially? Enjoyment won’t protect you from burnout. It’s a risk factor, and it makes it harder to step away when you need to.
⁂
I’ve been working for this startup for a month now. I love it. I love what I’m doing, I love what we’re making, and I love the people I work with. But I fear I might love it too much.
There’s a saying among MIT students: IHTFP. Its likely origin is the acronym for I Hate This Fucking Place, and it still means that. But IHTFP means many other things; most famously, it also means I Have Truly Found Paradise. From Lydia K.’s Meltdown:
I love this place. […] At the same time I’m miserable, sometimes. […] IHTFP is studying my butt off to hit the average, crying about my grades, and then helping a freshman with his homework and realizing how much better I’ve become at patiently disentangling a challenge.
MIT is paradise.
I cry sometimes.
More than a decade later, Meltdown is still one of the most popular blog posts on MIT Admissions, maybe because there’s something universal to this undergrad experience. Highly-accomplished high schoolers placed in fast-paced places and told there is no speed limit. They’ll go on to do great things; they might burn out in the process. They’ll enjoy it every step of the way, right up to the crash. The road to meltdown is paved with enjoyment.
I want to be clear—loving your job is great, going fast is a virtue, and working hard is important. I think there’s plenty of people who’d be served well by ignoring everything in this blog post past the first two paragraphs. But I’m writing this because I know people I want to give this advice to. Most importantly, I’m writing this for myself.
I’ve burned out before, and I’m learning my lesson. My weekends are for my hobbies, my weeknights for my friends. I get paid time off, and I’m going to use it, and when I do, I’ll mute my Slack notifications. And when I come to work, I’ll go as fast as I want, because I do love my job! But I can’t work if I’m burnt out. I’ve set myself a speed limit, and I’ll stick to it.