#35: Three Things that got me thinking
Burnout + life design + book machines
Bonjour!
We’re working on the go, from the mountains to my sister’s couch—but rest assured my intrinsic motivation antennae are working as usual.
1. Make It or Break It
Climate journalist Emily Atkin, who writes the Substack newsletter Heated, says she had an ambitious List of career goals from a young age. It included external markers of excellence—and possible proxies for social impact—like a Pulitzer prize or cable news invitations, and also this curious target: “By 50, I’ll have to take a few years off because of burnout.”
She writes about her planning, nay striving for collapse:
“From popular culture to academia to the economy, I learned that a noteworthy life required an extreme and unsustainable use of energy. If I wanted to both improve the world and be able to take care of my parents, I would have to extract from myself more than I thought I could bear. Eventually, inevitably, I would run out of steam. But it wouldn’t be that bad, and I would recover. The benefits would be worth it. There was no other way.
You see the parallel to climate change, right? The rationale I’ve used to burn myself out is the same rationale the fossil fuel industry uses to burn up the planet.”
Oof.
While I’ve never expected burnout as a necessary part of a worthwhile career, I have certainly bought into the narrative of the broken worker resurrecting into a better version of herself—finally finding the clarity and courage to be and do what she’d always wanted to, deep down. I also bought into the common confusion between our identity and our work, like we’re Gracie-Lou Freebush.
That’s until I heard the trainers1 of The Self-Investigation, an online course2 helping journalists to deal with stress and digital overload, tell us: You are as important as your work. Aha! It is OK and good to ask ourselves (and each other): how do you feel? Do you enjoy this work? Does it matter to you?
As Atkin writes:
“I’m going to stop fixating on the amount of work I do, and focus more on how it feels to do it. Hopefully, that change in focus will allow me to create something sustainable—something that will last far beyond the year I turn 50.”
2. Follow the joy
I’m reading and enjoying Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. The book provides prompts to reframe old beliefs, tools to turn intimidating life and career decisions3 into defined design problems. That makes it easier to then come up with usable ideas.
Here are some quotes I highlighted:
“We are serious about this: you don’t need to know your passion in order to design a life you love.”
“Since there’s no one destination in life, you can’t put your goal into your GPS and get the turn-by-turn directions for how to get there. What you can do is pay attention to the clues in front of you, and make your best way forward with the tools you have at hand. We think the first clues are engagement and energy.”
“we don’t want someone to stand up at our funerals and say, 'Dave had good written and verbal communication skills.' Or 'Bill really demonstrated the ability to juggle competing priorities and move quickly.' Life is about more than a paycheck and job performance.”
3. This seemed like a cute idea
I read about an elementary school in Pickerington, Ohio that installed a book vending machine to encourage children to read:
“Once a month, each teacher will select a student to receive a Golden Stripe Award. That student then will be able to insert a golden token into the machine to receive a book.”
Says the principal: “We want the gift of a book for their positive behavior to continually reinforce the intrinsic motivation that drive all of us to be well-rounded individuals.”
What is intrinsically motivating about a golden token system?! A librarian at another school shares a fairer, more exciting way:
“We considered awarding books from the book vending machine based on positive behavior. However, students who need free books the most may struggle to earn positive behavior rewards. We decided to offer books on students’ birthdays instead, and on half birthdays for those born during summer months.”
One of the trainers, Mar Cabra, is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who did suffer burnout from her work on the Panama Papers investigation.
Shout out to the Freelance Journalism Assembly, who gave us access to these resources for free in 2020.
At our outpatient clinic at the Yale Child Study Center we also have a book vending machine. Kids get to choose a book at the end of their therapy session--it's a big hit
M'agrada la idea de premiar, i pel simple fet de ser!