[thu]

What do you do if chilling out is not an option ? If your day job is maddening (and you feel like any other job would probably be maddening too) and the only alternative you have is to start your own company ? What do you do if you need to keep the day job to pay bills and work on your own product in the evening and the week-end until it can bring money ? When it seems that you can either burn out or succeed ?

[goalieca]

If your job sucks, be patient and make a long term plan to improve it/get out. Find/make something awesome outside of work to look forwards to and focus on. All work ends up being boring to some extent, so focus on the good things in life like your nephew or perhaps that microbrew taste testing night with your old friends.

[wprl]

There's nothing wrong with "going hard" to reach a short-term goal. Burnout comes when "going hard" becomes a lifestyle. You need to make sure to allow plenty of time for resting afterwards, or your intellect and will wear out.

[marcosdumay]

Well, first, you run away from fast growing startup business. You may want to start consulting first, instead of creating products. If you insist in products, do something that can be lucrative right at the beginning (Patio11 is famous for having lots of material on that).

Anyway, that advice is hard to follow. If you can't, I can't really blame you, I'm still unable to follow it either. But I've failed enough times to know that it's the right way to do it...

[stevenkovar]

Learn to enforce boundaries. If you let your job walk all over you, it will.

[ihsw]

It's not that it will walk all over you, but that it will keep taking away from every other part of your life until there is nothing left to take away. You'll feel helpless precisely because you will have nothing left to give. Everybody has their limits.

You will be straining your mind all the time, never able to let your guard down for a second. The only hope you have is that someone else will save you by taking your job from you.