The condition is real, pervasive, and can ruin your career and your life. Here’s my story, and what I did to defeat it and get back on track…
For nearly two decades I was on a roll. My career started accidentally, and success came easily. That’s not to say I wasn’t ready, or that I didn’t work hard— quite the contrary, I had prepped with the mandatory Malcolm Gladwell 10,000+ hours, and in my sweet spot was relentlessly focused and determined. By any standard I was talented, driven, and thriving.
Beginning at the very bottom in what coworkers and I cynically called an “html sweat shop,” I stubbornly stuck to it, zigged & zagged from better jobs to worse jobs to better jobs, riding the wave. A combination of flexibility, relentlessness, and smarts got me from squalid office onto planes and into multimilion dollar pitches. Along the way I increased my salary ten-fold.
Maneuvering between land mines and over speed bumps, I navigated a career path that matched my appetite, attitude, and aptitude. A quirky science geek and prolific writer, my talents energized gigs that demanded a combo of cognitive and creative savoir faire. I pounded on keyboards and mugged in front of cameras to rock it at the convergence of science, marketing, and tech.
Not only was I accomplished, I was having fun. The sheer joy and apparent effortlessness of my achievements engendered awe and jealousy. Put me anywhere to do anything, I was all-in. Working evenings, weekends, always on-call and standing-by, I consistently won MVP. Jumping into any project to take myself and the whole team to a higher level, I boosted value and wins.
The price I paid seemed insignificant compared to the benefits I received. Endless roadtrips kept me from my kids, but I frequently FaceTime’d; non-stop effort allowed little rest let alone sleep, but I somehow flourished on endless espresso shots and midnight sprints; competitive intensity triggered typical work politics and drama, but we processed, rapidly reconciled, and moved on.
Success engenders more success, to the point things get taken for granted. That’s the first sign of trouble, when you consider yourself invincible. The healthy paranoia and feelings of insecurity that once forced close attention to detail and sweating the unknowns are slowly overshadowed by ego, confidence, and distraction. The biggest victories make you most vulernable.
Too Good to Refuse
People talk about other people, that’s what we do, that’s how we’re all wired. Perception is reality, especially when it comes to hearsay. Reputations are created and destroyed based on personal branding, which like the marketing of breakfast cereals or politicians goes through inevitable ups and downs. Thanks to my stellar decade I peaked, was blue chip, a hot corporate ticket.
Prophets are without honor in their hometown since everyone’s seen them pee behind a barn — but mostly because their peers are competing for the same table scraps. Similar rules apply in business where the only way to significantly boost one’s salary and industry status is to jump to another company where personal liability can be turned into professional asset.
So that’s what I did last year, leaping from a great job to what looked like an incredible one. I would be doing what I had succeeded at before, and more of it. A proven storytelling maestro, I’d be weaving strategic ideas with creative concepts to help win new business and grow existing clients. I’d manage my own extended team, mentor and empower them with my mad skills.
All systems initially seemed “Go!” Meeting and exceeding expectations, my crucial first 90 days were a textbook case of outsider talent assimilating into a complex organization and nailing it. The risk senior management had taken by bringing me on was quickly rewarded by the benefit of hiring top talent that proved to be personally liked and professionally indispensable.
To nobody’s surprise I was winning— until to everyone’s I wasn’t. The temptation to dramatize a life crisis is strong, point to an event that in retrospect triggered catastrophe. Memories are imperfect, especially when emotions run high and the consequences are significant. But in this case, my runaway career train clearly flew off the rails the day my son broke his leg.
Almost exactly six months into my exciting new job I got the call every parent dreads, my youngest screaming into the phone: “Dad, I fell off my skateboard and I can’t walk!” OMG, here we go — rush to school, holding his damp hand throughout the bumpy ambulance ride, excruciating wait and X-rays, cast and crutches, by his side throughout the long and agonizing first night home…
An Imperfect Storm
The accident had broken my twelve-year-old’s left tibia. A spiral fracture, we were lucky the injury wasn’t worse, yet unlucky in that it should never have happened at all. Across the broad universe of human misery this incident certainly scores low, kids break bones all the time. Pleasure and pain are relative, though, their metrics subjective. We faced months of dread ahead.
His recovery was slow and arduous, and as a doting dad I projected my own shock and fear by overdoing his caregiving. Instead of situating him comfortably on the living room couch I carried him endlessly up and down three flights of steps to and from his bedroom; terrified of his vulnerabiliy I worried about him constantly and obsessed over his mood, sleep, and therapy.
My son’s physical wound cascaded into emotional wounds around the house. The rising tension triggered intense feuding with my wife; helpless witness to my son’s suffering I midlife-crisis’d-myself into spontaneous and ill-planned vegetarianism, former low-carb protein diet haplessly flipping into a toxic onslaught of bread and baked foods, reeking havoc on my mind and body.
Weaving a cohesive story from otherwise random events is inevitable when those events are horrible and hit you all at once like a ton of bricks. So as my son mended our household was of course invaded by bedbugs, infested by mice, and ravaged by the flu. The mounting domestic disasters would have been comical had they not exacted such a cumulatively destructive toll.
The acute incident with my son and escalating crises at home exacerbated my growing vulnerabilities at work. Cracks had already started to form in my performance, my son’s break catalyzing more subtle and deeper breaks throughout the rest of me. He’d obviously over-extended himself with that Tony Hawk skateboard stunt — was I doing the same with my career?
First published by Laurence J. Peter in 1969, The Peter Principle originated as satire but has since evolved into cautionary tale for recruiters and candidates alike. Top performers get promoted to senior positions, usually leadership roles, based on the often erroneous assumption that being good at one job makes them great at another. Was I getting woke? Had I hit my ceiling?
Dream Gig to Nightmare Grind
What began as a thrilling rush of intriguing new responsibilities was starting to wear me down. Up to then I had flourished as the strategic capability of an interdisciplinary team— leveling up, I found myself managing a staff and overseeing multiple projects. Thought leader had morphed into project leader, with added workload that demanded entirely different capabilities.
Once firing on all cylinders and comfortably in the driver’s seat, I became head of a pit crew tackling a thousand technicalities I could no longer take for granted. In prior gigs I was summoned for my ability to simplify the complex, turn an otherwise banal presentation into a scintillating and memorable performance — then race away. Here I had to keep the machine running.
Accustomed to zooming round and round at 200 mph, I operate best where the heat is on, the air is thin, and the bullshit is thick. I over-promise and under-deliver, but in such a way that the promise becomes, in and of itself, the delivery that clients crave and eagerly pay for. Grease, rubber, and oil instead demand true grit, team work, and organization. I was getting burned.
While my son struggled at home, I struggled at work. Simple tasks were becoming difficult, tough ones impossible. I had trouble concentrating, processing the tsunami of hourly emails and blizzard of swirling projects. Prioritization was slipping, and with it effective time management. I compensated by sleeping less: five, then four, then three hours per night.
On the surface I was hanging on, but my grip started to slip. All the positive feedback I enjoyed throughout my career flipped into the red. I was treading water, then swimming upstream. Tiredness beget exhaustion. Instead of firing away at new opportunities I was dodging bullets. Metaphors mixed as I feverishly ran just to stay in place, sprinting yet losing ground.
Corporate life is like poker: all it takes is a couple bad beats and your winning streak is crushed. Mine were in the form of high profile projects my former self would have effortlessly knocked out of the park. Instead of cranking slides and energizing teams, I slugged espresso at 4am and paced in front of my laptop, unable to think clearly or work efficiently. My brains were blown.
Bright Light to Burn Out
Without realizing it at the time, I was suffering from a debilitating case of cognitive fatigue. Originally grouped with traumatic brain injuries, the condition is now viewed by psychologists and therapists through the lens of extreme sensory overload causing stress and exhaustion. The implications are declining performance, loss in productivity, and reduced quality of life.
Debate continues as to its classification, epidemiology, and societal impact. I don’t play a doctor on TV, but after enduring its symptoms and suffering from its results I can directly relate. Not someone who rationalizes away his personal responsibilities with the fate accompli of a medical condition, the definition nonetheless resonates for me. Don’t let this happen to you:
Mental or Cognitive Fatigue (CF) can be defined as a decrease in cognitive resources developing over time on sustained cognitive demands, independently of sleepiness. CF can be observed in the context of various attentional and executive cognitive functions with, amongst others, developing difficulties to suppress irrelevant information during selective attention, increased perseverations and time needed to plan, weakened cognitive control and decreased high-level information processing, or even declining physical performance. CF is also a significant contributing factor in loss of productivity, poor academic and professional performance, increased risks of accidents and reduced quality of life in normal and clinical populations. Although fatigue as a global phenomenon has been investigated for more than a century now, the impact of CF at personal and economic levels continues representing an alarming figure in modern societies.
Makes sense. When leg muscles are over-worked they fatigue, make walking difficult, running impossible. When the mind is similarly over-worked it, too, becomes fatigued, cognitive tasks increasingly difficult, eventually impossible. Debility is analogously progressive: soreness, limping, infirmity for the leg — irritability, insomnia, loss of concentration and productivity for the mind.
On crutches, my son needed help every morning getting onto his school bus which arrived late or not at all. On a vegetarian diet, my body got fat and my brains got protein-deprived. On ice, my married life suffered and exacerbated everything else. And on the hook, dozens of work projects distracted me from skill areas where I naturally flourished and needed to shine — yet went blank.
Bedbugs, mice, and the flu didn’t help. Before I knew what hit me, I was completely overwhelmed. Ideas that once flowed spontaneously were blocked, projects that took fifteen minutes became interminable. These symptoms were my brain’s way of telling me that this muscle was fatigued, that it needed rest. Like it or not, I was headed toward shut down mode.
A year into my dream job, I was done. Packing my things up, I felt a complex mixture of emotions, most of them relief. I had a great run, nearly two decades of continuous growth and personal improvement. I had made some mistakes, but always bounced back. I’d bounce back from this, too, but knew fundamental things had changed. Dead ends force maps to be redrawn.
Mirror, Mirror
Arguably the most dangerous aspect of success is how it can mask critical flaws that remain unseen until too late: Evident on the corporate level, where exponential growth often hides systemic problems, such as the housing and dot-com bubbles; and obvious on the individual level when personal problems finally catch up to and unexpectedly destroy the careers of celebrities.
High performing talent also tends to be quirky, demanding a commensurate level of oversight and encouragement to accentuate prodigious strengths, and downplay and even ignore glaring weaknesses. The brightest lights cast the longest shadows, so accomplished coaches understand how such chaotic but constructive energy needs to be channeled rather than switched off.
I’m no different. I’m phenomenal at some things, bona fide world class when it comes to crafting a terrific story, reading clients, and owning a room; at others I flat-out suck, such as attention to detail, rigorous process, following up. Other skills vary depending on my fickle, often childish mood, such as getting my darting thoughts down on paper — paradoxical for a born writer.
My strengths and weaknesses are often complements of each other. My strong sense of intuition and lightning fast mind can instantly “see” the solution — but jumping to conclusions can be dangerous, and teams often feel steamrolled. My impulsiveness works miracles if the context is right; but if imbalanced or inappropriate can lead to embarassment or disaster.
By this career stage age admittedly became a factor, too. Skating into my fifties, I was no longer a young buck. Things you enthusiastically do when you’re twenty become unwelcome tasks as you get older. And as you age, tolerance for doing what you don’t want to do to get to where you think you should be succumbs to sheer inertia. Some call it wisdom — others laziness.
Was my burn out caused by internal or external factors? Innate behaviors or extraneous circumstances? Would have, could have, should have things been done differently? The counterfactual “What if…?” makes us feel better as it distracts us from dealing with the immutable past. But I believe we’re better off looking ourselves in the eye, taking personal responsibility in the present.
Free, Your Mind
Cognitive fatigue is genuine and pervasive. But like most medical conditions, management and even prevention are possible and necessary. Just as diet and exercise can delay Type 2 diabetes, knowing oneself and one’s limitations can control mental exhaustion. Speaking up is also important: the world always wants as much as it can take from you. Only you can set the boundaries.
In retrospect I should have asked for extra time off and taken a plane by myself to Nowhere. Simmering my head inside a bucket of whiskey or airing it out on some Himalayan mountaintop could have worked wonders. Instead I was immersed in a state some have described as “The Fog of War,” where panic swaps simple proactive solutions with complicated reactive errors.
Hindsight is 20/20 because gaining a sense of perspective is much easier after the smoke clears. Meditation serves a similar purpose, clearing the mind of all distraction so you can wake back up and focus on what actually counts. That’s also why highly successful people recommend you never check email before coffee— we all need quiet reflective time before facing the busy day ahead.
Sensory overload is the opposite of the Zen-like stillness required to process stimuli accurately and respond meaningfully. Attacked from all sides, we shift from calm success mode to desperate survival mode: garbage in → garbage out. The irony is that stopping everything and doing nothing is usually the best solution, giving mind and body their much needed rest and reboot.
From an early age I dreamed of becoming a celebrated scientist, my hopes dashed with the eventual realization that my math abilities were impressive, but not of the caliber necessary to play ball at that level. A friend of mine has a doctorate in astrophysics from MIT, so I’ve often gushed enviously at his abilities, ‘fessing up my frustration at not being nominated for a Nobel Prize.
“Don’t feel bad about it,” he shrugs. “Everyone has a math ceiling. I hit mine the last year of graduate school. Sailing along until then, I felt like I suddenly struck a wall. I sweat it out and got my Phd, but I was in over my head.” He’s since gone on to a great career in cyber security systems, no looking back or regrets. But his lesson is a good one, a reminder that we all have a limit.
Fixing What’s Broke
I’ve always been obsessed by genius. Not so much amazed by how it shines, but by the mystery of how it fades. How can the same guy who created Jerry MacGuire go on to make Aloha? How could Einstein revolutionize science by thinking up relativity theory only to be taken out to pasture by rejecting quantum dynamics? Apple fired Steve Jobs. Why do the mighty fall?
Be careful what you ask, because the universe will one day answer you — personally, profoundly, and with painful insights. I’m no Leonardo, but I’ve always been that annoying whiz kid making difficult things look easy, until the easy becomes difficult. Bouncing from Hero to Zero is suprising and humilitating, yet an important allegory in self-reflection, healing, and rebirth.
Pain is an eminently useful discomfort. Without it we would burn, freeze, poke, cut, and mutilate ourselves into extinction. Cognitive fatigue is similarly protective, the mind shielding itself from being wounded by too much stimuli, the demand for too much response. My condition was actually a defense mechanism, urging me to do what the rest of me refused to accept: move on.
All this begs the question of the job I had, the career I’d been pursuing, and the future I now want. If cognitive fatigue is simply my body’s way of saving itself, then clearly I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A vacation might have helped, but it wouldn’t have solved the core problem that my job and I were misaligned, that as I crashed and burned nobody cared.
So move on is what I did, had no choice but to do. Aware of my limits, sensitized to my vulnerabilities, and appreciative of my distinct talents, I got long overdue rest, recuperated, and regrouped. Rather than tumble into the next inevitable professional phase, I took stock of my emotions; rather than job searching I did some serious soul searching. Who am I, really?
At least I knew whom I wasn’t, not anymore: workaholic, non-stop go-getter, ADHD warrior. Instead, my personal and creative selves demanded attention, and they’d be appeased. My physical health and wellness also had to take priority, my body having gone soft as my brains worked too hard. Finally, after all these years, I was starting to pay attention. The motor mouth was listening.
Healing & Feeling
My son who broke his leg a year ago is now playing flag football, running in the park. Fully healed physically and emotionally, we both reminisce about that terrible Tuesday and the months of pain and healing that followed, the whole experience bringing us closer together. Our household is calmer, too — although every once in a while we see a mouse scurrying across the floor.
Failing at vegetarianism, I’ve succeeded at regaining my fitness. My body atrophied from the endless work hours and travel, I’m now back to running, lifting, biking, and boxing. My mind again relaxed, I’m back to thinking clearly and working efficiently, the creative spark returning with gusto. Guitar, drums, and writing are where they belong, priorities for a healthy life.
Embracing the next phase in my career, I’ve shifted gears from company guy to consultant, hung up the shingle and started my own business. The evolution enables me to adapt my unique skills to the jobs best suited to my abilities, rather than force myself into a mold that can trigger anxiety and frustation. Back in the driver’s seat, I steer my own destiny.
One of my clients is an advocacy group that I truly believe can make the world a better place. Another client is an entrepreneur who is as kind as he is passionate. Other gigs abound where my strengths add immediate value, and my weaknesses are overshadowed by others eminently more capable. Learning my limits the opportunities have become boundless.
Resourceful, driven, networked — I’ve moved on and again feel terrific. By taking personal responsibility without taking things personally I’ve successfully turned it all around. Sensitized to the warning signs, I’m better balanced and live happier and better, making it a point of making time for what sets my mind and heart at ease: kids, creative pursuits, and laughter.
Moving forward, eager for what’s next, I feel like the protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading when at the end, free at last, he “made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.” End of the day, bottom of the spreadsheet, the essential question we all need to answer is: What do we love doing, and whom do we choose doing it with?
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