Why you probably need a break...right now
Authorpreneurs often think that taking a break is a luxury, but it's an essential part of success.
This is an article that came out of nowhere. I have done several articles about audience building, and I can only talk about it for so long before I need a break. Writing this was a reminder of that fact.
If you are a paid member, I recommend reading Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time, When to burn it all down and how to rise from the ashes, How to survive as a writer in a capitalist dystopia, and Everything is beige here... to help round out this article.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
I have been overwhelmed recently with the deep, guttural need to scream. I have no idea why, but it bubbles up several times a day while I’m simply going about my life.
I have a mouth, and I must scream; at nothing in particular, just the overwhelmingness of existence.
Not even the burden of existence, or the pressure of existence. Just the existence of existence fills me with the need to scream.
Things are not even going poorly. They are going as well as a human living in a hypercapitalist hellscape can expect…
…and yet, I feel the compulsive need to scream.
I’m not even mad, or sad, or particularly emotional at all. Yet, I feel a need to scream that comes on from nowhere and all at once.
If I could get by with one scream, perhaps I would cave and let it out. One scream, while alarming, is barely enough to turn heads.
But it will not be one scream. One scream will lead to a cavalcade of them that will cascade into eternity.
I fear if I start, I will never be able to stop. Society would not allow me to let out a scream as long and powerful as my soul aches to force out, and certainly not as often as I feel the need to release it.
So, I keep my mouth shut and cover it with my hands until the need sinks back into my belly once again.
In this way, I am like Ted from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The Allied Mastercomputer of capitalism has formed me into some sort of compliant jelly, and while I do have a mouth, I cannot scream.
Still, I am filled with the unceasing need to do so…and one day, I will explode, if only to escape the pressure.
I wrote that several weeks before the rest of this article. After I posted it, I kept coming back to one thought.
“Dude, you need a break.”
Maybe you thought it, too. To me, it screams (get it, lol) of somebody in severe burnout. Often you can’t see the signs of it before it’s too late.
Some years ago, at 20books Vegas, the incomparable Becca Syme handed me her book Dear Writer, Are You in Burnout? and it changed my life. In it, for the first time, I had the language to talk about something I had been feeling for a long time. The book is brilliant, and everyone should read it, but here’s what Becca said about burnout on The Rebel Author podcast.
The reason we burnout is because we reached the end of our ability to create enough energy for ourselves to do all the things we’ve committed to doing right…
So when you slide down into burnout, it can either be really really like a 90 degree angle, or it can be like 140 degree angle, right? So some of us are just going to head that way anyway. So the more we can do self care on a regular basis, and this is things like sleeping, get drinking enough water, like a ton of us are overtired because we’re dehydrated. And that’s because we over drink coffee and under drink water…
But even if you are going to still continue to drink the same amount of coffee, drink twice as much water as you drink coffee, just to make sure that you stay hydrated. So much of our tiredness on a day to day basis is from not drinking enough water. And so, so things like very, very minimal self care. If you are a person who feels the need to read a lot, you probably make energy from reading. And it helps you to write better books don’t cut out your reading. Like so many of us look at our daily hours and we think that all of our minutes are equally up for grabs to do things like writing or working and they’re not like we need the time to make the energy So that we won’t overspend, and then burnout because that’s what makes us burnout is when we reach the end of our energy stores, and we can’t produce anymore because we’re not making enough. I talked about it in terms of pennies, right? Like you spend 1000 pennies of energy a day. And if you don’t, and then you make a certain amount from sleeping and from drinking water and taking care of yourself and watching Netflix and things like that. And if you don’t make enough then you have a store that you use up. And once you get to the end of the store, you can only make as much as you can make from the normal stuff and you don’t have any more and that’s what causes the burnout to happen. Yeah,
Does this sound familiar? Even a little bit? Then you probably need to take a break, right now.
In fact, even if you don’t feel like this, you probably need a break. Unfortunately, as a rule, most authorpreneurs don’t take breaks. There are a myriad of reasons, but they usually fall into three categories.
I’ve noticed — and experienced firsthand — that vacations fall off the business owner’s radar for three different reasons at three different stages in the business life cycle.
Stage One: Financial
During the startup phase vacation plans often get scuttled for financial reasons. These are the bootstrapping months (or years) of business ownership. Budgets are tight both in and outside of the business. Even if you can afford to take a vacation during this stage, the priorities are to conserve cash and focus all of your time and energy on turning a profit.
You skip vacations during these years.
Stage Two: Physical
Once the startup phase is in the rearview mirror, your business enters the survival and growth stage. At this point your reasons for not taking a vacation go from financial to physical. While your business is perking along nicely, your presence is still required for it to run smoothly. The business is experiencing some serious growing pains that probably revolve around your unwillingness to a) hire senior management, and b) delegate. You feel the tension between profitability and sanity. The former takes a hit if you hire talent to help run the business, but the latter will suffer if you don’t.
You manage to take vacations during these years, but you can’t truly unplug from the business.
Stage Three: Mental
Even as the business reaches maturity, some owners still have trouble taking extended time off. With the first two excuses off the table, vacations now represent a mental challenge. Your identity and daily rhythms are so intertwined with your business that it’s just too hard to mentally “check out” and take a vacation. This is often the time when marriages have been stretched to the breaking point, regrets about missed birthdays and soccer games begin to set in, and health issues begin to surface.
You may or may not take vacations during these years, but you find it increasingly difficult to enjoy them. -Allan Taylor and Co.
I have certainly fallen into all three of those categories in my career.
I’m actually kind of scared for myself, because I just had a break when I was on safari in Africa, and yet, my body is telling me I need even more time off. I have been so burned out for so long that even though I wrote 24 books in 24 months before June of last year, I have only just finished my first novel since then.
In fact, until my safari, I hadn’t written more than a sporadic short story since June of 2022. Even now I can only write a couple thousand words of fiction a day, down from 5,000 words a day I used to write.
Still, I feel the compulsive need to scream multiple times a day, and I can tell my body is revolting against me. If anything, my safari just reminded my body that I’m supposed to be taking at least a week off every quarter, and work no more than 6 hours a day.
Does that sound like a luxury? Because I think in order to be a writer in this world, you need to spend almost all your time absorbing the world and learning how to exist in stillness. Letting your brain synthesize a billion inputs is how you make interesting writing.
Until last year, I took at least a month off every year. I would make sure not to work more than six hours a day in my business, even if I worked more than that on my business.
Business owners and advisors often talk about the importance of working IN your business versus working ON your business.
What’s the difference?
Working IN your business is anything that’s a job: execution, yes, but also management of the execution.
Working ON your business, however, includes anything strategic: business strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product development, research, and the vision and decisions that live in the C-suite. As you start up or launch new products, it also includes creating the systems that make your business run. -Ciara
That distinction is really important because while I usually work from about 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., most of my time is spent surfing the web, reading books, watching movies, and generally allowing my body to absorb inputs to help it grow. All of that is nurturing.
Working in my business, I take all of that potential energy and use it to create something. That part I find incredibly draining, which is why I have to be very, very cautious about how much time I spend inside my business.
For years, I’ve been relatively good about striking that balance, but in 2022 that all changed when my business partner and I started Writer MBA. That year I spent almost all my time working in my business and burned out hard.
So hard that I had to go on a sabbatical from writing just to recover, a practice I started many years ago.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 7,000-word article, then go to this website.***
Almost 10 years ago, back in 2015, I was struggling with building Wannabe Press when I saw a TED talk designer Stefan Sagmeister made six years earlier about taking sabbaticals.
As he explains in his 18-minute TED talk…Sagmeister’s goal is to take five years off of his retirement and intersperse them throughout his working years. He’s taken two such sabbaticals, and he uses the “experiments” he conducts during them to inform what he produces during working years. -Gina Trapani
Like any “reasonable” business owner, I listened to that TED talk the first time and said what you are probably saying reading this “must be nice”. After all, a sabbatical is a luxury, even for a week, let alone a whole year. It’s the thing uber-successful people did once they were successful, not what businesses did to become successful, right?
Still, I couldn’t get it out of my mind for the next few months. Then, at the end of 2015, the worst happened.
I owned a B2B Verizon dealership at the time and all our business dried up in December. Nobody wanted to switch phone carriers at the end of the year. They wanted to spend time with their family. At the same time, I was doing 3-4 conventions a month, and there were no conventions in December. All my businesses unwillingly shut down at the same time.
So, I had no choice but to take time off. I was forced to take a month-long sabbatical against my will. For the first week, I was too tense to do anything, but over time I had no choice but to relax and accept the truth that nothing could be done until January.
I begrudgingly started a sabbatical, thinking it was a luxury. It was hard to even think at first but after a couple of days, my brain started to reflect. I would wake up in the middle of the night wondering about something, and go back to the extensive data to check if my intuition was right.
I started to pour over numbers, in fits and starts, while I was reading books and talking to friends about how their year went. I would go down rabbit holes and spend hours staring off into space.
After another few days, I started to have ideas, and then those ideas turned from a dibble to an outpouring. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, taking time off was the best thing I could do for creative ideas.
Truly breakthrough ideas rarely hatch overnight. Consider, for example, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had a protracted evolution of its own. Darwin spent decades reading scientific literature, making voyages on the HMS Beagle to the Galápagos and other exotic destinations, carrying out painstakingly detailed observations, and producing thousands of pages of notes on those observations and his ideas for explaining them. It’s inconceivable that his break-through would have occurred if he’d tried to rush it. In business, too, there are striking examples of the value of having relatively unstructured, unpressured time to create and develop new ideas. Scientists working at AT&T’s legendary Bell Labs, operating under its corporate philosophy that big ideas take time, produced world-changing innovations including the transistor and the laser beam. Their ingenuity earned the researchers several Nobel prizes. They, like Darwin, had the time to think creatively. -Teresa M. Amabile, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Steven J. Kramer
After that first year, I decided to make my December sabbatical a yearly thing and have never regretted it.
Once the floodgates opened, I couldn’t close them. I went to the movies and suddenly ideas I had been blocked with for months started to come to me. I read books and they connected disparate dots in my business that I had not noticed when I was going full tilt. Turns out I, like most authorpreneurs, suffered from overwork, and that’s a creativity killer.
Overwork kills your creativity because an idle brain is anything but idle. When you take time to rest, your Default Network lights up, connecting pieces of your brain that don't usually talk to one another. The result is often bursts of inspiration and creativity. -Erin Wildermuth
The best thing I could do for my body was to do the one thing I always thought was a luxury. I needed time off, not just for myself, but for my business to grow. In order to find clever solutions to my problem, I needed time off to be clever.
For example, consider the sandwich. What has become a staple food in society is actually the result of a man who wanted to minimize work and maximize pleasure. The Earl of Sandwich wasn't inclined to eat with a knife and fork because it took him away from his real passion, which was gambling. So he put his meal between slices of bread so that he could keep gambling while eating, and the sandwich was born. As you can see, streamlining work can actually breed ingenuity. What could happen if you chose to work smarter instead of harder? -Timothy Sykes
The biggest thing I realized during that first year was that I had no idea what I was doing. I was selling books, but mostly by moxie alone. I had previously been a sales manager, and I was able to take those sales skills to sell books by sheer force of will, but I needed to figure out how successful creators built their careers if I wanted to have sustained success in publishing.
I knew if I could get their advice, then I could figure out how to make it work, but people didn’t generally want to sit down and get peppered with questions by random people for no reason. If I had a podcast though, I could basically use it as a way to turn the tables. Everyone wants to be interviewed. Neil Gaiman learned early that interviewing writers was a great way to become one and build a network.
So, I started The Author Stack podcast, which back then was called the Business of Art. It went for 200 episodes and from it I learned everything about what it took to build a successful business.
Without stopping to think about what was working and what wasn’t, I would have kept barreling forward forever wasting time and resources on things that didn’t work, or failing to notice the missing pieces that would move my business forward.
The following year, I knew the slow-down was coming, so I prepared for it. I made some hypotheses earlier in the year, and I decided to test them through the summer so I could check in on them during my sabbatical. Yes, I totally scientific methoded my business. We all learned the scientific method in school, but it’s worth a refresher because you probably haven’t thought about it in years.
The scientific method is the process by which science is carried out. As in other areas of inquiry, science (through the scientific method) can build on previous knowledge and develop a more sophisticated understanding of its topics of study over time. This model can be seen to underlie the scientific revolution.
Process
The overall process involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions to determine whether the original conjecture was correct. There are difficulties in a formulaic statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is often presented as a fixed sequence of steps, these actions are better considered as general principles. Not all steps take place in every scientific inquiry (nor to the same degree), and they are not always done in the same order. As noted by scientist and philosopher William Whewell (1794–1866), "invention, sagacity, [and] genius" are required at every step.
Formulation of a question
The question can refer to the explanation of a specific observation, as in "Why is the sky blue?" but can also be open-ended, as in "How can I design a drug to cure this particular disease?" This stage frequently involves finding and evaluating evidence from previous experiments, personal scientific observations or assertions, as well as the work of other scientists. If the answer is already known, a different question that builds on the evidence can be posed. When applying the scientific method to research, determining a good question can be very difficult and it will affect the outcome of the investigation.
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while formulating the question, that may explain any given behavior. The hypothesis might be very specific; for example, Einstein's equivalence principle or Francis Crick's "DNA makes RNA makes protein", or it might be broad; for example, "unknown species of life dwell in the unexplored depths of the oceans".
A statistical hypothesis is a conjecture about a given statistical population. For example, the population might be people with a particular disease. One conjecture might be that a new drug will cure the disease in some of the people in that population, as in a clinical trial of the drug. A null hypothesis would conjecture that the statistical hypothesis is false; for example, that the new drug does nothing, and that any cure in the population would be caused by chance (a random variable).
An alternative to the null hypothesis, to be falsifiable, must say that a treatment program with the drug does better than chance. To test the statement a treatment program with the drug does better than chance, an experiment is designed in which a portion of the population (the control group), is to be left untreated, while another, separate portion of the population is to be treated. T-Tests could then specify how large the treated groups, and how large the control groups are to be, in order to infer whether some course of treatment of the population has resulted in a cure of some of them, in each of the groups. The groups are examined, in turn by the researchers, in a protocol.
Strong inference could alternatively propose multiple alternative hypotheses embodied in randomized controlled trials, treatments A, B, C, ... , (say in a blinded experiment with varying dosages, or with lifestyle changes, and so forth) so as not to introduce confirmation bias in favor of a specific course of treatment. Ethical considerations could be used, to minimize the numbers in the untreated groups, e.g., use almost every treatment in every group, but excluding A, B, C, ..., respectively as controls.
Prediction
The prediction step deduces the logical consequences of the hypothesis before the outcome is known. These predictions are expectations for the results of testing. If the result is already known, it is evidence that is ready to be considered in acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis. The evidence is also stronger if the actual result of the predictive test is not already known, as tampering with the test can be ruled out, as can hindsight bias. Ideally, the prediction must also distinguish the hypothesis from likely alternatives; if two hypotheses make the same prediction, observing the prediction to be correct is not evidence for either one over the other. (These statements about the relative strength of evidence can be mathematically derived using Bayes' Theorem).
The consequence, therefore, is to be stated at the same time or briefly after the statement of the hypothesis, but before the experimental result is known.
Likewise, the test protocol is to be stated before execution of the test. These requirements become precautions against tampering, and aid the reproducibility of the experiment.
Testing
Suitable tests of a hypothesis compare the expected values from the tests of that hypothesis with the actual results of those tests. Scientists (and other people) can then secure, or discard, their hypotheses by conducting suitable experiments.
Analysis
An analysis determines, from the results of the experiment, the next actions to take. The expected values from the test of the alternative hypothesis are compared to the expected values resulting from the null hypothesis (that is, a prediction of no difference in the status quo). The difference between expected versus actual indicates which hypothesis better explains the resulting data from the experiment. In cases where an experiment is repeated many times, a statistical analysis such as a chi-squared test whether the null hypothesis is true, may be required.
Evidence from other scientists, and from experience are available for incorporation at any stage in the process. Depending on the complexity of the experiment, iteration of the process may be required to gather sufficient evidence to answer the question with confidence, or to build up other answers to highly specific questions, to answer a single broader question.
When the evidence has falsified the alternative hypothesis, a new hypothesis is required; if the evidence does not conclusively justify discarding the alternative hypothesis, other predictions from the alternative hypothesis might be considered. Pragmatic considerations, such as the resources available to continue inquiry, might guide the investigation's further course. When evidence for a hypothesis strongly supports that hypothesis, further questioning can follow, for insight into the broader inquiry under investigation. -Wikipedia
My hypotheses in 2016 were that:
I could learn how to have a successful business by interviewing successful business owners
I needed to build a killer network that would help me get to where I wanted to be and
If I did a lot more shows then I would start to be a known commodity in the local Los Angeles scene.
All three of these were tested and proved true to some degree. By the end of 2016, I had done 40+ conventions, built a bit of renown in the industry, and started to turn Wannabe Press into a real business.
I also ended up running four Kickstarter campaigns that year and learned a ton about my audience. By the middle of the year, I had so much I wanted to change from what I learned, but I found it impossible to stop while I was in the middle of my experiment.
It was one of the biggest lessons I learned; I couldn’t work inside my business and on my business at the same time. The only time I could legitimately change courses was when I almost completely stopped, and I couldn’t stop while there was work to be done.
By December, I was ready for a rest. Eleven months of burning the candle took its toll, and I was both beaten and bruised. Again, it took several days to unwind, but even in my battered state, I knew what I needed to do.
My business was growing, but people still had trouble pinning down what kinds of books we published. We made books and comics across several genres and it was a big problem.
I spent a lot of time talking to fans and learned that what tied them all together were the fans who loved them all. I had talked to thousands of them throughout 2016, and they all had a similar rebellious attitude and chip on their shoulder. They were creative, anti-authority, and hated BS. They appreciated that I cut to the core of it.
I needed a way to show them they were in the right place with a single glance, which is when I decided to create a mascot.
From all those conversations (which is the #1 reason I love shows) I developed and fine-tuned my customer avatar, which is possibly the most important part of building an audience. After all, a business is little more than making a product a customer willingly gives money to consume, and books are no different.
Maybe a little fiction can help you get down to a marketing truth: who is my ideal customer?
Take a moment to think about your business, and who you would really love to see walking in the door.
Enter the ideal customer avatar.
“One way businesses explore their target audience is by coming up with an ideal customer avatar,” says Minal Sampat, a marketing expert from the state of Washington. “This isn’t a new idea I can take credit for: it’s well-known in the marketing world because it’s highly effective.”
By definition, an avatar is an icon or figure representing a particular person like in a video game. Perhaps you have created an avatar when you were playing a game like Guitar Hero (to be geeky, it is a personalized graphical illustration that represents a computer user).
In marketing, an avatar is a little fiction that helps us understand who our ideal customers are so can more easily find them.
The website Einsteinmarketer.com, for instance, defines a customer avatar as “a detailed profile of your ideal customer. It doesn’t make assumptions or categorize people into groups. The avatar focuses on one person and outlines everything about them. It goes into much greater depth than a regular marketing persona, providing marketers with many more targeting tools.”
You don’t really create an avatar, you discover it. -Henry DeVries
That last line especially was absolutely true in my case. I discovered my customer avatar by having thousands of conversations with fans at shows. Conventions might seem impossible for you, but often to only way to get to the next level is to do things other people can’t or won’t do.
[In] Gary V’s case, scaling the unscalable means doing things your competitors are not willing to do. Getting on a plane, going to somebody’s wedding or who knows, maybe you actually scaling unscalable by every community that has an enterprise that you’re in. You go in and you send 10 volunteers. Think about the corporate culture of saying, hey, in order to earn clients, whether we do it right or we do it wrong, whether we make money, we don’t make money, we are going to go invest in a community where somebody we want to do business with is ad. And think how that benefits your brand. Think about how that amplifies your ability to move. -Hamer Marketing Group
This doesn’t necessarily mean “do more things” or “hustle harder”. It can simply be about finding a gap between supply and demand and filling it. Going to shows is incredibly challenging on your body and soul, but you can send one to two emails a week to subscribers and start to bridge that gap online with far less effort. There are all sorts of ways to do the unscaleable that don’t involve killing your body, mind, or soul.
I didn’t have much cash on hand at the end of 2016, but from meeting so many of my fans I knew that we needed a visual representation of our perfect customer, which is why I took what little money we had and invested in creating Melissa the Wannabe, who is still our mascot to this day.
Melissa helped change everything for me, but it wasn’t the only thing I discovered during my experiments in 2016. From conducting interviews for my podcast, I developed a stellar network of creators and many of them made similar comic books to mine.
I had built a network of creators who all loved monster books, so in my off-time during the year, I had slowly talked to people about an anthology idea called Monsters and Other Scary Shit.
My assumption was that if I could collect a bunch of incredible comic creators who made books about monsters, then all of our little audiences would be able to make an incredibly successful anthology book…and I was right.
Now this is a well-worn strategy, but back in February 2017, it wasn’t clear that a relatively unknown creator could use an anthology strategically to scale their business. I helped prove that hypothesis correct. So many creators in our anthologies have gone on to run the same playbook for their own anthologies and broken through in a big way that together with several other creators, we built the standard back in the early days of Kickstarter.
I wasn’t the first, and I wasn’t the biggest, but I did help prove that a creator could break through with an anthology. Dozens of creators after me proved my theory correct, and I helped prove it for people who came before me.
Needless to say, 2017 was a breakout year for me, but it was only possible because I took a break. While I was working inside my business, I couldn’t really work on it. I found small pockets of time to do a little planning, but it wasn’t until 2020 when everything came to a halt that I developed a better practice of taking time off every quarter.
Now, I plan in quarters, taking on one new project every quarter, rigorously testing it for three months, and then taking a week off to decide whether it is worth continuing to pursue.
Earlier this year, I tested out Circle and did not love it. Lots of people ask why I would choose to pay $100/mo to host a membership community and I addressed them in an email to subscribers a few months ago.
Okay, now onto the nitty-gritty from Music City.
If you're still reading with interest, the reasons why I chose to spend $100/mo (plus hundreds more in onboarding) on a membership community were varied, but it came down to a few main reasons.
Most memberships/forums look terrible. I haven't tried them all, but I have tried several of them over the years. They are not intuitive and people don't use them. Also, I don't use them which makes them flounder. On top of that, they don't have apps. The fact that Circle was easy, convenient, looked good, and had an app changed the equation for me. I've developed my own app before, and $100/mo is a steal compared to the money I pissed away on that app.
I refuse to build on any platform where I don't control the data. Even before Facebook locked and deleted my account, I decided that I couldn't build on a platform where I didn't have access to the email addresses/contact details of the people who used the service. After they locked my account, I only doubled down on that belief. This prevents me from creating a community on Discord, or any social platform. Substack is the only social network where it's been possible to interact because I have access to all the subscribers of my newsletter and can back them up offline.
I already have a community on Circle, so it was easy to use the same platform for this community. Switching between communities was easy and I don't have a lot of spoons to do tech support. In fact, I have zero tech support spoons, which is another reason why creating a site and loading a forum doesn't work for me. I don't have time to troubleshoot anything. I have been chronically ill for years, and I have to pick my battles very carefully. Books are easy to troubleshoot. Tech is not. I've been in a never-ending tech support loop before with my own app and that was the main reason we sunset it.
I am somewhat of a professional guinea pig. I try things and report back to others about my experiences with them. It's kind of my thing. I dive headfirst into projects nobody else has ever thought to try before just to see if I can make it work. Usually it ends up not working, sometimes it epicly blows up in my face, and rarely it changes the trajectory of my life. I'm willing to try them because it's first hand data, and I don't trust other people's opinion on what will work for my fans.
It was my yearly gamble. Every December I decide to take a big gamble on something, and this was my big gamble for the year. Usually these gambles are things I've been noodling on all year, and I'm sick of wondering if it will work so I just pull the trigger and try it. About half the time they catapult my business forward and half the time they die on the vine.
Those are the main reasons. This email has already gone on long enough, and I have a little bit more to say, so I'll stop it there. I appreciate you all reaching out to give me advice, so I thought it was only fair I shared my experience with you like you were so gracious to do with me.
It was sad, but most of the time experiments fail. If even a small fraction of them succeed, and you can stack those on top of each other, you become unstoppable.
I abandoned my Wannabe Press Circle community (though we still use the platform for Writer MBA) after the first quarter of the year.
My second test of the year was this Substack, which has been going great. It went so great that I decided to continue building it as my third-quarter project as well. I have been trying to build a membership for years and this is the first time it’s even sort of worked for me.
Even with all these safeguards in place, I am still fried. What are the odds somebody without all these safeguards is fried, too?
All of those are the head reasons to take a break, but the heart reasons are just as important.
We need breaks in our lives to build a life worth living. Just because you are working on your life’s purpose doesn’t mean your purpose needs to be your whole life.
In fact, it’s even more important to take breaks when you are doing something you love, because it’s so easy to ignore burnout and keep going.
We all want to do this work. You have probably wanted to be a professional writer for your whole life. You probably grew up taking breaks from the stressors in your life by writing.
But now writing is likely one of the stressors of your life because you rely on it to sustain yourself and thrive. When you become a successful writer, it’s easy to get caught in a writing doom loop.
A doom loop describes a situation in which one negative action or factor triggers another, which in turn triggers another negative action or causes the first negative factor to worsen, continuing the cycle. It is equivalent to a vicious cycle in which a downward trend becomes self-reinforcing. -Neal McGrath and Jiwon Ma
A writing doom loop often looks something like this: You used to destress by writing. However, you now have customers who expect your writing, which means the writing itself becomes stressful. You try to write something else, but in doing so your body starts to figure out how to monetize it, and that causes more stress. Your best strategy to relieve stress is now causing your stress, which causes a negative feedback loop that causes you to spiral.
A negative feedback loop is a normal biological response in which the effects of a reaction slow or stop that reaction. A negative feedback loop helps regulate health by ensuring that a reaction is appropriate and that the systems of the body are in a constant state of equilibrium, also known as homeostasis. -Elizabeth Boskey
There are several ways to break out of a doom spiral, and many of them are some type of self-care. It’s even more important to keep self-care at the front of your mind to avoid these spirals in the first place.
practice self-care activities
take regular breaks to avoid overwhelming yourself
engage in activities that improve the happiness chemicals
journaling about both positive and negative thoughts/emotions
reward yourself to keep you motivated
use positive self-talk
spend time unplugged from your devices to help you relax and improve sleep patterns
have a support network and check-in on each other regularly
take care of all three aspects of health (physical, mental, and social)-Mind Peelings
The whole thing, this whole game of being a professional writer, is not so we can replace working for a boss with working for ourselves. That’s the game capitalism wants you to play.
The real game we should be playing is to replace working for a boss with having the freedom to work when you want, how you want.
Money is not the goal.
Time freedom is the ultimate life objective.
“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life, ” says Henry David Thoreau. People think they want money — a lot of it. What they truly want is the time freedom to do what they really want. If you could trade your young life for a 90 years old but rich person's life, you would probably not do it. -Thomas Oppong
If you are not able to extricate yourself from the economic pressures pushing against you, then you are still stuck in the hamster wheel of capitalism.
The things we do to cope usually make matters worse. We eat or drink too much, buy stuff we don’t need, and lose our sleep — by trying to feel better, we perpetuate our problems.
Most people live in a hamster wheel — the constant effort to run away from where they are, gets them stuck in a never-ending routine. -Gustavo Razzetti
It literally doesn’t matter that you can be more productive if you take breaks or if your business will grow when you take breaks. The truth is that the only wealth that matters is time wealth.
What is time wealth? Time wealth is the ability to spend your precious time in a way that is most aligned with your values. That could be spending time with family, doing work you love, volunteering, traveling, etc. The ability and freedom to control our time should be what we all aspire to achieve. -Jack Northup
Much about how we envision a writing career is backward. We think about how we can write for a living, but that shouldn’t be the goal. Writing for a living means you are, on some level, writing to live. My goal, and the goal of everything I do on this publication, is to show you how to create a thriving life by writing, not being shackled to a desk, forced to write in order to survive.
Yes, it will help your business in unimaginable ways if you take time off with intention, but way more important than that is you should be able to do what you want when you want.
I wrote most of this from a cafe, as I sipped a Spanish latte with my dog at my feet, not because I was forced to write, but because it sounded like a nice way to spend a Saturday morning.
I have hours, literally hours every day that I can sit and do nothing. Even then, I feel like I work too much. When writing becomes your life, it will become a burden unless you understand a simple truth: writing is supposed to set you free, not yoke you down.
That is how I know you need a break…because we all do, whenever we want, for however long we want, and to do work we love that allows us to thrive, not so we can live.
We should be taking breaks all the time, with short bursts of work, not the other way around.
I’m going to end this with a little exercise I’ve been thinking about recently. I don’t know if it fits with the rest of this article, but I like it. Maybe you will, too. It’s something that I think about a lot these days.
Did you end today a little better off than yesterday?
No? That’s okay.
Did you have a pleasant time standing still?
No? That’s okay.
Did you end today without going backward?
No? That’s okay.
Did you just move backward a little bit?
No? That’s okay.
Did you find a way to stabilize yourself so you stopped going backward?
No? That’s okay.
Did you avoid falling in the mud?
No? That’s okay. People pay a lot of money to get a mud bath.
Maybe tomorrow…or maybe not. Either way, that’s okay.
If you liked this article, please consider becoming a member. If you are a paid member, I recommend reading Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time, When to burn it all down and how to rise from the ashes, How to survive as a writer in a capitalist dystopia, and Everything is beige here... to help round out this article.
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Yeah I agree I definitely need a break but there's this voice in my head that guilt trips me whenever I'm thinking of resting...
Hi Russell, I hope you don't mind, but I've been meaning to write about screaming as a brilliant coping strategy and was inspired by your post to finally get it out there. In case it's of interest, here's the link -- https://ezprine.substack.com/p/screaming-as-a-way-to-cope-with-these. Thanks for the inspiration -- much appreciated. Enjoying your substack very much.