How To Not Burn Yourself Out (It’s Ironic)

Overworked

Spending hours on Pinterest or skipping lunch to continue working on your business plan is exhausting. To be an expert in social media, undo, marketing, guitar, writing greeting cards, anything, it takes tons of time.

Over and over I’ve watched others burn out from spending hours upon hours on something.

I’ve seen friends spend days learning cool Twitter marketing skills just to burn out and scrap their campaign idea.  Others have exhausted themselves from writing for 4 hours straight or playing a video game for 8 hours non-stop. (Ask anyone in my family or my close friends, I’m quite notorious for burning myself out too, and it’s taken a number of years to write this post with pure confidence.)

The best way I’ve learned to not burn myself out is to do a little bit of everything. To be a social media expert, don’t spend all your hours trying to leverage Twitter. Do something with Twitter once a day and move on to doing something with all the other social media outlets. Instead of going all in, go in on all.

It’s not about knowing a little bit about everything anymore. Now it’s about learning a little bit about everything continuously over a period of time until you’re an expert on a lot of things.

This also means to go out and run in the rain, to cook yourself a damn good meal, to email a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while. Everything in moderation.

 

Stay Positive & Emphasis On The Everything

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The Catalogue Effect

There’s a problem with overserving, with overshipping, and with overcreating.

Do you know what a catalogue is? They used to be extremely popular because every week, month, or year, the catalogue would present everything new that is being sold. Yes, they would contain older products, but companies don’t send out catalogues to show you their old products, they send them to show you the new products.

A catalogue is the greatest 18th and 19th century way to overserve, overship, and demand overcreation. I’m going to let you in on a secret. The secret why catalogues have died off – it’s not because of the internet. No.

When people would receive catalogues, they looked at them to see what was new, but contrary to the seller’s belief, the consumer wasn’t looking to see what was new to buy it. The catalogue became a news source. All the consumer was left with after receiving a catalogue was wonderment with what the next catalogue could possibly contain.

Where does that leave the seller?

It’s neither positive or negative. The seller makes money as she always does.

The real person you should be questioning is the creator. Where does that leave her?

It’s a positive thing to serve, create, and ship with some form of regularity. However, when you overserve, overcreate, and overship, you produce the catalogue effect. Yes, people will value your work, but merely appearance wise. After you begin to deliver excessively, they will only be interested in what you will concoct up next. (Not what they will pay for next.)

 

Stay Positive & Creating More, Makes Your Audience Want More, But Not Spend More

Garth E. Beyer