Gordon MacRae Blog

This piece by Cate Hall is great all the way through. But a couple of parts that stood out for me:

Court rejection

Seek out rejection as a way to find the boundaries of your knowledge or skills.

Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough. Jobs are a great example: Especially if you’re early in your career, you should aim to get rejected from most things you apply for. If you have not yet learned the skill of absorbing rejection, court it deliberately. Apply for some jobs you really don’t think you’ll get so you can learn to decouple “no” from surprise and dejection.

Learnable traits

Most subjects are learnable. They just take time. Most people don’t dedicate time to learn.

Many other supposedly fixed traits can likewise be altered: confidence, charisma, warmth, tranquility, optimism. Someone recently asked how one might go about learning charisma, and my answer was boring. Read a few books, watch many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopt a few of their habits. This is surely a plan of action most people could come up with if they didn’t have the notion that charisma is innate lodged in their heads.

Most of low status

The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of Sasha. 

When you make changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, you’ll have to cross a moat of low status—a period where you are bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

Manage your burnout

I realised this in my mid-thirties. During the pandemic, on a series of back-to-back zoom calls with an unpredictable manager, I burned out. I ended each day shaking with anxiety.

My body tried to rid itself of adrenaline. Over the course of three months I lost 15 pounds. I only weighed 145 pounds to start. I did not have the room to lose the weight.

As Cate says, “burnout is the ultimate agency-killer”. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realise what’s happening.

A switch flips and I start looking for ways to rule out ideas and actions, to conclude they won’t work or aren’t necessary, rather than chasing better versions.

These days, I set boundaries that would have made me ashamed at earlier points in my life: I’m offline at 6 p.m. almost every night, and rigorously observe a Sunday sabbath where nothing with the flavor of effort is tolerated. These will seem like small things to some people but like a mortal sin to others in the communities I run in.

It is so easy to allow other people to set boundaries for you. Unless you take steps to prevent it.

My rule is to never take instructions on how hard I should work from someone who hasn’t burned out before. Very few people take this seriously enough.

I have a theory that burnout is like the flu. Bear with me.

I’ve found that a lot of people misdiagnose a cold as flu. During the winter you’ll hear a lot of “I’ve got a touch of flu” from co-workers who are in the office or operating as if nothing is wrong.

The test for flu is more binary. If you were lying in bed and a £50 note fluttered through an open window and landed out of reach, you wouldn’t be able to get out bed to pick it up.

Burnout is similar. When you hear people complain about being burned out they are likely just tired. True burnout is like the flu. You are incapable of doing anything to help yourself.