#57 Burnout - When Changing Jobs isn't the Answer

Learning to recognize the difference between running away from a problem and moving towards a solution

Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.

I’m an ADHD and product management coach helping you feel a little more comfortable with your life by oversharing mine.

Part 11 of the Coping with Burnout series.

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🦋The Takeaways

The belief: Changing jobs or quitting will solve your burnout challenges.

The reality: Changing jobs doesn’t fix the internal challenges you’re avoiding by changing jobs.

The action: Find out if your burnout is a you problem, a place, or both.

⭐Introduction

This is the last post in my ADHD Burnout series. I wanted to summarize the last 10 posts with one story that would connect the concepts I’ve mentioned and share my personal story of burnout recovery.

My key to recovering from burnout wasn't finding a new job. It was realizing I had been living the life I wanted all along and had to let go of the shame of living it.

Today’s story is about the Costco hot dog!

📢The Belief - Quitting doesn’t solve the you problem

15 months ago I was in a complete state of burnout. I was working at my first company outside of the one where I learned to be a product manager (PM).

I had a lot of insecurity and self-questioning if I was a good PM going into the job. Maybe my 5 years at Amazon were a fluke and I wasn’t a good PM. I was just good at surviving Amazon.

Maybe the doubt came from ADHD.

Maybe it was the shared insecurity of a job title that can mean entirely different things in different companies.

Maybe I hadn’t read enough PM books. I wasn’t sure.

10 months into the job I was burned out and questioning everything about my life and career.

All I wanted to do was quit my job and go work at Costco selling $1.50 hot dogs. (For the unfamiliar, Costco is a US retail big box store known for good deals on bulk purchases and for keeping their food court hot dogs at $1.50 since 1984.

Eventually, I’d work my way up the food court ladder and get to create new items. I’d introduce new foods, bring back the combo pizza, and update a menu that hasn’t changed much in 40 years.

It was a romantic dream of spending my days in my favorite retail store without the pressure of working in big tech. No one would ask me about APIs, or scalability. Just about what else I could add to the food court.

I thought quitting my job and career would solve my problems. I’d be free of the struggle and anguish I was in.

I would never have to deal with the challenges of questioning my abilities and self-worth again.

I took this photo on my last day of work and sent it to some friends to show I was fine. Was I? Not really.

📢The Reality - Sometimes it’s a you and a job problem

Then I got laid off and came face to face with reality. The job was gone but my problems were not; they were worse. At the cost of a regular paycheck, the world had removed the thing that amplified my insecurities but not their source.

My questions of self-worth and direction remained.

• Am I a good PM?

• Do I want to be a PM?

• What do I want to be when I grow up?

Leaving the job brought a short sense of relief followed by an overwhelming sense of what the hell am I doing with my life.

Being unemployed and having ADHD meant I had all the time to think about my failures, shortcomings, and insecurities.

I had all the space to let my anxiety and self-loathing run wild.

Amid those struggles, it also gave me the time to reconnect with who I was and find who I wanted to become.

📢The Action - What’s my mission?

Recovering from burnout was a long and painful process. If you’ve read the blog since issue #1 you’ve read a good chunk of what I went through. Burnout posts 1-10 were some of the highlights of the journey.

What has completed my burnout journey and helped me begin to let go of my insecurities was finding my mission.

There was a big part of me that carried shame for splitting my time between the following goals over the last 15 months.

• Finding a full-time job in a rough tech market

• Running an ADHD coaching company

• Running a whiskey company as a CMO/CPO

• Writing an ADHD newsletter

My should monster told me “I need to focus on one thing at a time”.

“You can’t do it all and trying to will make you fail.”

My turning point came a few weeks ago when I realized what the thread that tied my goals together was.

The mission that keeps me going: Making the tech and alcohol industries more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. In short, I want to help the two worlds I live in better for people like me.

I work on this mission as a PM in a tech company working on the right challenges, as an ADHD coach and writer, and as one of the few Asian American whiskey owners in the US.

My mission of DEI is the thread that ties my seemingly haphazard and intentionless path into a clear road. It brings me the clarity to know who am I and where I’m headed.

Realizing that I’ve been living my mission for the last year ended my burnout and started my next chapter.

I’m much happier these days even when I get back from vacation and my bathroom mirror has fallen off on its own but didn’t break.

✨Conclusion

Finding my sense of self ended my burnout, not changing my job.

For some of you, changing your job might be the only thing you need to end your burnout. Sometimes it’s not a you problem, it’s the place you’re in

For others, it could be both. It’s a hard path sometimes to find the right place and who you want to be, but it’s worth the struggle.

Working, especially in the tech industry’s “growth at all costs” mindset can make you believe that money and titles are the true measures of a good mission.

They’re nice but they’ll never fully replace the mission you want to be living.

🐼Want to talk to me privately about your ADHD struggles?

⏭️Next Week

The start of a new series on navigating performance reviews, improvement plans, and everything else that comes with being evaluated in your job.