Marissa Mayer: Why Work Burnout Is About Resentment
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I worked at Napster. I saw well over a hundred people burn out over the course of a couple years when we were being sued by half the entertainment industry. I've known people who have burned out during college too from undergrad to grad school. I knew someone who was so burned out, he moved to a anti-technology cult in Canada ten years ago. This had nothing to do with resentment. It had to do with stress.
Just because a few people like Mayer have no need for an emotional or stress outlet doesn't mean burn out doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe for her, stress doesn't exist, but for the vast majority of the world, it is quite real.
The fact that this woman runs a company full of people who have to have approached or are burned out is, quite frankly, amazing.
Burnout has been studied for decades by occupational psychologists and is a well understood subject. Whenever a CEO makes pronouncements on stuff and doesn't so much as make reference to existing research on the matter at hand anyone should ask themselves what that person wants.
When a CEO makes a statements like this, it tends to raise questions about their judgement.
It's an out of touch belief in my opinion.
Sufficient stress may overwhelm any reward. But lesser stress with no reward may still be a problem, especially as a chronic condition.
P.S. I'm not finding a better word than "reward", but I mean it in terms of positive experience, not a "check" or service plaque or the like, and not necessarily or even preferentially part of of the work experience itself. (It might be family, friends, and the ability to pursue personal interests sufficiently.)
Logic like this is so baffling. Look, I can think of one or two people that don't seem to suffer form X, so clearly X doesn't exist! Alternate explanation: Churchill and Einstein were freakish and don't represent normal humans, thus using them as exemplars is likely not going to be useful.
The rest is just her extrapolating her personal experience as a template to be writ large with 0 evidence behind its accuracy other than her claims that it 'worked for her' (maybe, people have an amazing ability to conflate 'I was succesful' with 'what I did clearly is right/effective').
It's going to take a special kind of incentive to get me back in a day job. I'll only work for someone who understands the opportunity cost of me working for them, and that everyone has unique contributions/needs that should be considered. I'm actually hopeful that will happen though, amazingly, even here in little old Idaho.