#43: Why Self-Care Hasn’t Cured Your Burnout

#Burnout #Marriage #LifeLessonsRunning #PowerfulRefusals

Nov 03, 2023

👋 Welcome to this week's Pursuit. My name is Amir, and each week I go over 10 hours of content in pursuit of living a meaningful, fulfilling and balanced life. I'm grateful to share my findings with you and hope I can have a tiny impact on your life. Subscribe now if you haven't already!

This week’s discovery:

😪 Why Self-Care Hasn’t Cured Your Burnout
💍 Becoming the Best Version of Yourself Before Marriage and Children
🏃🏼 Lessons From Running
✋🏼 The Power of Saying "I Don't" Instead of "I Can't"
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To

😪 Why Self-Care Hasn’t Cured Your Burnout

Instead of signaling lethargy, maybe sometimes burnout signals a desire for more life, not less. Your burnout might mean that you’re much more ambitious than you think — about everything in your life, not just your career. If you’ve lost your drive for meaningful work, sometimes what helps is not to stop working, but to replace the labor you’re resisting with new activities that offer different flavors of engagement and satisfaction. Instead of endless rest, it sometimes helps to find new ways to engage with work and your wider existence.

📖 9-min

💍 Becoming the Best Version of Yourself Before Marriage and Children

Nietzsche believed that before jumping into marriage and having children, it's important to first become the best version of yourself. Rushing into these things as a means of escaping loneliness or feeling directionless is not the way to go. Instead, take the time to cultivate your passions and virtues, and find a partner who is also on a similar path of personal growth. Marriage can help you become the best version of yourself, but it should not be seen as a solution to your problems. Rather, see it as an opportunity to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Remember, the garden of marriage can only help you if you have first built a strong foundation within yourself.

🎧 2-min

🏃🏼 Lessons From Running

Don’t judge anyone at a single point in their journey because chances are you are missing context and will be wrong.
Everyone is engulfed in their own drama, with a unique series of challenges to overcome. You’re in a lane unique to you, with its own conditions. Stay humble, don’t judge, and focus on beating yourself at your own game.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.
Those especially difficult periods, where it feels like you’re running uphill against the laws of gravity, are the periods of truly material and differentiating progress.
Doing the hard thing makes you more rare because few people do, and doing so gives you an extra dose of much-deserved and surprisingly transferable confidence.

📖 10-min

✋🏼 The Power of Saying "I Don't" Instead of "I Can't"

When it comes to saying "no," the words we use matter. Refusing something based on our identity is more effective than using external excuses. Instead of saying "I can't," which implies something outside of ourselves is preventing us from doing it, say "I don't." This way, we focus inward and communicate our refusal based on personal feelings and identity. Look inward and determine why something isn't a good fit for you. Refusal based on identity comes across as much more powerful and is less likely to be pushed back by the asker. Remember, the words we use matter and have the power to shape our communication and interactions with others.

🎧 2-min