Am I failing? Or I am just exhausted?

When the wheels wobble, it’s not always the car

I had one of those moments this week where I was ranting to my partner about how I was tired, cranky, skipping meetings, falling behind on work, dropping the ball with clients, and generally turning into the worst version of myself. You know the version — the one who looks at a full calendar and feels personally insulted by every meeting in it.

He listened (patiently… suspiciously patiently), then said something painfully simple: “Well, any wonder. You’re exhausted.”

It stopped me. Not because it was profound, but because it was so obvious that I’d managed to ignore it entirely.

When you look at the last few months, it makes too much sense:

• July was a month of delivering on work people booked — and paid for — in June.
• August was the busiest month of meetings I’ve ever had.
• September was Startup September, which basically means “say goodbye to downtime.”
• October was October Business Month — 20 workshops and another dozen events. That’s basically a full-time evening job layered on top of a full-time day job.

And now? Instead of my usual November escape to Bali — the annual reset that saves my sanity — I’m in Melbourne, about to go to Brisbane, then Adelaide, working the entire way.

“Any wonder.” He was right.

The problem wasn’t my motivation, my ability, or my discipline. The problem was that I was asking a tired brain and a tired body to keep performing at “Olympic Cathy Freeman final lap” levels long after the stadium lights should have gone down.

And honestly? That realisation felt like the first deep breath I’ve taken in months.

Burnout doesn’t start with collapse — it starts with compromise

Burnout creeps. It doesn’t kick the door down. Instead, it whispers:

• “I’ll skip that meeting — I’ll catch up later.”
• “That promise to a client can wait — I’ll do it when I’m fresher.”
• “I’ll write that thing tomorrow — tonight I just need to stare at a wall.”

And those little compromises are easy to justify. After all, you’re still showing up. You’re still delivering. You're still high-functioning… just increasingly resentful about functioning at all.

The thing is, burnout doesn’t show up as “I’m drowning.” It shows up as “Why does everything annoy me?” Or “Why am I doing the bare minimum of what I usually love?” Or “How did I forget something so basic?”

For me, it showed up as slip-ups I don’t normally make — the kind that feel so unlike me that I briefly wondered whether I needed a brain scan.

But again, the truth was far simpler: I’m functioning on fumes. Not because I’ve done anything wrong — but because I haven’t stopped doing things at all.

And this is the part I want you to hear: Sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is stop before you break what you’re trying so hard to build.

Rest isn’t a reward — it’s the operating system

There’s a benefit to stepping back that we don’t talk about enough.

Rest isn’t just sleep. Rest is the space that clarifies things.

When you pause:

• You see which commitments matter and which ones you took on out of guilt or habit.
• You realise which clients genuinely energise you and which ones drain you like a faulty USB-C cable.
• You notice where your best ideas come from — and spoiler, they don’t come when you’re sprinting from event to event.

The big benefit at the heart of this newsletter is this:

Rest improves everything you care about — work, relationships, creativity, health, patience and the possibility of enjoying your own life again.

Without rest, you become a worse version of yourself doing worse versions of your best work.

Rest isn’t optional. Rest is the maintenance schedule. And when you skip maintenance, things don’t explode — they simply slow, glitch, and eventually refuse to start.

That’s what happened to me. And maybe, if you’re reading this with a knowing nod, it's happening to you too.

Permission to stop (before your body forces the issue)

Here’s what’s next for me:

When I get home, I’m resting. Not theoretically. Not aspirationally. Actually resting.

I’ll be sleeping in. Saying no more often. Canceling the unnecessary evening events. Reclaiming my weekends. Rebuilding the boundary between “what I owe others” and “what I owe myself.”

Because I am not waiting until late December to finally take a breath. Not this year.

If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, consider this your permission slip. You don’t need a Bali trip to rest. You don’t need two weeks off. You just need to stop pretending you’re a machine.

You’re a human. A tired one. Who probably deserves a break more than you realise.

That’s all for this weekend. Just one short read about promising - yet again - to slow down and do things differently before we all burn out.

If you’re not getting value out of these tips, please consider unsubscribing. I won’t mind and there are no hard feelings.

But if you are enjoying this newsletter, the best compliment you could pay me would be to share it with one person who you think would benefit from it. In fact, share it with someone who likes to boast that they love their work - while they have been getting a little crabby from loving it a little too much. They might just need the reminder.

See you again next week. Cheers, Dante

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