I mean his “work 100 hour weeks to achieve success” days were long over. He was basically quasi-retired, and clearly had been checked out of his Zappos management role for some time.
This is much more a story of someone who has already achieved all the success in the world and seemed to turn to drugs as many do as an escape or search for greater meaning in his life to his detriment.
Two or three of those I've seen fall are exact fits for "I went from working hundred hour weeks to quasi-retirement", and they did not treat their burnout with the respect and healing I feel it requires. When they took away the overwork, the unhealed burnout smoldered and eventually caught fire and burned them, weeks or months later.
Is this what took down Hsieh? I haven't a clue, and it's unlikely I'll ever know, and I certainly don't intend to bother anyone to learn more about his circumstance. His friends are having a bad enough time as it is and I empathize too strongly to press for more knowledge.
Is Hsieh's story familiar from personal experience? Yes, absolutely. In the couple of press articles I've read, and a couple of quotes from a letter from a friend to him in one of them, there is certainly material enough to remind me of others I've known who worked themselves to the bone, sold it all and rested, and then a while later (a few months to a couple years) self-destructed.
He had always been into the rave scene. His entire instagram page was like one big love letter to Burning Man. He had a new tour titled the “Rabbit Hole.” I think clearly there was some interest on his part with psychedelics or dissociatives that went too far, and made worse by surrounding himself with people too afraid to confront him about it.
Perhaps his story his relatable from afar but to paint this as something to do with “getting over burn out from overwork” is not what I’m seeing when I read this piece.
> Each exhibited the same pattern of awesome-burnout-intoxicate-destruction as Hsieh is described as having here
I got the impression that he was a lone Atlas pushing a rock up a hill in Vegas, and the startup ecosystem he envisioned never really caught on. It doesn't surprise me that he moved to Utah at the end. They seemed to be accomplishing what he had been trying to do alone.
I didn't like the way Utah was moving though, and I left right before he got there.
Can you elaborate on this if you can spare the time? Genuinely curious...
I feel that he is a deeply corrupt individual who makes backdoor deals with his buddies. I also don't trust the judges there.
I went to the FBI with evidence of some of the corruption I uncovered, but was told point blank that corruption in Utah was so deeply entrenched that there was very little they could do about it.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good people there. There are also some very convincing liars and slick talking con artists. (There is a reason why Utah is home to so many sales based companies)
I started to feel like there was no room to breathe there. Real estate prices were skyrocketing, and I couldn't see a path forward for several of my projects that required large spaces.
There was a huge influx of venture capital that was supporting these inflated prices on real estate and talent, but I never wanted to go that route, so I was priced out.
I fund everything I do with family money, and keep 100% ownership.
TL;DR: It's hard to get ahead when you feel the game is rigged.
What's your perception of why the pandemic has caused a shift in pressure for you?
I ask because, like you, I feel much more stressed, but I can't really put my finger on why because my job has mostly stayed the same (besides going remote). Is it all just because of a reduction in in-person social contact? Or is it something else? In the beginning of the pandemic I got into a sort of manic mode of "do more faster" which was clearly not sustainable and caused me to almost burn out. The funny thing is there was nothing external pushing me to go faster, just my own brain and patterns. Are you experiencing something similar?
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I can understand why the list of what they fell prey to varies so wildly, because the typical top two most common drugs, alcohol and marijuana, have essentially no intoxicating effect on my brain at all — they do one time per year, but the 'addiction' curve for me is far sharper than other people, and they won't work again for months after that first time. It's always been like this for me, before and after I was diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD.
Every one of them started with alcohol and/or marijuana, and after a very brief period of time, those had minimal or no effect whatsoever, so they escalated to a wide variety of more potent disassociative drugs. My mental list is: LSD, cocaine, nitrous, other inhalants. It isn't even a surprise anymore to see that someone with charisma and a really interesting view of the world end up failing as they try as hard as they can to get a break from their thoughts. I don't blame them. If I hadn't watched one of my friends self-destruct and die over this as a teenager, I'd probably have burned out my brain decades ago by now.
So I go through my life with no known intoxicants that work on me — of the set of intoxicants that are considered 'safe', anyways — and, bluntly, I would never wish this on anyone. I have an unusual brain that can interrupt addictive cycles with willpower, but until I learned this lesson, I repeatedly found myself caught in the same Hsieh-like loop of "if I just double down, I can finally disassociate enough to get an evening's rest from my thoughts and worries", thinking that maybe if I just consumed more, it might be enough. It never was, and I am lucky beyond belief to now be able to interrupt that cycle without external intervention, before I do harm to my life and body.
The pandemic has put crushing pressure on me, and strained my ability to bear reality to the limit, and I still worry that someday I'll end up like Hsieh, trapped in a cycle of addiction because I just wanted a one-day vacation away from it all and couldn't find it. I'm not a startup founder, and most of my friends weren't either. When I find myself wanting an escape from life for a day, it's not because my life is terrible, it's because my life is intense like the noon sun is bright. (Like Lantern, if you Know.)
It turns out that burnout is the one thing that's guaranteed to push my ability to bear the intensity of life to my limits, and in that I think there's a critical warning for founders, for workers, for anyone in our industry with the tendency to drink caffeine to calm down and to do the entire project the night before it's due. Managing burnout is your number one priority for staying alive, after the bare minimum of bodily basics, because when your burnout level overflows, it can easily and trivially send you into severe addiction and possible death, as happened to Hsieh here.
If you suffer the same kind of brain issues that I and those I knew did, if you think that ADHD may apply to you — even just if coffee slows you down - then I beg of you: Beware burnout. It is your greatest enemy, it can undermine your willpower and your defenses against escapism and futility, it can't be cured with money or intoxication or hard work towards a goal, and it can lead to you sucking your life away from a small metal canister in the blink of an eye, just trying to get a single instant away from it all.
Footnote: The desire to escape can find outlets in religious and cult-like experiences as well; one friend with severe burnout fell prey to "self help" seminars trying to heal from it. I wonder sometimes if this offers a glimpse into the rise of personality "cults" in our modern world.
Disclaimers: Yes, everyone has different experiences. Yes, not every ADHD brain is the same. Yes, burnout can affect normal people in this way too. But I'm not speaking to those circumstances here today. No, I don't have secret information about Hsieh, and maybe he spiraled in a familiar way for an unfamiliar reason. This is a reply to the story, not gossip about Hsieh.