The Reboot podcast was started because we believed that there needed to be an authentic, real conversation about the emotional journey of entrepreneurship. One that included its valleys and not just its peaks. 1 in 3 entrepreneurs will struggle with depression or burnout in their career, yet when it happens to them, many entrepreneurs feel totally alone in their experience. Rob Symington is founder and entrepreneur who experienced a debilitating period of burnout following the launch of his startup, a startup that was inspired by the idea that work could be more fulfilling, less stressful and generally improve people’s lives no less. In this conversation, Jerry and Rob discuss his experience, why Rob believes it’s so important for him to share it, how he is moving forward, and the fact that the pressure of doing something you passionately believe in can challenge you unlike anything else.

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Jerry: Hey, Rob. It's really great to see you and to meet you. Even if it's not in
person, it certainly feels live.
Rob: Hey, Jerry. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jerry: It's our pleasure. Thank you for volunteering to come on. Before we get
started, why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself.
Rob: My name's Rob Symington. I'm the co-founder of an organization here in
London called Escape the City. Escape is essentially a community for career
changes. The city in London is the financial heartland, so our name
represents helping people move away from unfulfilling jobs in big corporates.
Typically, towards more entrepreneurial career paths, startups, starting their
own things, or finding an exciting new avenue for employment. Personally,
I've lived in London for the last nine years. I've got a six-month-old baby
daughter called [inaudible 00:01:05].
Sadly, we had to move off the narrow boat in order to have her, but we spent
the last four years trying to be as [inaudible 00:01:12] as we could in London
without actually leaving the physical city. That's me in a nutshell.
Jerry: Tell me a little bit more about why you came on. I want to acknowledge, at
the start, that you, a few months back, wrote a beautiful ... You shared on
medium a beautiful, deeply authentic email that you'd sent to your team about
your experiences with burnout.
I know that that's not necessarily the content here, but it's related. I wanted to
mention it, because I want to make sure our viewers or listeners really key in
to that, as well.
Tell me what it is you were hoping to speak to and have a dialogue about as
you reached out.
Rob: Having spent five years in the business, from a kitchen table upwards, and
experience the roller coaster that any founder goes on, I eventually worked
myself into a place of such exhaustion and pain, both physical but mainly
mental, that I burnt out. I stopped functioning. I had to take four to six
months completely away from the business. In doing so, and then through the
painful process or trying to make sense of the experience and put myself back
to work.
There were a couple of things. One was the realization that I knew I'd be
[inaudible 00:02:50] from the only person who had gone through an
experience like this, and I was motivated to share just because when I was
going through it and feeling so lost, I got so much support from other people

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who had been brave enough to say, "Hey, this is what I went through." There
was that side of things. Then there was so many insights from that experience
that were relevant both to the organization that we're building and what our
organization stands for publicly. I knew I wouldn't be able to ... There was so
much value in this experience to share and to make sense of, beyond just
itself, that I knew I needed to make sense of it more publicly, more widely,
with my team, then with the community here in London.
Jerry: What is it that caused you to reach out and think about having a dialogue with
me?
Rob: You [inaudible 00:03:48] one of the few places online where people are
honestly talking about some of this stuff, and I felt like it was a two way
thing. I felt like I might have something to contribute, but I also valued the
opportunity of speaking to you to make sense of this for myself to dive a bit
deeper into it. I love the approach that your podcasts are basically coaching
calls.
It was for me and for you, reaching out to see where a conversation might
lead us.
Jerry: I know that when you reached out to Dan, Dan Putt, my colleague, one of the
things that you asked for, I'm reading here from some of my notes, how do
we overcome some of the deep, emotional team challenges that we're
encountering at the moment? How do we find the balance between best
practice organizational stuff and innovating, doing things differently, which
is one of the guiding values behind the company. This really struck me. How
do shake off all of the definitions of success for how to build a business?
How can we walk the talk of living and working differently? Not burning
out?
Are you recalling that?
Rob: Yeah. I haven't actually ... Because it was submitted in the form, I haven't got
a copy. It's [inaudible 00:05:17] to hear that reflected back, and it's still ...
Those are the questions that are guiding us as a team, my business partner
and the rest of the great people at Escape. It's a really uncomfortable
realization that [inaudible 00:05:32] replicating a bunch of the stuff that we
reacted against by starting Escape, then we were still back where we started.
Jerry: I'm going to recommend that you just hold on that thought for a moment. We
could have a dialogue about depression and burnout. I thought your
description about the experience, of being in that either situationally
depressed state or chronically depressed state we are beautiful and reveal
both an intellectual awareness and an emotional intelligence that I really
admire. And there's something else going on here, which I think you put your

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finger on it, which was: here's this organization that we all came together to
found to create the ability to escape interesting ford, the city, but really it's
about escaping a way of being in a relationship to work, only to find yourself
in full circle right back into the thing that you were trying to run away from
in the first place. Our listeners can't see your face, but you're smiling. Is there
an irony in this?
Rob: Yeah. There's an irony, and when you're in that bottom of the [inaudible
00:07:01] depressed state, you just feel like a fraud.
Jerry: Yeah.
Rob: Actually, there's an authenticity in it, too. Which is this realization that of
course, of course we're going to replicate a bunch of dysfunctions internally
without awareness and without understanding [inaudible 00:07:20] going
there. We've never lead an organization before, so we don't know what it's
like to not fall into these traps, and it's almost like we had to fall into them to
now [inaudible 00:07:29] climb our way out of them.
Jerry: I love the emotionally intelligence implicit in that structure that you just
identified, which was that the realization that the cause, that the depression
and burnout, caused you to have is actually a gift, and it recalls, for me, a
quote, one of me favorite quotes from one of my favorite writers, a guy
named Parker Palmer, who wrote about his own experience of depression. In
it, he writes ... In the book, Let Your Life Speak, he writes about his own
depression. "After hours of careful listening, my therapist offered an image
that helped me eventually reclaim my life. 'You seem to look upon depression
as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you,' he said. 'Do you think you could
see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing down to ground, on which it's
safe to stand?'"
That quote came to mind as I started thinking about our call this morning. Do
you have any reactions to that?
Rob: Yes. Only because Parker Palmer's words, one of the few [inaudible
00:08:56] of hope that I found when I was frantically googling my way out of
this, so I'm familiar with those words, and they're beautiful. Also, the person
who helped me make sense of what the gift was. [inaudible 00:09:11]
Actually, I know someone who you've worked with here in London called El
Harrison.
Jerry: Yeah. Who's a brilliant coach in her own right.
Rob: Right. It was ... [inaudible 00:09:21] working with El, and [inaudible
00:09:24] the only narrative was, "You're broken, you're weak, you can't hack
it." [inaudible 00:09:31] I was doing some CVTs [inaudible 00:09:34]

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therapy here in London, but the only thing I really got from that was that
there's nothing wrong with how you're living or how you're being or what
you're doing. You've just got some thinking distortions. I leave each of these
sessions feeling really, really bad about myself.
It was in the first call with El where she said, "This doesn't sound like you're
weak or broken. This is an initiation, Rob. There's something here for you to
discover, to learn. Start getting curious about this experience." [inaudible
00:10:06] that I tell you that because that was [inaudible 00:10:09] at which I
regained, even just a tiny fraction of hope, that this could make sense. It
wasn't just a crappy, painful experience.
Jerry: I think El's guidance is incredibly powerful, because it feels like it took you
into this line of [inaudible 00:10:31], which Parker really speaks to, which is
wait a minute. This experience is forcing me to look at my life a different
way. Now, to sort of pull it back, what I hear you doing is also saying: what,
actually, were we doing at this company? Here we were, a bunch of
gorgeous, brokenhearted, idealistic people, who were committing ourselves
to creating the means by which others can support their transformation, only
to find ourselves in that worn out, burned out, depleted state again.
I imagine, and I have some ideas about what's going on in this, but ... To go
back to your own words, which, again, you don't have in front of you, but I
do, you wrote, in response to the question: what is your top challenge? You
said, "Undergoing a business transformation process. From vision to strategy
to people, process and operations whilst keeping the show on the road whilst
recovering from burnout. Trying to build a progressive organization along b-
corp, reinventing organizational lines. Also, trying to ensure business
survival and progress."
There's two things going on here, which is how can we walk the talk? How
can we live out what's going on? What, actually, is going on, and how do we
build an organization simultaneously that is sustainable, that is financially
sound? Am I naming some things correctly?
Rob: Yeah. Absolutely. You are. It's that sense of, in the immediate term, you can't
build an innovative organization if you can't build a sustainable one. You
need the foundations, and I think what you're describing is reminding me of
how much of our leadership ... [inaudible 00:12:54] came out Dom, this
lovely friend and my co-founder, who I've now worked alongside for seven
years, and myself have so much of our leadership over, especially the last
couple of years, was basically fear driven.
Jerry: Yes.
Rob: Fear driven because of that sense of responsibility and the idea of: we're

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really the only people here who are, ultimately, on the hook, the pay roll and
business survival. [inaudible 00:13:23] chicken, because when you don't let
go of control, by definition, you're creating the condition where you can be
the only people focusing on these things. If I reflect over the last couple of
years and six months before burnout, it was this increasing feeling of we're
trying to aspire so much impressive stuff with this organization, but we've
also got to keep the lights on. A lot of unhelpful stuff came from that fear.
Jerry: I hear that fear. I want ... If you're willing, I'd like to do a little deeper dive
with you on this. I think that you're emotional intelligence and self-awareness
is extraordinary, not surprising given what you've committed yourself to and
your life to, and I have a feeling there may be something else going on here.
You also speak about your perfectionism, and you also speak about your
drive. You start to see that there's a kind of layered relationship between
perfectionism, the aspirational goals that you have, we want to create this
mean by which people escape the city or escape their lives and transform, and
that creates this powerful, powerful drive room, which you yourself get lost.
In my [inaudible 00:14:47], we would often talk about 'disappearing into the
fire'. This notion of giving ourselves over to everything.
I often caution that it's really easy to see that process as something that only
happens to bankers in the city, when, in fact, it's just as easy to happen to
those who've committed themselves to doing well in the world, to doing good
in the world. I think you are a living embodiment of that. It's not at all
surprising that there was a reenactment of the kind of desolation of self that
lead to the burnout.
I want to take you back a level, and I want to make an observation here, and
the observation is that the organizations, in my experience, that have suffered
the most in creating the conditions that we are trying to escape from, that you
and your colleagues are trying to escape from, are actually not what we
would consider the most nefarious organizations. Bankers, insurance
companies, government [inaudible 00:16:05]. It's the organizations whose
values are the highest aspirations. It's those who commit themselves in this
conscious way of doing good without actually exploring the fear behind the
fear.
Let's name the first level of fear. Your first level of fear was, I imagine,
something along the lines of not living up to the aspiration. Does that
resonate?
Rob: Yeah. It's the first level of fear is this is a big idea, and we're a bunch of
young people in their late twenties and early thirties. Are we going to be able
to do it justice. Yeah.

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Jerry: Which speaks to the beauty of the big idea. What's behind that? What's the
fear that actually exists behind that?
Rob: For me personally or as an organization?
Jerry: For you. Don't de-personalize it. Stay with the personal.
Rob: It's probably a generic fear of not being good enough. My sense of everything
being okay being tied to stuff that I do.
Jerry: The first level of form is Escape the City, because the city is the place in
which all that negative energy exists. The second level of form is prescribe
for yourself these beautify aspirational values, because that will make sure
that we don't do this. Then there's this professionalism that lives beneath it,
which his a defense. It's a defense against a particular belief. The particular
belief is I'm not good enough.
Here's a line from you. I'm going to go back to what you said to me. "How
can we walk the talk of living and working differently?" What do you feel
about people who don't walk the talk?
Rob: Talking and not walking, they're my greatest fear, which is to be a hypocrite.
Jerry: The fear behind the fear is what about you. Who the fuck are you, Rob, to
teach other people how to escape the city. You don't know anything.
Rob: You've got it. Man, you're good at the voice in my head.
Jerry: Yeah. That voice. That voice, which says, "Work harder. Work smarter."
That voice, which is always watching you really diligently, saying to you,
"Hey, hey, hey. You stepped out of line. You're not living 'the values.'" That
voice is relentless. Here's the really, really hard part about the thing you're
attempting to do, which is to build this gorgeous mechanism for people to
really transform their lives and live out their work in a meaningful way.
That's your practice point, my friend. That's the hardest part. If you want to
change the name of the organization, now might be a good time to change it
from Escape the City to Escape the Voice.
Rob: You're right.
Jerry: Why do we go to the city in the first place? Does a five-year-old wake up and
say, "Can't wait to put on that gray flannel suit and commute into the city and
work a hundred hours a week."? Of course not.
Rob: No, we go into the city because of the voice, as well.

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Jerry: In what way?
Rob: Because of all the shoulds. This is how you should, this is what success is,
this is how you should be living, this is what you should be achieving. The
joke is, the irony is you can escape, physically, you can wear t-shirts and
board shorts and work in a coffee shop, but if that voice is still with you, you
haven't escaped.
Jerry: A-men, brother. No-one escapes the need for radical self-inquiry, for
stripping away delusion, for really looking in the mirror and saying, "What is
the bag of shit that I'm carrying forward? What is the self-defeating, self-
[inaudible 00:21:25] line of expression that I carry with me from cubicle to
cubicle to cubicle. From relationship to relationship to relationship. From life
situation to life situation to life situation?"
Moreover, can you see how the set out, and it wasn't just the hours that you
worked, it wasn't just the perfectionism, but the entire set out, which was my
god I escaped the city, and I'm still living and feeling like a fraud. The result
is an organization of people who are well-intentioned, idealist ... I imagine
now, to go back to the organization, it's not just you. Is it, Rob? It's a whole
bunch of people who are committed to escaping the voice.
Does this resonate?
Rob: It resonates massively. Two things. One is just naming it helps ... Just
speaking to the team about it, having someone like El come in and run a
council session where it's okay to talk about, to share how our struggles, but
the thing that got me earlier this year was I was like, "Awareness! I've got a
narrative of what's happened. I'm done." That's not how it works. That's the
beginning, as you say, of the practice, and I fall off everyday.
I knew this before I burnt out. I knew this two years ago. I was coaching with
a man called John Morgan, a lovely guy, and he said to me ... We were in a
canoe on the River Thames, and he said to me, "Rob, tell me all the ways that
you haven't yet escaped the city." He said, "How will you know when you
have?" I kind of already knew what we were talking about. I hadn't had to
properly face it because it wasn't hurting me enough yet.
In the same way, the best thing we've done as an organization, in terms of
what we offer to the world, is these three month programs, tribes.
Communities of people coming together to do this work. Even before we had
this collective ... I had my individual breakdown, but as the organization, we
had our crisis of faith. We knew that a huge chunk of these three month
programs was about introspection and self-inquiry.
It's funny. The same addiction I have to the voice. You can say to a group of

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fifty people on a weekly basis, "This isn't about the external transition, it's
part of it. Your problems are not going to be solved when you build a
business. Your problems are not going to be sold by a dream job." They'll all
nod, because intellectually, it makes sense. They know that it's also about
redefining success and, like you said, opening up that bag of shit. It goes so
deep in all of us that you see the same behaviors coming up again and again,
in other people and people that we work with, and I say this very humbly,
because the person I see it coming up in the most is me.
Jerry: Transformation of the type that you're talking about. You used the word
practice, I used the word practice. Transformation of the type that we're all
talking about, whether it was John, your first coach, or El, your current
coach, or myself or ever you speaking with others comes about not as a
consequence of cognitive awareness, it comes about in slow increments, like
drips of water on a stone, over time. It takes patience, and it takes courage.
It's the drop of water on the stone that eventually splints the stone. That
transformation is embodied. It requires a kind of fearlessness, and it requires
the inquiry into something much deeper than the cognitive, conscious lines
that we tell ourselves. It requires, in a way ... the [inaudible 00:26:21], the
late Irish poet, former priest, has a beautiful blessing called For a Leader, and
in it, he has a line there, which I often quote, which is, "Maybe surrounded by
good friends who near your blind spots." It requires community where we
each help each other see where are work remains. In this case, how can we
walk the talk of living and working differently?
Is a beautiful, bright crumb on the trail of Rob, and if we follow that back,
there's some time period in your childhood in which this conflict, this self
imposed construct, of I want to be this thing, I should be this thing, but I'm
really this other thing, that split that form. Maybe it's even inherited. Maybe
it's a gift of unresolved issues from mom and dad, which was a gift of
unresolved issues from their moms and dads, and so on.
When we, at Reboot, talk about these kinds of things, we talk about using
work not as a means to escape but using work to do our work, so that we get
to realize our fullest potential as human beings. The gift of the hand of the
friend holding you down is to say, "Hey, Rob. When did the voices of should
start forming in your head? What is it that ... " This is the important thing,
"What is it that they're trying to protect you from?" Instead of seeing them as
the hand of the enemy, needing to be escaped from, what if they're the hand
of a friend, needing to be befriended? What if it's about transforming the
relationship with the voice? What if that voice loves you and is just trying to
protect you in a nagging, annoying way?
If that voice loves you, and the truth is, Rob, it probably does, what else
would it say aside from the fact that you're a fraud and don't be a hypocrite?

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Rob: If the voice is trying to help me through being critical or through being ...
Jerry: What if the voice loved you but doesn't know ...
Rob: But doesn't know it ...
Jerry: Does it know how to express it's love except through criticism? What would
it say other than something critical?
Rob: I think it would say ... I know what I want it to say. I would want it to say,
"You're okay, regardless of what you do." But that's not what it would say. It
would say, "I'm trying to make you feel okay, feel in control, feel worthy by
getting you to do all this stuff." It's theory is if I get you to do all this stuff, I
reckon all would be okay.
Jerry: What would you say to it, to that voice, starting with thank you?
Rob: I'd say, "Thank you. You've helped me get a long way, but I don't think this is
working out anymore, so we need to find another way to do this."
Jerry: How does that feel?
Rob: It feels quite exciting.
Jerry: Do you notice something about that voice? Is it strong?
Rob: No, not particularly. It's almost invisible. That's its greatest trick is you don't
realize ... It just comes across as thoughts to yourself.
Jerry: What if that voice, that hand of a friend ... What if it's got some power and
some capability? I imagine that voice has enabled you to do extraordinary
things in your life, like work really, really hard and create something out of
nothing. I know that it also came with a cost.
Rob: I think the power in the voice is it's also telling me, "You can do good things.
You can do great things. You've got ideas. You have the desire and energy to
turn them into a reality. Let's get on with it. Let's do it. Let's do this stuff." A
bunch of that is really positive, life affirming energy, but, as you say, the way
I interpret it or the way I enact it comes with ... I pay a high price for that.
Jerry: I think that voice has an edginess to it that's kind of fear based, which is,
"Hey, Rob. If you don't realize your full potential, which I know you have,
then we're going to be massively disappointed."
Rob: Like a threat.

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Jerry: Like a threat. It's trying to protect you. Do you hear it? It's trying to protect
you from that sense of, "This missed opportunity, this missed potential."
When I hear that voice, one of the things I say to it is, "Thanks a lot, but I got
this. I really appreciate the ways in which you're looking out for me. Be my
friend and be my ally and don't worry so much." Rob, you've got a six-
month-old?
Rob: Yeah.
Jerry: Boy, girl?
Rob: Little girl, yeah.
Jerry: What's her name?
Rob: Lua.
Jerry: Lua. Now, I'm going to do something that's really, really unfair. You know
where I'm going, my friend. Let's fast forward. How old are you? 30, 31, 32?
Rob: 33.
Jerry: Okay.
Rob: Last Saturday.
Jerry: Mazel tov. Happy Birthday. Lua is 33. She's on the 33 years from now
version of the video chat across the Atlantic with a coach. She's saying to her
coach, "That voice is relentless." What is it that you would like Lua to have
in her relationship to that voice?
Rob: It's funny. On Saturday, this weekend, we're doing a welcoming ceremony for
Lua, and right here in my notebook, I have a prayer that I'm going to read out
for her to welcome her, and the laugh is is what I want to say to her is what I
would want to say to myself. I'll just read you the relevant bit of it, because
it's right here in front of me.
I say my promise to you is to be your friend in exploring and learning about
the world, to be your support when you need it, to be your council when you
ask for it, and to be your biggest fan and most loyal friend no matter what.
Then I say I will try to help you live a life full of truth and beauty, and
generosity and connection, but ultimately, it doesn't matter what you do or
who you become, whatever you choose is fine by me.
Jerry: Let's frame that. That is your prayer, as beautiful as it is, that is your prayer

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from father to daughter. As you noted, this is something that, actually, is in
dialogue within Rob, and we got to this by talking about what dialogue you
would for your daughter to have with her inner voices. Say the part again
about being your friend.
Rob: My promise to you is to be your friend in exploring and learning about the
world.
Jerry: Hold that thought for a minute. You know that voice? The voice that says,
"Hey, Rob. Don't be a hypocrite." What if that voice was the voice of the
friend who's with you in exploring the world? What if the friendship implicit
in that wish is with yourself.
Rob: I think it would change how I felt about what I'm trying to do, because I don't
see it, at the moment, as an exploration, I see it as something that I have to
get right, which goes against even the concept of exploration.
Jerry: I'd like to read a poem to you. This is a poem that, for me, speaks to the
whole question of our relationship with our own self. With all the various
voices that [inaudible 00:38:22] within us. It's a poem called Love After
Love, by Derek Walcott.
Love After Love. The time will come when, with elation you will greet
yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at
the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger
who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to
the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the
photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit.
Feast on your life.
Love After Love, Derek Walcott.
You know, Rob. I'm 52. I'll be 53 in December. I have three children, all of
whom are adults now. I've learned a few things in life. I've learned, for
example, that if we want to create organizations that live up to our
aspirational values, if we want to be the parents that we truly, in our heart,
want, if we want to be the me and women that we are born to be, we have to
feast on our own life, we have to love again the stranger who was our self,
including bad, sometimes annoying, voice that says, "You're not good
enough." Packing that voice up and shipping it out doesn't really work.
Creating a company that says, "We're just a good company, and we're going
to do good stuff in the world." Suppresses a part of our self that reaches up
and grabs us by the neck and drags us back down and says, "Sit the fuck
down. Stop. Don't ignore me. I am the stranger who has loved you all of your

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life. Yeah, sometimes, I say nasty things to you, but it's only because I love
you."
You want to live out the truest meaning of your values in your mission
statement and your purpose, which is gorgeous and beautiful and is totally in
alignment with the things I care about in the world, peel your own image
from the mirror. Take down the photographs and the desperate notes. Feast
on your life.
Rob: Thank you. It's so uncomfortable to realize all the ways in which you are a
stranger to yourself. Also, that's why this year's experience, which was ... I
wouldn't have wished it on my worst enemy, has, actually ... Now, I wouldn't
trade for anything. I wouldn't give it away. In it has the potential for the work
I now need to do, and maybe there were prompts before this year's crash,
something tapping me on the shoulder saying, "Hey, we need to change." But
I obviously wasn't listening. That's the gift. The gift is that I didn't even know
that this was the work I needed to do until now. To befriend myself, to feast
on my life is terrifying, because I still feel completely illiterate in terms of
how to go about doing that work. As you said, in an embodied way. I can do
it in an intellectual way, and that's where I say to El sometimes, "I feel very
illiterate," on what this actually feels like. I can get the concept.
Jerry: A word of advice on that. The path lives through the body, through the
sensory experiences. The path through the intellect is tempting,
understandably so, creates a kind of intellectual framework that is quite
common initially to go, "This is what I have to do." Artists, like poets and
musicians and painters, as well as children, as well as the earth itself are all
beyond the intellect. Spiritual traditions, western traditions that stretch back
millennia are all beyond the intellectual. Sitting meditation practice is not an
intellectual practice, it's an embodied practice. Yoga is not an intellectual
practice, it's an embodied practice. Parenting is not an intellectual process, it's
an embodied practice. Leadership. The intellectual part of leadership is just a
fraction of what it is, and there in lies both the difficulty and the opportunity.
That's what's the promise of all of this is. That's what your subconscious was
really after when it said, "I want to form Escape the City." That's the
opportunity in front of you. The bad news is Nirvana is not obtainable in this
lifetime. Enlightenment is not the goal. Relief from suffering is the goal. By
the way, that may lead to ... Okay, great. Every single day, you're going to be
presented with the practice and the opportunity to grow.
The closing line of John O'Donohue's For a Leader is and may leadership for
you be a true adventure of growth. Never, ever, ever stop the practice of
growth. You want to not be depressed? Keep growing.
Was that helpful?

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Rob: Yes. It was emotional and uncomfortable, which reminds me of the slap in
the face realization that I have every now and then when I reflect on what
growth is, which is that it never looks like growth. It always hurts. Growth,
the idea, the Nirvana of growth, is just this beautiful, incremental upward,
effortless, glide. Actually, it looks more like a mud fight with yourself. The
parts of this conversation that were hardest for me and the messages that were
hardest for me to listen to were hard because they were what I need to know
and do in order to grow. The bits that I could just tell you the analysis that
I've done on my own burnout were fine, there were fun for me, but they
weren't what this was about, in terms of, like you say, not stopping the
practice of growth. I can already do that. I already can do the intellectual bit.
Thank you for kicking my arse in a nice, compassionate way across the
Atlantic and just reminding me.
Jerry: Thank you for being a fellow traveler. A community member in the sangha.
A committed person to relieving the suffering of people that are really
struggling with the existential dilemmas implicit in work and life. If all of us,
in some form or another, were committed to that practice, it would be a nicer
way to live, so thank you for the work that you do. Thank everybody on your
team for what they do. Thank El, because you've got a good, good ally in
your work there.
Rob: Thank God for El.
Jerry: All right, my friend. Thank you so much for coming on this show.
Rob: Thanks very much, Jerry. I really valued this conversation massively, so
thank you.
Jerry: Great.