Stay Angry To Avoid Burnout
from the watch-out-for-Michael-Dell dept
An interview with someone who says that the main reason for employee burnout is boredom - and the people most likely to get bored are those who aren't angry. Among those mentioned as a threat for burnout due to boredom are Michael Dell - since he's been doing the same thing for years and years. While I understand the basic idea - that being in a rut can cause burnout, I'm not sure I agree about the whole "anger" thing. It sounds to me like the guy in the interview just wants an excuse for the fact that he can't control his own temper.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Anger as a Motivating Force
Burnout is a kind of exhaustion that can overcome an employee who has lost sight of their own personal and work goals. A constructive way to avoid burnout is to regularly engage in setting and evaluating both personal and work goals. It is important to set both - because otherwise the tension that results from not having or evaluating goals can become a significant source of lost energy and motivation.
Using anger to stay motivated is like using aspirin to cure the pain that comes from a splinter that has not been removed, the pain may be temporarily dulled, but the cause is still present until it is dealt with. It is up to each individual person to figure out what those "splinters" are that are sapping his/her energy and to set goals to remove them.
This is much more difficult to do than it is to describe here. Part of setting goals is honestly evaluating where you are now. This can be a painful process - often our own inner critic is a harsh one. However, when we do our best to silence that inner critic long enough to see where we really are, and accept that for whatever reason, that this is where we are, we have made the first step towards setting goals towards improving our own position.
Goals should be simple and attainable. It is very important that once they are set that they be evaluated regularly. The process of checking off achieved goals can be incredibly satisfying - a point often missed by those who are afraid to enter this process. Goal setting allows you to gain perspective that you may not be able to get in any other way, and is your opportunity to decide for yourself the answer to the question "why", that is, why am here and what should I be doing?
Once goals have been set they allow you to have positive rather than negative motivators. Curiosity, financial gain, expanded family, a recreational lifestyle, an early retirement, become positive motivators that give you confidence in yourself as a worker and as a person. Like negative motivators, these positive ones also can have a spillover effect on co-workers and family members, helping to make their goal achievement easier and more productive.
Goal setters tend to do well in the professional work environment for obvious reasons. Over time, with added confidence, their benchmarks tend to exceed those of their superiors, and lead to greater long-term sucess.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Anger as a Motivating Force
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Anger as a Motivating Force
Anger is a way to avoid burnout, but it is usually not the best one. Employees motivated by anger often are angry at themselves for having put themselves in the situation of depending on a job that does not satisfy them. Using anger as a motivator is very risky - to yourself and others, and has a tendency to spillover on your family and co-workers.
Burnout is a kind of exhaustion that can overcome an employee who has lost sight of their own personal and work goals. A constructive way to avoid burnout is to regularly engage in setting and evaluating both personal and work goals. It is important to set both - because otherwise the tension that results from not having or evaluating goals can become a significant source of lost energy and motivation.
Using anger to stay motivated is like using aspirin to cure the pain that comes from a splinter that has not been removed, the pain may be temporarily dulled, but the cause is still present until it is dealt with. It is up to each individual person to figure out what those "splinters" are that are sapping his/her energy and to set goals to remove them.
This is much more difficult to do than it is to describe here. Part of setting goals is honestly evaluating where you are now. This can be a painful process - often our own inner critic is a harsh one. However, when we do our best to silence that inner critic long enough to see where we really are, and accept that for whatever reason, that this is where we are, we have made the first step towards setting goals towards improving our own position.
Goals should be simple and attainable. It is very important that once they are set that they be evaluated regularly. The process of checking off achieved goals can be incredibly satisfying - a point often missed by those who are afraid to enter this process. Goal setting allows you to gain perspective that you may not be able to get in any other way, and is your opportunity to decide for yourself the answer to the question "why", that is, why am here and what should I be doing?
Once goals have been set they allow you to have positive rather than negative motivators. Curiosity, financial gain, expanded family, a recreational lifestyle, an early retirement, become positive motivators that give you confidence in yourself as a worker and as a person. Like negative motivators, these positive ones also can have a spillover effect on co-workers and family members, helping to make their goal achievement easier and more productive.
Goal setters tend to do well in the professional work environment for obvious reasons. Over time, with added confidence, their benchmarks tend to exceed those of their superiors, and lead to greater long-term sucess.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Anger as a Motivating Force
:-)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]