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When Specialists Burn Out (and How to Avoid It)
Alone Again
One night, a tightness started to build in Matt D’Avella’s chest.
It wasn’t a metaphorical tightness. It felt like his heart was covered in cling wrap and pulled—tightly.
The stress had been building up for months and years, and the anxiety had become overwhelming. He wasn’t sure how he ended up like this, but something had to change.
After scaling a successful online business for several years, he cut the cord 9 months ago. Matt fired his entire team. For the first time in years, he worked on his own again. No writers, no editors, no brand strategist. No nothing.
Somewhere along the way, Matt lost sight of why he became a creator in the first place.
This could happen to anyone, whether you’re an aspiring online creator or not. You start on a new endeavour, passionate and idealistic, but you get distracted by the latest and loudest. You end up burnt out and disillusioned.
Matt’s story contains a powerful warning: if you don’t know yourself well enough, the world will quickly lead you astray.
The latest video on his main channel is more than 6 months old. He is considered to be disappeared from YouTube, but he left some breadcrumbs for us to figure out how it all happened.
Who’s Matt D’Avella?
Matt D’Avella is a YouTube creator and online entrepreneur.
In 2015, he directed the documentary Minimalism, which ended up trending on Netflix. In 2017, he decided to step in front of the camera. Since then, he brought his filmmaking chops to YouTube and grew his popular channel to 3.9M subscribers.
Matt started out as a lone filmmaker, writing, directing, performing, and editing all by himself.
He distinguished himself on the platform through a unique filmmaking style that elevated his videos on minimalism and intentional living above the crowd. In particular, video editing is what he loves and where he shines.
After struggling to gain traction for a year, he went viral with videos like My Minimalist Apartment and especially A Day in the Life of a Minimalist. He doubled down on what worked and increased his popularity in the productivity space with a slew of ever more elaborate videos on minimalism and habit formation.
Ironically, on the road to YouTube fame, Matt himself lost the connection to his inner voice and stopped making intentional choices. Burnout and disappearance followed.
Scaling Stress
Matt’s YouTube channel was growing, and the business was doing well. So, he did what every successful creator does: he started hiring employees.
Over a couple of months, he hired 10 full-time employees and a half a dozen freelancers: writers, researchers, editors, social media experts, and community managers. Matt grew his team because he wanted to make more videos and fund bigger projects, while working less.
However, scaling his business had the opposite effect. Matt was creating less, making less money, and working more than ever before.
He didn't realize it at the time, but he was turning something he loved into a job he dreaded.
When you scale a business, a lot of other unintended things scale, too. Things like emails, problems, obligations, expenses, calls, meetings, difficult conversations, and stress. Above all, Matt scaled the stress.
In Matt’s opinion, the quality of the videos decreased too. He was pulled in a million directions trying to manage his employees. For years, he had no creative juice left to produce anything interesting.
But while he couldn't create, he had to have output. His employees relied on him and the business revenue. He had to pay their salaries. Matt was now responsible for their livelihoods.
He boxed himself into a corner he had never wanted to be in. It had to stop. Unfortunately, that meant letting go of a lot of talented people he appreciated. He fired all of his employees and continued on his own.
Matt had to take stock of his current situation and answer some tough questions for himself:
Who did he want to be?
What did he want to do?
Where did he want to go?
A Good Match
Most people aren’t as lucky as someone like MrBeast, who discovered his passion for YouTube in his early teens and became the platform’s biggest creator. He knew who he wanted to be and where he wanted to go. He and his chosen path were a good match.
Matt wasn’t as lucky, and neither was I when I picked my first career.
Matching your profession to your personal disposition is essential for sustainable life satisfaction. Otherwise, you walk in the wrong direction for far too long—and end up like Matt.
But he’s merely part of a trend of previously successful YouTubers leaving the platform. As many of them, he got distracted by external pressures to grow as fast as possible. And once distracted, it's no easy feat to stop a business with momentum.
Unfortunately, most creators aren’t talking about scaling businesses sustainably and slowly.
Matt only did what he thought he had to do. But in the process, he forgot why he wanted to make videos in the first place.
The author Seth Godin has a useful concept for developing your business in a way that’s right for you: Do you want to be a freelancer or entrepreneur?
Both freelancer and entrepreneur are self-employed, but in Seth’s terminology, freelancers work in their business, while entrepreneurs work on their business.
Freelancers aim to provide a certain service or build a specific product, like video editing or web design.
In contrast, entrepreneurs don’t provide the service themselves. They build a business, so their employees can provide the service. They make the high-level strategic decisions, define the structure of the business, set its long-term goals, hire the key people, etc.
These two roles, or archetypes, relate to the social needs specialise and generalise. The freelancer wants to be responsible for a specialised role, while the entrepreneur creates the general overarching structure for a business.
You don’t necessarily have to be one or the other. These roles exist on a spectrum. But if you own a business, you cannot only be the service provider. You have to play the entrepreneur as well.
The hard part is figuring out how to just outsource the things you don’t want to do, or shouldn’t be doing with your time, while keeping all the things you enjoy that make the business special and unique.
Sampling Experience
You have to know yourself, or you will be led astray.
What is the driving force behind your actions?
What experiences are enjoyable to you?
Why do you want to start a business?
Matt started with the freedom to make videos about whatever he wanted. But more and more, he felt like he had to keep churning them out. He didn’t know his individual needs and spent years building a business that wasn’t a good match for him. The end result was burnout.
Your social type can point you in a solid direction for your future, even though the details will remain fuzzy.
Had Matt known he was a specialist (his full type is MF-Ne/Fi-CS/B(P)#3), he might have never scaled his business the way he did, or at least, not as quickly. He hid his biggest strength and the one thing he loves most about making videos: editing. It was the one place where he could totally get lost.
Concepts like Seth Godin’s freelancer/entrepreneur distinction are useful as well, because they help you ask better questions. But concepts and introspection can only get you so far. In the end, we only learn by living—and not before.
We find better matching opportunities through sampling activities, social groups, careers, and contexts. Then, we reflect, adjust our personal narratives, and repeat.
Where can you totally get lost?