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“You have 2 hours and 30 minutes to help 6 creators with their burnout. What do you want to tell them?”, the Independent Television Service (ITVS)’s director of content asked me.
“That I fucking hate the word burnout,” I said. Inside my head, because I’m a professional.
I worked with ITVS1 during the Biden administration2. I love and respect so much what they do for film and video makers.
But now, Trump has eliminated government support to the arts and humanities. So when they said they could only offer me $500 for a 2.5 hour workshop, I took a beat and said, “For you guys, of course.”
If everyone’s burned out, no one is. We have officially tapped out the word. If we want to move out of “burnout”, let’s talk about what it actually means.
These are some of the ideas I posed during the workshop:
Burnout is living in the scarcity of physical energy, time, and/or money.
I got my coach training at the Academy for Coaching Excellence3. The founder and Chief Creative Officer of the school taught us that in the western world, there are 6 life energies.4 Here are the top 3 that most relate to burnout, in my view:
Physical energy
You get one vehicle, one meatsack in this life. Once it breaks down, you lose everything and everyone you love.
Put another way: You were born with a vessel that you can fill with water and pour into different cups.
If your vessel is cracked, broken, handle doesn’t work, doesn’t have a spout, isn’t maintained… you can’t hold water and quench the thirst of yourself and others.
Money
Money is crystallized energy that we exchange with each other.
The reason people hate billionaires is because they don’t share enough of their crystallized energy with those who truly need it, the ones that have little. Often by no fault of their own.
You must know your worth so that you can price yourself accurately (let me know if you want to hear how I calculated the value of my workshop).
Time
I’m a Silicon Valley native. I lived in San Francisco for 13 years. I’m sending you a postcard from my insane homeland:
You live in time poverty because you spend your time working for other people, building other people’s ideas. You work land that doesn’t belong to you.
If you’re a successful creator with over 100K followers and brands are reaching out to you but you don’t have a good website nor an email list/newsletter, I hope you don’t sleep very well at night.
You are at the beck and call of a volatile, shape-shifting algorithm.
You don’t really own your brand. I’m not even sure you own 50% of it. And at the end of the day, Google, Meta, and TikTok own ALL of your content.
But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. I’m inviting you to meditate on that more than you currently do.
Are you working for someone else, or yourself? Have you ever wanted to flip it? ❖
My Fortnight Favorite
Jack Conte is now officially my favorite CEO (Patreon). Mainly because he doesn’t want to be a bloody CEO he wants to solve the problem of artists not getting paid.
His interview with Jackson Dahl on Dialectic Podcast is worth your time.
P.S. What do you guys think of this new newsletter format? A story + something I have to tell you. Stepping up to 2x a month-ish. Is this helpful?
Love, Kat
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) funded, which is to say barely funded right now.
Zero bouquets of flowers or wistful sentiment for that administration. I wasn’t a fan. But at least they understood the power of the government funding American artists and humanists without dictating subject matter or medium.
By the way my friends who work at ACE, I send you paying customers. It would be great if you could comp me some training :)
Time, money, physical vitality, creativity, enjoyment, relationship.