The Secret To Avoiding Burnout

Two years into writing my latest book, Discipline is Destiny, I hit a wall.

There is no word other than “despair” for what I was feeling. Doubt? One always has that. This was deeper. No, this was a fear that the book would not come together. That I had chosen the wrong topic. That I had used up all my material. That I did not have what I needed, that my momentum had run out. At my lowest moment, before I had really even begun, I was facing the necessity of calling my publisher and asking for a delay.

I was also tired. Just so tired.

Coming up with the idea for a book is a creative pursuit, actually creating the book is effectively a work of manual labor, sitting in a chair, grinding out each consecutive sentence — a process not measured in hours or days, but months and years. It’s a marathon of endurance, cognitive and physical.

For me, in the last decade, I have run not just a couple of these marathons, but 12 of them, back to back to back. That’s roughly 2.5 million words across titles I’ve published, articles I’ve written, and the daily emails that I produced in the same period.

To say I was burned out was an understatement…at a moment I could not afford it.

This tends to be exactly how it goes.